Balancing Wellness and Building Dialogue Skills as a Scientist

Beyond Understanding: Other Ways to Practice Listening  One question is who is responsible? Another is can you read?   – Florens, the main character in A Mercy by Toni Morrison   “Listen to understand, not to respond.” This amounts to a golden rule, maybe the golden rule, in dialogue work, taking its inspiration from Stephen Covey’s oft-quoted … Read More

The course began weeks before we left for our trip. We met every week to discuss the environmental challenges that shape our world today. Under the guidance of Professor Sarah E. Light, we explored topics like corporate responsibility, sustainability, and climate ethics. But the real learning began when we packed our bags, left our phones … Read More

One aspect of the course and trip that resonated with me was the idea of remembrance and temporality. With these in mind, there was a big focus on exploring museums, and I noticed the role that museums had in remembering and reimagining the culture and history of indigenous people in Australia. The class did a … Read More

The Language of Dialogue: Embracing New Metaphors What is the first language you learned how to speak? How did that language teach you to see others, to think about yourself and your place in the world? From whom did you learn it, and how well did you mimic it?   The version of myself I met … Read More

Why Choose Common Ground? One of my (Tanisha) fondest memories of freshman year was the conversations we had before and after the 2024 elections. In a small room in the corner of KCECH, 15 of us Common Grounders huddled together to predict the election results and later reconvened to discuss them. This experience reinforced the … Read More

What are some of the feelings this play, and the choices made in staging it (like the use of whiteface), brought up for you? Where do you think those feelings come from? How effective was the epilogue in translating the play’s themes from 1965 to 2025? If you were writing the epilogue, where would you … Read More

Testimony as a Dialogic Practice and Pedagogy: Notes from a Fall 2024 Paideia Course How can we receive another’s stories – their grief, their pleasure, their bewilderment, their wonder, their rage – in a way that affirms but does not appropriate or presume to understand? How can we share our own stories in a way … Read More

On December 7, Noah Kocher, undergraduate member of the Political Empathy Lab research team, and I spoke at the Fair Districts Pennsylvania Conference in Harrisburg.  Fair Districts PA is an organization that works towards the just apportionment of Pennsylvania’s congressional districts, trying to redraw gerrymandered districts that unfairly keep one political party in power even … Read More

We were invited to participate in a pop-up newsroom alongside students from 12 universities around the world, creating written and multimedia content about the conference for both attendees and the larger iMEdD community. We each covered aspects of the conference, a panel on investigative journalism on the food beat (Isaac) and wrote a photo essay … Read More

During our time in Greece, we visited the US Embassy, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and various community organizations. There was ample time for questions at each location, during which our course leaders Professor Fernando Chang-Muy and Professor Fariha Khan encouraged us to delve deeper into the topics we explored in our final … Read More

Reflecting back on my summer at Penn, I am grateful for the opportunities that I were graciously given to enhance both my career and personal growth through the SNF Paideia Program. Yes, it was my second summer at Penn, and yet, the experience this summer allowed me to mature in ways I couldn’t have imagined … Read More

Any Penn student worth their salt knows how to bluff. Bluff that they’ve certainly started that 15-page paper due Tuesday. Bluff that even though they are at one of the top institutions in the world, running three clubs, taking six classes, and conducting an honors thesis, that they are perfectly fine and know all they … Read More

After the chilliness of the morning all but evaporated, I found myself climbing into a cavernous riverbed. Behind me, lay our matatu, a local minibus, which we’d teetered in the past couple hours down rural, rocky paths, taking the occasional detour through acacia bushes. Once I reach the riverbed, I unprofessionally scramble to the other … Read More

On the walk back I thought about how even though I’ve lived in Pennsylvania for decades, before this summer’s Political Empathy Lab, I used to see Pennsylvania as monochrome shades of green, like that field.  Green was the color that rushed by my window if I happened to look while zooming down a highway enroute … Read More

Political Empathy Lab (PEL) Borrows the Netter Center for Community Partnerships’s Van I want to start this reflection by thanking Rita Hodges and Yetunde Pinckney at the Netter Center.  Not only did you lend Political Empathy lab your van for a tour of Philadelphia you also exposed me to my favorite new term. You see, … Read More

