The highly-anticipated DePauw Dialogue 2.0 kicked off on Wednesday in Neal Fieldhouse with keynote speaker, Dr. Rev. Jamie Washington. Beginning his speech with a song, he immediately caught the attention of the audience. Washington also began with a central point to the day.
"Dialogue begins with building relationships," Washington said.
Washington’s focus throughout his speech emphasized the day’s ultimate purpose: to build connections between people despite their different communities.
He explained the responsibilities of different groups who have power over others with a metaphor about the differences between right-handed people and left-handed people, and how right-handed people have more opportunities available to them and do not necessarily think about the struggles that left-handed people endure. He then asked the audience what the difference between diversity and inclusion was.
"Diversity is pointing out people's differences; inclusion is accepting those differences," shouted junior Emma Veon shouted from her seat..
After Washington’s speech, the day continued with several breakout sessions with two time slots and a lunch break in between them. In contrast, there were two keynote speakers at last year's DePauw Dialogue.
“We felt that it’s really hard to sit in the bleachers for four hours listening to very compelling speakers but not engaging as much,” said Katie Kondry, Student Body Vice President and DePauw Dialogue coordinator. “Our biggest goal was to make it more engaging and to really contextualize things.”
According to students, this shift changed the dynamic of the day from last year because people were constantly doing different things and moving about.
“I felt comfortable knowing that I was going,” said junior Sarah Salazar, one of the student facilitators for the event. “Last year, we all kind of felt that it was rushed.”
While there did not appear to be a difference in numbers, there seemed to be a difference in the amount of people who spent their whole day at the Dialogue.
“I think the nice thing is that people stayed more past lunch this year,” Kondry said. “I think the discussion groups were a little weak.”
There were many different breakout sessions covering everything from LGBTQ+ communities to freedom of speech to the ethics of comedy and humor.
“We wanted to ensure that all different kinds of diversity would be reached and that there was something for everyone there to learn no matter where you are on your journey towards learning about issues that have to do with diversity,” Kondry said.
While there were many satisfactory breakout sessions, some students felt there could have been more.
“One breakout session that we didn’t have that a lot of people felt that we should have was a breakout session on feminism and masculinity,” Kondry said.
After lunch and both breakout sessions, there were smaller discussion groups across campus. This year, like last year, the assigning of discussion groups was random.
“I really like the fact that we have random people come together to talk because I think it implements exactly what we are talking about,” Salazar said.
The only difference between the two years and discussion groups were that they were split up by position on campus: students, faculty and staff all attended different sessions.
“We felt that faculty wanted to focus on different things, they want to talk about curriculum and biased incidents in the classroom, whereas students want to focus on social interactions,” Kondry said.
In addition, there were people who were trained for the student, staff and faculty discussions through a diversity consultant group called Montage. Most of what was covered was what role the facilitators would play and how they should direct conversations.
“Yeah, I facilitated the discussion, but people really took it into their own hands,” said first-year and facilitator Kiara Goodwine. “I was a little bit scared that people were just not going to care and it was going to be hard, but I think the best thing about it was I came in and everybody was pretty enthusiastic and nobody had an attitude and nobody seemed upset to be there,” Goodwine said.
“Overall, I think the day was a big improvement on last year," Kondry said, "which is not to say that last year was bad, but this year I think we were able to create a much more engaging atmosphere and an atmosphere where everyone felt like there was something there for them to learn."