Braver Spaces

Learning how to talk across differences — beyond today's limits

This original piece of art was created with the assistance of DALL-E

Before becoming the new president of Dartmouth College last fall, Sian Beilock was best known among many of her students for having delivered one of the more viral TED talks in the conference’s science-themed archive—a 15-minute pep-talk on how to combat mental stress that’s now being shared by more than 2.4 million people worldwide. Its title? “Why We Choke Under Pressure—and How to Avoid It.”

Today, seven years later, the prescience of that talk hasn’t been lost on Beilock. She now finds herself using her cognitive research on mental stress to help herself, students and faculty members navigate today’s political turmoil and set new norms for what constitutes a quality education. The goal, she says, is to expand knowledge of cultural and political differences to help students develop global leadership skills for a changing world.

“In these times, we have a responsibility to help students engage in dialogue across differences,” says Beilock. “We’re at a critical moment when many (in society) seem to have lost the ability —and the will—to listen and to understand perspectives beyond their own. … Talking across differences needs to be taught, practiced and learned. We’re not born with it. ”

As the 2024 election season heats up and campus tensions over the Israel-Hamas war, the war in Ukraine, rising student debt and political turmoil remain on high boil, Beilock is launching a new initiative on campus she calls Brave Spaces: Dartmouth Dialogues —to help Dartmouth College students learn how to navigate across differences, and within the guardrails of democracy.

Talking across differences, Beilock says, is about collaboration, an in-demand skill in the workplace—and what she believes will become ever-more critical to learn as our national population and work cultures become far more racially, generationally and culturally diverse. “Success isn’t just about learning new things,” Sian told me recently in our #NewRules podcast studio in Manhattan. “It’s also about learning how to overcome personal limits when it matters the most.”

What follows are some short, edited excerpts from our conversation. My full interview with Sian and her new model for knowledge-capture to bridge our political and cultural divides will be featured in its entirety, as an audio episode in our forthcoming #NewRules’ podcast, set to launch later next month.

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MARCIA: You say that today, students aren’t being taught how to talk across differences, and that this represents, in some ways, an assault on both the quality of learning and the effectiveness of our democracy.

SIAN: I think there is often a perception that students aren’t talking across differences, and feel like they can’t voice an opinion that is different than others. We tend to self-censor, we tend to stop talking, we tend to not engage with people who have different views than our own. But expressing one’s self and listening to what others have to say is essential for knowledge-capture. Not feeling able to do this has serious consequences for both our thinking and our ability to understand difference.

It also has consequences for our country and for our mental health. We know that young people are lonely right now and often don’t have deeper connections. And so the goal of Brave Spaces is also about figuring out ways, through our faculty, to start building this leadership muscle of having these difficult conversations, of being uncomfortable in the classroom, hearing different opinions, learning how to listen, and having humility — to understand that maybe everything one knows is not exactly accurate or right.

MARCIA: You’re calling the first rollout of this effort The Dialogue Project.

SIAN: We’ve started by developing new courses and events related to challenging topics. We’re also doing a new partnership with the nonprofit StoryCorps, to bring strangers with different perspectives together to record conversations about their lives, and in the process, to discover their shared humanity. We’re also doing a series of workshops where faculty, staff and students can practice the skills of collaborative dialogue.

Learning to talk across differences — teaching it, practicing it, learning it — is critical in these times. We’re not born knowing it, nor are we particularly well-versed in knowing it as young adults, especially in an age where social media exposes us most often to those who think like us, look like us and come from the same backgrounds.

MARCIA: You’ve said that a basic condition for the success of Brave Spaces will be mental wellness, not coddling people but giving people the tools to do their best.

SIAN: There are studies out there talking about parenting during the past 20 years, in which today’s students have been experiencing ‘lawnmower parenting’—a favorite term of mine—where parents would try to get rid of every obstacle in front of a child. We know that being raised this way has had an impact on how students come onto campus thinking about whether they're going to take a class where they might not get a perfect grade or have to engage with others.

MARCIA: How much of this is about reducing political polarization and how much of this is about building confidence and basic leadership skills?

SIAN: It’s so important for having these difficult conversations, and for pushing forward and developing the kinds of students that will be leaders able to voice opinions that others don’t like, so then we’ll be able to think about how and what kind of change can happen.

But also, it’s not just about saying anything. We should be speaking with facts, from data, from reputable news sources. Brave Spaces and free expression is not about threats. It’s not about trying to push and control one into your point of view. It’s learning to exercise a new muscle, to sit back and listen, to have humility, to be able to engage in respectful dialogue, to ask questions.

I really believe that the long-term goal is to create new bodies of knowledge for collective impact to change the world. So the question is, what are the baseline conditions to do that? 

For starters, I think my focus on health and wellness and my research career that centers on anxiety is really relevant for how we’re working with young people today. I think lots of institutions are not putting health and wellness front and center, are not focusing, in part, on the mental stress inherent in these times, and I think that’s a mistake. Wellness is a condition of excellence.

MARCIA: What are some of the topics you’ll be focusing on first?

SIAN: We’ve all been grappling with the Middle East. And one of the things our faculty here at Dartmouth has done as part of our new Dartmouth Dialogues series is bringing our Jewish Studies and our Middle Eastern Studies faculties together to talk about what’s going on across differences, in panels and discussions open to the public and also just for students in environments where they can feel safe to express themselves openly, without judgment. Our faculty also has been in training and is modeling how to come forward with different points of view and to have conversations that are uncomfortable, and it helps us to move forward. But that’s just a start.

MARCIA: So much of this sounds like you’re teaching civic engagement, giving lessons on democratic values, focusing on how to bridge differences around common values—things universities have focused on in the past. How will you measure the success of this initiative?

SIAN: We’re not always going to get this Brave Spaces initiative right, and we’re going to try some things that don’t work. But in these times, learning how to talk across differences is something we all need to learn how to do better, first, and to do more widely in this turbulent time, and not just to avoid a fight, but to co-create the foundations of success for the future of work, ourselves and society.

We’re just getting started.