During spring break of March 2024, I traveled to Puerto Rico as part of the class “Crafting an Ethnography of Vulnerability” taught by Professor Ernesto Pujol. My time in Puerto Rico was marked by a constant uncanny feeling. It was my first time visiting the unincorporated island territory, yet the experience resonated with places that … Read More

Throughout my time at Penn, I have taken several Paideia courses, one being Nature Rx with Dr. Elizabeth Mackenzie this past fall. The course allowed students to connect with themselves and the natural world by practicing meditation and mindfulness within Philadelphia’s urban green space. As someone who is passionate about preserving and exploring outdoor spaces … Read More

In my life, I’ve been self-centered—as is typical. As humans, we focus on our own needs and lives more than any other individual’s. Very generally speaking, this focus serves as a gateway to the intricate process of crafting our identity, or “sense of self.” In psychology, sense of self refers to a person’s perception of … Read More

The Penn SNF Paideia team, members of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, with honoree SNF Paideia Inaugural Faculty Director Michael Delli Carpini at the January 29th SNF Paideia Program celebration at Sweeten Alumni House. Photo by Constance Mensh. A celebration of the SNF Paideia Program took place on Monday, January 29, 2024 at Sweeten Alumni House … Read More

It becomes especially important, however, in moments of discernible collective unrest in response to major campus, community, national, or global events. We would like to share a few resources that may help you think about how to address these moments. We welcome feedback and the sharing of additional practices. Please email sropp@upenn.edu with your thoughts. … Read More

Fake News in the Post-Factual Era–It’s Not Just False Beliefs: The Many Faces of “Post-Factual” Democratic Politics. Open Seminar at the University of Iceland by Ian MacMullen, Practice Professor of Political Science, SNF Paideia Program My keynote speech for the University of Iceland’s open seminar on “Fake News in the Post-Factual Era” addressed the ways in … Read More

Hospitality and Dialogue: Challenging Preconceptions As I embarked on my journey to Tours, I was unsure of what to expect as I had only ever heard the conventional explanations of France, but I wanted to confirm for myself. What I didn’t expect was the immense hospitality from my host mother, people gathering for hours on … Read More

The restaurant’s walls are adorned with glowing hanging lamps and the floors are covered with thick woven mats and colorful patterned cushions. It’s always filled with big groups squeezed together around round tables and seated cross-legged on the burgundy floor cushions. They pass around huge baskets of pita and dig into platters of food family … Read More

Practicing Mindfulness and Gratitude at the Lab Bench This summer, I was encouraged by SNF Paideia’s Wellness and Student Advising Director, Dr. Lia Howard, to keep a weekly journal throughout my time as an Amgen Scholar at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Honestly, as someone unfamiliar with, but who always wanted to … Read More

Located in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Terreform ONE is a non-profit architecture and design research group utilizing innovative technology and design aimed at shaping a socio-ecological future. Their motto, “design against extinction,” clearly articulates their innovative use of bio-technology to increase biodiversity. SNF Paideia Fellow Abigail (Abby) Weinstein, class of 2025, in the Weitzman School … Read More

The conference, hosted by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was focused on negotiations and technical dialogue preparing for COP28 (the United Nations Climate Change Conference or Conference of the Parties) in Dubai later this year. I had the opportunity to attend the conference in Germany with the support of the SNF Paideia … Read More

My understanding of what I wanted to do as a nurse has changed significantly since I began my studies at Penn Nursing in August of 2020. Originally, I told friends and family in Madison, Wisconsin that I wanted to work with kids. Through experiential learning, made possible with support of the SNF Paideia Fellows Program, I am entering my final year as a nursing student committed to working in reproductive endocrinology and infertility. Beyond this shift in specialty, I have overcome personal fears while working at Pennsylvania Hospital on a medicine floor as a nurse extern this summer. This transformative experience has given me greater humility and confidence in my career decisions.Read More

My interest in coding began in the fall of my sophomore year when I enrolled in a political science course called Introduction to Data Science. I hoped that developing analytics skills would enhance my abilities as a researcher. Throughout that fall, I devoted more time to my R homework than anything else, and yet, I … Read More

