Ways to Get Students Talking Across Differences: Advice From Winners of the Provost’s Teaching Innovation Prize
Matt Kaplan and Ryan Hudson
Our last blog post explored productive engagement across diverse viewpoints, values, and backgrounds, essential skills of democratic citizenship. In this post, we continue that theme by highlighting two projects, each of which was designed to teach students to talk across differences of worldview. Professor Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg developed a set of exercises to promote open inquiry which can be incorporated into courses in a range of disciplines. Students in Professor Sara Ahbel-Rappe’s course take on roles of historical figures and create podcasts in character to develop skills at listening and responding to differences of viewpoint. Both were recognized last year with Provost’s Teaching Innovation Prizes (TIP). (FYI, The 2026 TIP competition is accepting nominations and self-nominations through January 30th.) Below, you will find descriptions of each project, including brief video comments by Professors Scharbach Wollenberg and Ahbel-Rappe along with some suggestions for adopting these approaches.
The first winning teaching innovation that we’re highlighting is a tool developed by Professor Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg (Judaic Studies). She was looking for a solution to a problem that many instructors are facing in the current environment. Students are quite reluctant to engage across differences in outlook and opinion. Instead, they try to suss out the professor’s expectations and parrot them back, which feels much safer and more comfortable than risking disagreement or even censure from classmates and the instructor. She is careful to point out the social reasons for this phenomenon and how it differs from faculty experience:
As faculty, we have watched societies across the globe begin to sort themselves into ideological and demographic bubbles until both people’s neighborhoods and their digital worlds are increasingly homogenous echo chambers. But most of us were ourselves raised in a social context in which our daily lives involved encountering much more demographic and ideological diversity than is possible today. As a result, we gained organically the social skills needed to talk across difference—even if less expertly than we would like. We sometimes forget that many of our students were never given that opportunity. The discussions we are asking them to participate in require social muscles they have never used—and skills they have never been taught.
To address this problem, she developed The Pluralism Workbook, which contains a series of exercises that guide students through each step of challenging conversations. In this 3-minute video, Professor Scharbach Wollenberg describes how she used the book and its impact on a very diverse set of students in a recent course on Biblical masculinities.
One of her students explains the impact the workbook exercises had:
The guided journal set-up of this workbook gave me space to reflect on prompts/questions and think about how I can manifest the skills taught in my own life. I think that too often, people my age are quick to cancel those that don’t think the same way as themselves. When we are able to have open dialogues, people are less likely to shut down when conversations are difficult, which enables us to build a more empathetic world. Getting this workbook into more classrooms would be a huge benefit to the university community, inspiring students to become better listeners and preparing them to effectively engage in difficult conversations.
If you are considering adopting this approach of explicitly preparing students for these types of rich exchanges, Professor Scharbach Wollenberg recommends the following based on her own and her colleagues’ experiences:
In my experience, students need two things in order to engage in open empathetic dialogue across difference. First, they need practical tools to overcome the intense (often physical) social anxiety that surrounds these sorts of discussions. Second, students need to be taught the many small social skills that go into having conversations across difference. Both myself and colleagues note that having students write out an exercise before discussing a tense topic palpably changes the energy in the room—whatever exercise they do that day.
Even in my own classrooms, we use the workbook as an independent learning tool with minimal instructor intervention. This is not a learning aid that depends on my presence or instruction. In some classes, I have assigned the entire workbook as a take home extra credit assignment for students who want to hone their skills. In other courses, I have had the students do the first page of each sub-section together in small groups at the beginning of class every day (leaving the intervening exercises in each section for individual homework). Other colleagues have printed individual exercises from the workbook to use as a whole class exercise before a potentially challenging discussion day.
The second winning teaching innovation that we’re highlighting is a student project developed by Professor Sara Ahbel-Rappe (Classical Studies). She faced a somewhat similar teaching problem of getting students to speak freely in her course on Pagans and Christians in Antiquity. Students entered the course with deep personal commitments, often based on their religious backgrounds, that made it quite difficult for them to step back and see other points of view, much less engage with them in a serious fashion. To surmount this hurdle, she created a process for students to develop historical imagination through taking a deep dive into specific historical figures.
