Preparing for Election Season
Strategies for Civic Engagement and Dialogue Centers
Civic engagement and dialogue centers play an important role in helping students participate in public life, examine political issues, and engage constructively across differences.
These centers can take proactive steps to promote voter education, encourage civic participation, and create inclusive spaces for dialogue and engagement. Centers can promote cross-functional cooperation by coordinating campuswide efforts. The election provides a prominent backdrop for partnering with faculty and staff. You can engage their subject matter expertise, and they can benefit from your experience engaging students.
Socialize knowledge from previous elections
Gather and socialize the lessons center staff collectively learned from recent presidential and congressional elections. Look for opportunities to share best practices with campus leadership, faculty, and staff. Revisit some of the more effective strategies. How can you apply the lessons you learned?
Transform speaker events into conversations
Most speaker events are built around the same format: a long presentation with a few minutes for questions, where a handful of attendees who are most comfortable speaking in a crowded room participate.
A few structural changes can turn the same event into practice for dialogue. For example, during large-scale public talks, typically attracting more than 350 attendees, organizers at some institutions have implemented an 8-to 10-minute “turn-to-two-neighbors” format before the Q&A session. This structure provides participants with an opportunity to absorb the content and to contemplate their questions and reactions. Some organizers also encourage speakers to perceive their presentation as a communal launchpad for discussion, often necessitating a streamlined delivery of their material.
Faculty and staff in the room matter as much as the format. Staying silent to leave space for students can signal that the conversation is not worth the risk of joining. When administrators and faculty take part in small-group discussions, raise their own questions, and disagree openly and respectfully in view of students, they show students what the event is asking of them.
Tap into campus expertise for issues programming
Nearly half of young Americans (47%) say they avoid political conversations because they worry about how others will react. However, education about issues and elections, and support from their communities, can help youth engage in democracy.
Center staff are ideally positioned to organize efforts to educate students about political issues while showing a diversity of viewpoints. Explore opportunities to pair up faculty and staff members whose expertise overlap to forge sustained cross-functional relationships.
Partner with other campuses
Few institutions have everything a strong dialogue program requires. Smaller campuses often lack the venues, budget, and reach to convene large audiences, while larger universities can lack the flexibility and agility of smaller campuses to pilot new ideas. A partnership with a nearby institution allows each campus to cover the other's gaps.
This collaboration enables the smaller campus to leverage the larger campus’ resources and vice versa. The smaller campus can function like a democracy laboratory, developing creative concepts to facilitate constructive dialogue and enhance students’ educational experiences before they are implemented at scale.
"No one discipline is going to solve all the problems. You have to do interdisciplinary work. Higher ed is not set up to do interdisciplinary work. There’s a lot of siloing. Some of the centers are housed in student affairs and they will have a harder time working with faculty. Bigger institutions often have multiple centers, so they’re kind of competing in some ways. You have to pull things together.”
Faculty and program director
Develop shared programming
Establish regular meetings with all appropriate center leads within your system to support each other’s efforts. Expand your collaborations outside of campus by working with local law enforcement and community organizations.
For example, at Christopher Newport University, the Tidewater Community Writing Center is a joint effort between the Alice F. Randall Writing Center and the Center for Community Engagement. Faculty volunteers work with both students and community members. Take advantage of the existing links among community service, civic engagement, and leadership to explore advocacy related to election issues.
Showcase balanced expertise
Provide educational programming that showcases expertise from within and beyond the institution. College campuses are embedded in networks of deep topical expertise. Inform and engage campus citizens with educational programming on topics that they care about and that may be relevant to the current election cycle. Display a range of viewpoints on a single topic.
"Students are eager to have structures that allow them to engage and provide space for them to have difficult conversations because they are less apt to do that on their own. They’re looking for space that’s created for them as opposed to just creating that space.”
Staff
Model engagement across differences
Create learning experiences outside of politically charged moments. A deliberative dialogue series provides students with physical spaces for difficult conversations.