This year’s theme focused on mental health challenges and developing innovative solutions. With the generous support of SNF, seven current and recently graduated SNF Paideia Fellows plus eight SNF Paideia staff members were able to attend. They participated in a wide range of activities including an SNF Dialogues discussion of the mental health consequences of … Read More

Perfect Vision has roughly 10 members at a time who participate in the program 5 days a week for around a year, where they are provided a safe space and learn necessary skills to enable them to live independently. The skills-based-training includes entrepreneurial workshops, cooking, and tailoring. I arrived at Perfect Vision on my first … Read More

Our work at DumoLab, headed by the incredible Dr. Laia Mogas-Soldevila and housed in the Department of Architecture at Weitzman, is endless experimentation in pursuit of biomaterial-based solutions for architecture and design. Our paper on cell-free, biologically active architectural structures was published in the Frontiers Journal for Bioengineering and Biotechnology in March. Some of that … Read More

Fellow Maeve Gonter reflects on how her time studying abroad in Spain connects with SNF Paideia and her Nursing major.Read More

Growing with the SNF Paideia Program I was always someone with many interests, academic or otherwise. In the traditional context of higher education, personal pursuits that fall out of definable achievements tend to get dismissed. Throughout my four years in college, I found it challenging to resist this mindset. However, I can say that I … Read More

What Good Shall I Do This Day? Benjamin Franklin left us with the well-known idiom “What Good Shall I Do This Day?”. Although there are contexts in which the good is quite clear, we also live in a complex world in which “the good” is often not obvious. After all, had it been clear, we … Read More

Angelina Oh, C’23, a Philosophy, Politics, and Economics graduate from San Diego, CA, talks about being part of the inaugural cohort of fellows, the impact of the program on her academic research, and her plans for life after Penn. Her capstone project examines the justification for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and identification of potential tangible … Read More

Representing the culmination of their semesters as part of the Comm 2760/Psych 2760/Nur 2760 course “How We Change,” the students constructed each of their projects with dedicated research, considerable planning, and lots of glue. Indeed, the works impressed students and teachers alike with the care the teams put into finding solutions to campus and city … Read More

Excerpts from Edited Transcript Dr. Lia Howard: Welcome to the Park podcast, where dialogue across difference is vital to community wellness. I’m Dr. Lia Howard, your host in the space where open dialogue, the free exchange of ideas, and civil and robust expression of divergent views is valued. Here we will explore the research, the … Read More

The Alliance for Understanding consists of a diverse group of students from Penn as well as staff from The Greenfield Intercultural Center, The African American Resource Center, and Penn Hillel. The cohort spends six weeks discussing the Civil Rights Movement and then takes a trip to the South to better understand American history for the sake of creating social change. The program provides opportunities to visit historical sites and museums and also talk to people who have invaluable knowledge from their experiences studying or living through the Civil Rights Era. The program has a special focus on how the African American and Jewish communities experienced the Civil Rights Era, providing opportunities for students to explore solidarity across racial lines for the cause of justice.Read More

Excerpts from Edited Transcript Dr. Lia Howard: Welcome, Maddie and Fawad. Would you introduce yourselves? Who are you? Can you give us your name, your major, your home town, or anything else you’d like to share? Fawad Syed: I graduated from Penn in May of 2021. I started in 2017. I’m originally from Philly. I … Read More

The film screening and meet-the-Director event reached about 50 thoughtful and energized participants. In addition to the screening of the award-winning documentary TikTok, Boom, the question-and-answer session proved to be immensely engaging. A big topic that came up after the screening was the role of “Gen-Z’ers,” as the first fully digital generation, to responsibly employ … Read More

Mindfulness and Body-Based Practices in a College Classroom One such opportunity is the SNF Paideia designated class, EDUC 251: Mindfulness & Human Development, taught by Dr. Elizabeth Mackenzie. In this class, Penn undergrads spend four weeks out of the semester-long class learning Koru Mindfulness techniques. These techniques include some metacognitive exercises, like labeling emotions, and … Read More