Students start by examining primary documents and then engaging in role-playing where they take on the identity of one of the historical figures. She pairs two students for this work: one inhabiting a Christian figure, the other a pagan character. The project culminates in the production of a podcast in which the students speak in the voice of their character to address an issue, such as whether Roman temples should remain open in a Christian environment.
The process started with students being invited to a Halloween party in Pagan-Christian pairs and looking up some primary sources to get oriented to their roles. The pairs met other such pairs and revealed their differences, then revised their scripts and developed ways of talking to each other. …They used more than facts and research: they embodied the spirit of the humanities. [They] find ways to bridge intractable cultural positions that historically resulted in violence and find meaningful ways to listen to each other across an ideological divide. That skill was meant to model the art of empathic, rational conversation in the midst of cultural division in a society increasingly divided along ideological lines. In effect, it showed students ways of solving the problem of living with those whom they initially perceive as “other,” and learning a set of skills for cross-cultural dialogue and understanding. Along the way, they learned to do research into primary and secondary sources, to envision historical characters, to practice rhetorical persuasion, and to create podcasts: editing, scripting, and publishing.
In this clip, Professor Ahbel-Rappe describes the benefits of her approach.
And her students agreed about its effectiveness:
While working on the script, I became engaged in the mentality of Maternus Cynegius, and I felt I understood his thought process and emotions behind wanting the temples to remain open more than I would have if I had simply written an academic paper summarizing his argument. Having a partner to collaborate with helped keep me accountable regarding deadlines, and we were able to discuss the readings with each other which provided an alternative viewpoint on the content.
If you are interested in using this strategy for helping students step outside their own perspectives, consider the following steps from Professor Ahbel-Rappe’s approach:
Assign students to work in pairs. “The depth of their exploration and listening to each other, the patient dialogue, was so much more authentic than a mere term paper. They became each others’ audience, spiritual mentors, and critics. They used more than facts and research: they embodied the spirit of the humanities.”
Provide initial research sources to jump-start student research. “I actually tailored the primary sources to each student pair, identifying original documents that I have encountered in my own research that I shared with the students individually. Thus, students had access to a corpus of research materials that gave their work a degree of accuracy and authenticity because they were matched in each case to their historical roles.”
Create an informal environment for students to get to know each other and develop rapport: “Having initial pairs meet each other in a town hall or loosely structured meeting allows for impromptu conversations, acting, exploring ideas, and personifying historical personages. The elements of play and of creative improvisation can support deep learning.”
Provide technical support for new skills, such as podcasting. According to one student, “Dr. Ahbel-Rappe provided support for recording the podcasts, bringing in a professional from the recording staff [at LSA Technology Services] to teach us best practices for recording audio and video and then editing it. From start to finish, I felt supported in the areas I did not know much about while still having the freedom to connect with the material in my own way.” You can listen to one of the podcasts created by a pair of students speaking as a pagan philosopher and a Christian saint.
By recognizing the barriers to student engagement across different worldviews and creating scaffolded exercises and projects, these faculty are equipping their students with essential skills for contributing to a diverse democracy. U-M faculty can engage with additional approaches to open inquiry at 6 workshops CRLT is co-sponsoring as part of our winter seminar series. In these hands-on lunch sessions, faculty presenters will share field-tested strategies for teaching across ideological, intellectual, and cultural divides. Their creative and embodied pedagogies range from improvisation and soft-skills training to sensory pedagogy and dialogue games. Designed for faculty in all disciplines, these workshops provide practical tools to build classroom communities in which students learn to cultivate and entertain a broader spectrum of positions and engage in constructive disagreement for the sake of collective intellectual growth. You can register here on the CRLT website starting on December 12.