Through their James Farmer Multicultural Center, the University of Mary Washington runs a range of programming and trains peer educators. These spaces and practices can then provide scaffolding to help students consider election issues and process their reactions to election results.
Engage your wider community
Encourage participation across campus and with your neighbors.
Promote events and dialogues to the full campus community, including health care workers, security, administrative staff, and environmental and food service workers. Invite local community participation, where possible. This can help expand the range of viewpoints to which college students are exposed.
Reinforce nonpartisanship in popular co-curricular spaces
Organize civic forums and other programming to follow election events or to accompany campus activities like sports and homecoming to drive student engagement. Invite campus and local policy or issue experts to attend. Encourage faculty to offer students class credit for event attendance or for volunteering with campaigns and reporting back through classroom assignments.
At orientation, encourage living learning communities to adopt election engagement as a theme. Coordinate with staff and faculty to infuse election issues into the first-year experience curriculum. Topics might include how government works, how elections are administered, how to evaluate political information, and how students can engage constructively across differences.
Operationalize a shared calendar with key events
Dedicate staff to keep the calendar updated with cross-functional deadlines like including information in orientation communications and programming. Spotlight major campus events and their organizers (e.g., homecoming, football games, concerts) to encourage easier coordination. House the calendar centrally and embed it into high-traffic digital spaces, like your campus intranet. Share it on your public website along with activities to which the public is invited.
Celebrate student civic engagement
The University of Delaware hosts a nonpartisan voter celebration event, which it started in 2008. They situate activity stations throughout a large room decorated with balloons. They serve popcorn and ice cream. Visitors receive a stamp at each station and earn free ice cream for visiting them all. In previous years, the stations have included a create-your-own-meme contest or activity, presidential trivia, and placing a pin in the state where you voted. Do not limit these to election night.
This idea could be expanded to incorporate a dialogue passport for use in events leading up to the election, including attending a speaker series or participating in community engagement. Sewanee’s Dialogue Across Difference Program has innovatively adopted a Dessert and Democracy format, using sweet treats to entice discussions on voter apathy.
Mobilize your student leaders
Student-organized and -facilitated discussions can be more effective than those put on by administration, staff, and faculty. Resident leaders, student government officers, student group leaders, and athletes can be trained to facilitate difficult conversations. The Diversity Education Empowerment Program, or D.E.E.P., Impact Program at James Madison University relies on a peer-to-peer model to explore topics related to identity, culture, and justice. Students receive facilitation training, and campus stakeholders can request their services inside and outside of classroom settings.
At Sewanee, the Canale Leaders serve as the boots on the ground. These paid student interns offer invaluable insights into event planning that resonate with student interests. They wield relational influence, heighten awareness, and maintain a direct line to a student advisory board composed of leaders from various campus sectors. Staff rely on their input to shape programming decisions effectively.
Transition into sustained practice once the election is over.
Assess the enduring value of the initiatives, undertakings, and infrastructure you have built. Consider extending them beyond the election season. Looking toward the future, craft a strategic approach to enhance civic engagement capacity. Consider prioritizing investment in faculty skill development and recognize their extended institutional tenures as a crucial factor. For example, Providence College’s Dialogue, Inclusion, and Democracy Lab hosts faculty learning communities to build confidence in facilitating difficult conversations. They also house a student fellows program where 10 fellows are responsible for cross-campus and community events and dialogue work. Those fellows receive a monetary stipend and course credit. They provide year-round opportunities like neighborhood clean-ups and community housing events to illustrate the range of civic engagement.
These initiatives can help combat apathy for democratic processes and provide ample real-life dialogue practice. In contrast to infrequent events like presidential elections, especially those fraught with negativity, participation in activities like board of education meetings, involvement in local initiatives within the mayor’s office, or volunteering with community development organizations can offer avenues for meaningful engagement and can strengthen community resilience.
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