A moderated panel discussion on topics including, but not limited to, the history of the Supreme Court, the creation of a conservative supermajority, the shadow docket, public opinion, and possible modifications to the structure of the Court including term limits and Court expansion.Read More

In this article we take a look at how the SNF Paideia designated course “Good Talk: The Purpose, Practice, and Representation of Dialogue Across Difference” led by Dr. Sarah Ropp, SNF Paideia and Andrea Mitchell Center Postdoctoral Fellow, instructs students on how communication can bridge the gaps of difference in our communities.Read More

What happens when you bring a physics professor, a history professor, a marketing professor, and five Penn undergrads to get dinner together?Read More

For this episode, host Lia Howard is joined by Ellen Kamei, a Penn alumnus and former mayor of the city of Mountain View. Kamei has spent most of her career in public service, especially focusing on issues of diversity, equity and inclusion. With a multicultural and community centered background, Kamei shares with her experiences with … Read More

Offering an alternate activity for fall break, SNF Paideia hosted Walk Around Philadelphia, an experiential day-long event where groups of 5-6 people walked sections of the 100-mile city boundary. This was the second year SNF Paideia collaborated with artist and alum JJ Tiziou, originator of Walk Around Philadelphia, to customize his program for a Penn … Read More

Jarrett Stein, a two-time Penn alumnus and a staff member at the Netter Center for Community Partnerships, joins host Dr. Lia Howard to discuss food awareness and education.Read More

As part of the “Nature Rx” course, the students and I have taken some trips to local gardens and arboretums. On October 25, we visited Awbury Arboretum and took a short tour of the 50+ acre site located in Germantown. Our guide, Nancy Pasquier, led us around paths and through fields, past a pond and … Read More

Utilizing the SNF Paideia Small Grant Program, I hosted the event “University Community Engagement: A Dialogue Amongst Penn Students Involved in Community Work.” This event was an opportunity for Penn student leaders in community work to engage with one another and reflect on the relationship between the University of Pennsylvania and the West Philadelphia/Philadelphia community. … Read More

Before joining Lawyers for Civil Rights, Espinoza-Madrigal was the Legal Director of the Center for HIV Law and Policy (CHLP). As a summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, he received a Juris Doctor from NYU School of Law, where he was a Root-Tilden-Kern Scholar. Espinoza-Madrigal has been named … Read More

We’ve all be in that meeting, that Zoom, that class session where one guy seems to believe everyone there has gathered simply to hear him speak, to hang on his every priceless word until the clock says it’s time to leave.Read More

Venturing off campus to Center City, the SNF Paideia Program hosted a retreat for their fellows at the National Liberty Museum. Designed in collaboration with curatorial experts, the event included a specialized tour of the interactive exhibits on “truth” and “home” as well as a sit-down meal and informal conversation. This was an opportunity for students from three different cohorts to meet each other, some for the first time, and have a shared experience as a community.Read More

Since Homo sapiens first showed up on this blue-green speck inside a hurtling galaxy, members of our species have told stories. From Gilgamesh to the Torah to the Bhagavad Gita to Antigone to the Gospels to King Lear and on up to Breaking Bad and Severance, we humans have told ourselves stories.Read More

What’s remarkable is how rarely the folks in charge react to the simmering cynicism about a coming meeting by doing something to change the way that conversation is structured, framed or conducted. It’s as though a football team ran the same play over and over and over, losing yards each time as boos rain down from the stands. It’s a stunning failure of will and imagination that sadly is not at all unusual in politics, corporations, nonprofits, and media outlets. Plenty of ways exist - particularly given the dazzling power of those little talking computers each of has in our pockets or our hands all day long – to hold very different conversations about thorny topics, inviting new voices, insights and ideas to fuel fresh solutions.Read More

A false notion about civil dialogue often gets trotted out to critique or dismiss the idea. It’s that civil dialogue elevates politeness over candor or the passionate expression of values. That it expects people to bury their actual feelings, or facts they know to be true, beneath a veneer of bland agreeability. That it will sacrifice justice and truth to keep the peace, to avoid offense. Not true.Read More

