DU Faculty Help Students Engage Across Difference
Through classroom research and facilitated conversations, students are building the skills for free expression with curiosity and understanding.
When conversations about free expression make national headlines, they often focus on conflict: protests, controversies, political divisions, or debates about what can and cannot be said on college campuses.
At the University of Denver, two faculty members are taking different approaches. Rather than focusing solely on speech itself, they are helping students develop the skills, confidence, and experience needed to engage in meaningful conversations and constructive dialogues across differences.
Through research and experiential learning, professors Tamra Pearson d’Estrée and Elizabeth Sheridan Sperber are creating opportunities for students to understand and overcome one of the most important challenges of modern civic life: talking with people whose perspectives differ from their own.
Creating spaces for dialogue
A professor in the Josef Korbel School of Global and Public Affairs, Pearson d’Estrée leads the Conflict Engagement and Resolution Initiative (CERI), a student-run program that provides tools, training, engagement opportunities, and process support for engaging across differences.
CERI began in 2004 as the Conflict Resolution Institute before transitioning to its current name in 2021. Today, it’s run by graduate student facilitators who organize events, develop discussion materials, and guide conversations on complex public issues.
Students are trained to facilitate both dialogues and deliberations. Dialogues focus on exploring differing perspectives and privileges by sharing personal experiences. Deliberations take this one step further by asking participants to examine multiple approaches to difficult issues, weigh trade-offs, and explore potential paths forward.
Where debates emphasize rhetoric and the logical quality of an argument, CERI’s work also focuses on developing relationships and an understanding of perspectives.
“It’s not to convince the other side of why your side is right,” Pearson d’Estrée explains. “If you’re framing it as a dialogue, it’s about mutual understanding: How can I better understand where you’re coming from? Not to agree with you—and not to disagree with you or to argue with you—but just to understand better.”
To support these conversations, student researchers work alongside Pearson d’Estrée to develop issue guides on topics such as immigration policy and sustainable development. The guides present several approaches to a problem, along with the benefits and trade-offs associated with each, helping participants move beyond simplistic, polarized positions.
The experience gives students more than subject-matter knowledge. It teaches facilitation, active listening, leadership, and conflict engagement skills that can be applied in classrooms, workplaces, and communities.
Pearson d’Estrée believes those abilities are becoming even more central to ensuring students’ future success. “The ability to bring together people who have diverse views—and to be comfortable with that—is going to be an important aspect of leadership,” she says.
How DU students experience disagreement
While Pearson d’Estrée’s and CERI’s work focuses on creating opportunities for engagement, Sperber’s recent research sought to understand how DU students experience disagreement in the first place.
An associate professor of political science, Sperber designed a capstone course that engaged students in original qualitative research about political and moral disagreement on campus. After conducting interviews and focus groups with DU students not in the class, she then anonymized the transcripts for her students to analyze and identify themes. At the conclusion of the course, the students presented their findings to University leadership.
Most notably, the project yielded a result that contradicts national discourse about free expression, which often cites faculty ideology as a major threat to open engagement. Instead, DU students pointed elsewhere: the fear of social consequences.
The research revealed that many students hesitate to participate in political conversations not because they lack opinions, but because they worry about saying the wrong thing, damaging relationships, or being judged by their peers.
Student researchers concluded that, for many of their peers, social risks simply outweigh the perceived benefits of speaking across political or moral differences on campus. And even students who reported speaking up feared blowback on social media.
In reflecting on the course, one student said, “This course revealed many of my own biases and made me realize that the way I protect parts of my identity might unintentionally cause others to self-censor around me. Genuinely, this has been the best class I have taken throughout my years of schooling.”
Deliberation in action
The connection between Sperber’s research and Pearson d’Estrée’s work became especially visible this year when CERI facilitators visited Sperber’s classroom to lead a structured deliberation on free speech and the inclusive campus with undergraduate students.
One participant wrote that the session highlighted “the nuances and challenges that both students and administrators face in trying to balance free speech, safety, well-being, and preserving the purpose and integrity of universities.”
Another student appreciated moving beyond abstract debate and toward practical problem solving, writing that the discussion created an opportunity to explore “the practical application of the ideal of free speech.”
These observations illustrate what free expression looks like in practice. More than the freedom to voice an opinion, it’s the ability to engage thoughtfully with others, navigate disagreement, and remain open. As DU continues expanding initiatives focused on free expression and pluralism, the work of Pearson d’Estrée, Sperber, and their students offers valuable insight.