Rare indeed is the occasion when you can gather in one room people who represent every possible viewpoint, every possible identity, every possible set of life experiences that might bear on the topic under discussion.Read More

A line in Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sounds of Silence” points to an experience many of us have had: “people hearing without listening.” It's an all too common experience addressed in this article.Read More

The poet Elizabeth Alexander asks, “Are we not of interest to each other?” These days, for many of us, when it comes to many of our fellow Americans, the answer has become unclear. In the process, we seem to be losing touch with our ability to engage in a task that's vital in a democratic republic: talking across differences.Read More

Peggy Lee was a popular American singer in the middle of the last century. In the Sixties, she made a late-career comeback with a huge hit song titled "Is That All There Is?" One way to think about this first core principle for designing and executing a public civil dialogue is: Don't set people up for a "Peggy Lee moment." Read more about the first principle: design talk to lead to action.Read More

PRINCIPLE 5: Listen in the way you would like to be heard Listen without distraction Often during our casual conversations – or even our “deep ones” – we are multi-tasking or distracted. In fact, some of the research on conversations shows that we spend 10-15% of our time really listening, and the other 85-90% of … Read More

It is common on college campuses to hear people yearn for, recommend or demand something called a safe space. All of us sometimes can use such a space, a refuge, where we feel insulated from pressures, insults and impositions. It’s important to many people to know that such judgment-free zones are available to them. Without the ability to carve out such spaces, much therapy and many identity support groups would be impossible to sustain. Beyond that, all of us deserve to be free, all the time, from some of the things the OED cites: discrimination, harassment, and violent physical harm. But can we perhaps agree on this: Some of the other items listed in these definitions of safe space are qualitatively different, and of more limited application? Read More

If you've researched an issue that you care about, that's great. If you've had a life experience that offers you insight into a topic, that's valuable. If you're a professional or amateur expert on a topic, wonderful; you'll have a lot to contribute to this discussion. But no single person has read everything useful there is to read on an issue. No one has had every life experience that bears on a topic.Read More

You feel slighted, dismissed, ignored. The feeling stinks. What this ground rule comes down to, simply, is: Don’t ever make other people feel that way. Ground Rule 5: Build on what others say Acknowledge what the previous person said In a discussion, you may not in fact agree with what the person who just spoke … Read More

The point of dialogue about any issue is to come to a clearer, more useful sense of how and why people differ – in hopes that this insight might point the way to a fresh solution, or at least a better way of stating one’s own viewpoint so that others can respect and grasp it. The principles of civil dialogue provide tools to dig into disagreement, to identify the experiences and values that lie beneath, and to sift through the layers to discover whether, somewhere beneath the disagreement, there might lie at least a patch of common ground.Read More

As a first-generation low-income student, studying abroad was always a moon shot for me. But with SNF Paideia’s funding I was able to make it happen and that has broadened my perspective in so many ways. We spoke with Lynn after her return to the states to hear about how the experience relates to the … Read More

Gen Z is remarkable in terms of their social activism. Before they could vote, many had already participated in protest marches, letter and social media campaigns, and outspoken advocacy around issues they are passionate about. Direct action can be empowering and marching with others can produce strong feelings of cohesiveness and connection around shared ideals. Yet at the same time, social and political change can be slow, and advocacy without results can be deeply discouraging, especially if the issues at hand are existential. How do we care for ourselves during the slow, challenging work of social change? This series interviews Penn alumni working to change some of America's most intractable social problems to ask them how are they taking care of themselves so that they can sustain their fight on behalf of others?Read More

In this special episode of the The PARK Podcast, Steven-John Kounoupis and Venus Tian of the Icarus Research Group weave together academic research and first-account interviews to deliver a multi-dimensional conversation on social isolation and mental health. The discussion focuses on the nature of social isolation and social networks in college, sharing diverse perspective on how socialization impacts health and how social wellness impacts our ability to have strong connections with others. Read More

The desire to change society resonates well with Gen Z for whom political activism is a generational hallmark. John Della Volpe’s book, Fight: How Gen Z is Channeling their Fear and Passion to Save America, uses survey data to demonstrate how Gen Z is using democratic means to voice their frustrations with older generations’ inaction on pressing social issues. “For them, America at times has resembled a dystopia. But they won’t sit back and take it. They’ve decided to fight their own war against injustice and inequality right here at home.” From climate change, to gun control, racial equality to reproductive rights, Gen Z is speaking out and showing up to contentious political battles. Read More

Nineteenth surgeon general of the United States Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, traveled the nation to contextualize loneliness. He listened to voices often unheard, met with change-makers, and started a wellness group with friends. His findings toward a connected life served as a starting point toward a conversation on empathy in this year's SNF Paideia fellows’ book club.Read More

“…the comfort, calm and emotional energy we gain from all supportive friendships strengthen our emotional core. And the stronger we are at the center, the more we have to offer everyone else in our lives.” Vivek Murthy, from "Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World." When we are emotionally strengthened by bidirectional relationships, we can be fully present to give to other people. Beyond just giving to our friends, we are better able to give to our broader communities. In this way, having inner strength allows us to better contribute to the work of social change.Read More

Cell biology, plant science, and neurobiology were all areas of study undertaken by students in the SNF Paideia designated course Research in Biological Sciences and its Social Impact. Projects were grounded in scientific inquiry with an added community focus.Read More

The summer allows for a moment to pause and reflect on the past academic year . We have an opportunity to choose to intentionally check in with ourselves and unpack our thoughts and emotions about the pandemic and its many disruptions. Read More

Justin Acheampong (they/them), C’23 and Favor Idika (they/them), C’23 are members of the Student Committee on Undergraduate Education (SCUE). A branch of student government at Penn, SCUE provides input to the administration on issues that affect undergraduate education and develop projects that are intended to benefit students’ educational experiences. This past year, Justin spearheaded a new marginalized community studies project meant to increase the student body’s understanding and bring awareness to under- or mis-represented communities. As Favor astutely said, “having a basic understanding of how we impact one another by reifying or questioning established institutions of power is crucial to being a productive member of society, regardless of one’s career goals or next steps after graduation.”Read More

Kaitlyn is the author of “The Public Sector Pivot: How Gen Z Will Lead a Renaissance in Public Service”, which discusses the role of young people in the public sector post-pandemic, and how to improve the public sector talent pipeline for college students.  To write her book, Kaitlyn interviewed dozens of passionate people who work in government to tell stories about motivations to enter the public sector and potential areas of growth, such as civic tech.Read More

The PIT@Penn student group recently held a fireside chat with Dr. Kayla Davis and Dr. George Demiris, who are both work in the intersection between public interest tech and biology.  Dr. Davis has been heavily involved in STEM outreach and science policy, while much of Dr. Demiris’ work focuses on research to use tech solutions to address aging related issues.Read More

Our final episode in the series on communities of practice features a conversation between Dr. Lia Howard and Pablo Cerdera, associate director of Restorative Practices at the University of Pennsylvania. Pablo shares about how he and his colleagues at Restorative Practices work to provide a safe, confidential, supportive space for all parties involved in incidents of harm. He talks about circle practice as a way of strengthening connections in a community to prevent harm as well as to endure conflict when it inevitably happens.Read More

Nipun Mehta, founder of ServiceSpace, the Daily Good, Karma Kitchen, encouraged Penn graduates in his 2011 Penn Baccalaureate address to take time to intentionally walk. Mehta shared the story of when he and his wife chose to travel to India and walk +1000 km in 3 months budgeting just a dollar a day. They changed their pace, they relied on the kindness of strangers, and they learned deeply from the experience. Using the letters of the word W-A-L-K, Mehta used this experience to inspire Penn graduates to “witness, accept, love and know they self.”Read More

To shape our thinking here, we are using the definition of a community of practice created by the nonprofit, Campus Compact. “A community of practice is a learning community or collegial network, defined as a group of people who share interest in an area of inquiry, and engage in collective learning about that issue as … Read More

According to Uriel Epshtein, Director of the Renew Democracy Initiative (RDI), “the crux of the democratic crisis is a failure of imagination. On the one hand, people simply can’t imagine how fragile our democracy can be and on the other, they can’t imagine that the alternative to American democracy is most likely not some utopian society but rather a far more authoritarian or kleptocratic one because freedom isn’t the norm, it is rather the aberration.” These were a few of Epshtein’s opening remarks at the event, “Rule of Law in America and Abroad: A Comparative View,” presented by The National Constitution Center and Renew Democracy Initiative in partnership with SNF Paideia Program. Read More

Our guests for the fourth episode in our series on Communities of Practice are experts at the nuances behind these ideas. We're looking forward to hearing today about the Netter Center for Community Partnerships at the University of Pennsylvania. Welcome to Rita Hodges, who's the Associate Director at the Netter Center and Faustine Sun, who is the Assistant Director of the Netter Center.Read More

Spending time between her hometown of Little Rock, AR and her grandparents’ home in Huntsville, AR, Celia Kreth (C’23) grew up experiencing the differences between urban and rural lifestyles. Looking back, she can see how this exposure to divergent cultural views fostered a deep appreciation for history, communication styles, and the impact that specific word choice may have on the outcome of a situation. In high school, she was interested in political science and politics but also had a love of words, reading, diction and writing. Celia chose Penn because the Communication and Public Service Program, now her major course of study along with a minor in Legal Studies and History, offers her the opportunity to combine her interests in communications with an emphasis on politics. Read More

Recent racist comments made by a member of the faculty in our university's Law School have caused hurt and harm in the community.  Dean Ruger’s response and organizing efforts by students remind us that racist comments and perpetuation of harmful stereotypes do not reflect the values of our broader community. The Task Force joins the University and community members in condemning hateful speech. These events underscore the continued need for the University to identify and demonstrate commitment to meeting the needs of Asian and Asian American students, scholars, and community members as well as other targeted and structurally marginalized communities. The Task Force invites the Penn community to share perspectives on what resources and supports would better serve to uplift and improve Asian and Asian American experiences in both the short and long term.  Contact the task force through the Office of Social Equity and Community  Read More

I suppose we’re bound to see things this way. But we can view our opponents’ arguments as weaker than our own without dismissing them as altogether worthless. One sad aspect of our poisonously polarized politics is that we are far too quick to form this dismissive belief. Politics is a complex business, and usually the … Read More

The most politically engaged Americans are becoming “dangerously polarized,” even as the “exhausted majority” of Americans opt out of political discussion altogether, writer David French told a Penn audience recently in a Zoom event sponsored by the Red and Blue Exchange (RBX).Read More

In We Want to Do More than Survive, Love argues for a pedagogy that actively works towards radically restructuring and reimagining the prevailing educational model in the U.S. This pedagogy, which Love calls “abolitionist teaching,” is devoted to intersectional racial justice in and beyond the classroom through civics education, community coalition building, and critical theory. She refers to recent high-profile events and activism related to racial injustice; academic research in education; abolitionist histories; critical theory; and her own experiences as a Black, queer, female student and educator to make this argument.Read More

Overview of The Art of Communicating This week, I’m reading The Art of Communicating by Thích Nhất Hạnh. (For an introduction to this blog series on anti-oppression approaches to dialogue, see here; for other entries in the series, see “Sarah’s Content” on this page.) Thích Nhất Hạnh, born 1926 in Vietnam, is a Zen Master … Read More

How can we learn together about our community at Penn and what practices best facilitate deliberative democracy? In the third episode of our series on communities of practice, we hear from the Andrea Mitchell Center about the study of Democracy, citizenship, and the constitution for the Penn community and beyond. Dr. Lia Howard is joined in conversation with Jeffrey Green, professor of political theory in Penn's political science department and director of the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy; Matthew Roth, who is a historian and is the Assistant Director of the Andrea Mitchel Center; and Sarah Ropp, the post doctoral fellow with the Andrea Mitchell Center and with the SNF Paideia program. She is a scholar of Comparative Literature and Childhood studies.Read More

Free Speech on Campus is written in response to a series of highly publicized incidents on contemporary higher education campuses across the U.S. related to tensions over freedom of speech, including (among others) controversial invited speakers, hate speech, and indictments of administration and faculty for failing to adequately protect vulnerable students from the real harm of the latter and the perceived or feared harm of the former. It also rises out of the everyday challenges Ben-Porath faced while serving as chair of Penn’s Committee on Open Expression.Read More

We are living in a “dangerous moment for our democracy” that requires Americans to recalibrate how they respond to ideas and actions that displease them, activist and educator Loretta Ross told a captivated Zoom audience recently at a program sponsored by the Red and Blue Exchange.Read More

In Stop Talking, the authors eschew the term “decolonizing” to describe the approaches they are advocating and instead use “indigenizing.” Indigenizing education, they explain, means “infusing indigenous values and perspectives into every aspect of higher education. . . . We don’t mean incorporating small features of them into the status quo, nor do we necessarily mean replacing traditional Western approaches with indigenous ones. We mean giving equal credence to and having the flexibility to draw from indigenous approaches as appropriate. Indigenizing education means that indigenous approaches are seen as normal, central, and useful, rather than archaic, exotic, alternative, or otherwise marginal” (41-42).Read More

Overview of The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop This week for the Decolonizing Dialogue reading series, I’m reading The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: Decolonizing the Creative Classroom by Felicia Rose Chavez (2021). (For an introduction to this blog series, see here; for other entries in the series, see “Sarah’s Content” on this page.) Felicia Rose Chavez is a … Read More

To shape our thinking here, we are using the definition of a community of practice created by the nonprofit, Campus Compact. “A community of practice is a learning community or collegial network, defined as a group of people who share interest in an area of inquiry, and engage in collective learning about that issue as … Read More

How can mindfulness practices help us navigate dialogue and resist oppression? This week, I’m reading "Integrating Mindfulness into Anti-Oppression Pedagogy: Social Justice in Higher Education," by Beth Berila (2016). Read More

Join SNF Paideia as we interview Wellness at Penn for The PARK Podcast series on Communities of Practice. You’re invited to listen interactively to this 24-minute conversation in a group or on your own. You can use the question prompts below, pausing the interview at the designated time, to “converse” with the content, either with others or in a journal. We hope you will learn about the Penn community’s commitment to wellness while thinking about your own personal wellness practices and places of belonging.Read More

How can we decolonize the way we talk about race? For the second post in our Decolonizing Dialogue series (see here for an introduction to the series + the first post on Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire), I’m reading Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence: Understanding and Facilitating Difficult Dialogues on Race (2015) by Derald Wing Sue. Derald Wing Sue is the son of Chinese immigrants and currently Professor of Psychology and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. His scholarly interests include multicultural counseling, the psychology of racism and antiracism, cultural competence, and mental health law, among others.Read More

We live in an increasingly polarized world. My educational experiences have simultaneously made me aware of the loss of open dialogue amongst our younger generations and given me hope for its future restoration.Read More

How can we practice scholarship, civic engagement, and dialogue in more liberatory, less oppressive ways?Read More

Do Donald Trump’s supporters trust Fox News? Did they ever? Many of the former president’s most fervent fans famously (but, in some cases, only temporarily) abandoned the cable channel after it dared to be one of the first media organizations to call Arizona for Joe Biden in the 2020 election. That mass desertion might have seemed like a sudden loss of faith in the TV network. But you can’t lose (and then regain) a faith you never had. And it’s not clear that these Trump supporters ever actually trusted Fox. They just liked it.Read More

The PARK Podcast's new series explores communities of practice, where we ask our partner organizations to help us better understand both how they see the Penn community, and to describe the types of practices they use to engage others in their work on campus. The first conversation is with Wellness at Penn.Read More

As we look to return to campus in the next few weeks images of Penn keep running through my mind. I keep thinking about places and people that I miss and that I am looking forward to seeing again. Returning to Penn also has me considering what it means to be part of the Penn community; what does it mean to be a Penn citizen or a citizen of Penn? It seems like a good question for a white board surrounded by answers as varied as the Penn student body, the Penn staff, and the Penn faculty. One very simple answer might be the desire to serve the Penn community, to contribute to make the lives of others—students, faculty, and staff—better.Read More