What actually is “dialogue”? Is it a thing that we do or a way that we do things?
We often talk about dialogue as a discursive genre: a category of discourse or communication defined by a set of characteristics. I’m interested in thinking through dialogue as a mode: a way of being and doing that might be practiced in any number of discursive genres, or academic disciplines, or professional fields, or personal pursuits. That is:
What if “dialogue” is both an activity we engage in (a WHAT) and also an ethos or a mode of engagement (a HOW)? Can we bring a dialogic ethos to any activity or pursuit? What would that mean? What would that look like? Why might it be meaningful or beneficial?
Let’s first talk about dialogue as a “what” – an activity that we engage in, a type of discourse that we enter into for a specific purpose on a specific topic, for a specific amount of time. For example, all of these might be dialogues: a classroom conversation about climate change policy; an event focused on social class difference; a workplace meeting about the organization’s evolving mission; an activist gathering to determine next steps for the current project; an interpersonal exchange with one’s partner or parents. Very often, we define “dialogue” in comparison to other discursive genres like “debate” or “discussion,” like in this helpful graphic.
Why is it helpful to consider dialogue a discursive genre?
As you can see in this guide, “dialogue” as a genre of communication has been defined by some key basic characteristics:
- The purpose is understanding, meaning making, and/or finding connection or common ground (not persuasion, winning, or mere viewpoint exchange)
- Listening to and learning from others are central objectives: skills that are consciously developed and practiced
- There is an endeavor to honor and invite sharing from the “whole person” (that is, one’s identities, emotions, experiences, and personal and community histories are valued and included as well as one’s intellectual ideas and analyses)
- Dialogue is collaborative and interdependent: people are working together towards understanding, not just seeking individual advancement
- There is an emphasis on reflection, self-examination, and transformation: rather than seeking to defend a firmly held position, participants seek to expand and deepen their understanding of their own positions as well as others’, with the potential to destabilize their own positions and worldviews
- There may be no resolution or consensus; disagreement or conflicting understandings and worldviews are allowed to exist and persist
Thus a classroom conversation or workplace meeting or activist gathering or interpersonal exchange or social media back-and-forth cannot be called a “dialogue” unless it reflects (an earnest intention and attempt to enact) these core qualities or attributes. If your workplace meeting needs to reach consensus or resolution, and it strives to focus (solely) on evidence-based logic, it should more properly be called a “discussion.” If your activist gathering strives to determine which of several proposed courses of action will be the most effective through passionate persuasive argument presented by proponents of each course of action followed by a vote, it should more properly be called a “debate.” If your interpersonal or social media exchange involves conflict without resolution and the allowance of emotion, but also name-calling, refusal to listen, and lack of self-reflection, well, that is simply a fight.
Important to note: there are many, many different formats and modes – many shapes dialogue, even thus defined, can take – beyond a traditional, synchronous, in-person, oral conversation. And there are variations on these defining characteristics of dialogue (and/or how they are interpreted and practiced) across different dialogue models and in different contexts. And, the 2008 document linked above calls for updating in light of developments like social media and AI (thank you to Lia Howard for pointing this out!). There is no singular, universal set of laws governing what is allowed to be called dialogue or what purpose dialogue must serve. But these are pretty basic qualities of dialogue that are invoked quite consistently in how folks are defining and applying the concept of “dialogue” as a genre of discourse in higher education settings.
Also important: these characteristics are not abstract intentions. One doesn’t just decide to “do dialogue” and then achieve it. They are enacted through structures and practices: choices made and actions taken deliberately both by the facilitator of dialogue and the participants in it. You can teach and practice skills like listening and mindfulness, you can use conversation formats that will require collaboration, you can craft questions that will invite participants to bring their whole selves into the exploration of a topic, you can provide structures for processing and reflection, and so on. The SNF Paideia program offers dozens of resources for “doing” dialogue as an activity; here are just a few:
Considering dialogue as a genre of discourse – a category of communicative engagement that is clearly distinguishable from other types of engagement, with its own set of norms and practices – is useful and helpful because it helps us match form to purpose. Thinking about the conversations we are trying to foster and participate in as conforming to discursive genres allows us to:
- select the genre of discourse that will best serve our goals;
- communicate transparently with one another about what we are trying to do in this conversation, why we are doing it this way, and how we will do it;
- put our purpose and goals into practice through a concrete, identifiable set of skills, formats, and techniques we can learn and teach.
This is hugely important not just for achieving the specific goals of a particular conversation or series of conversations, but for supporting equity in communication and community building in general. Establishing clarity for everyone involved around what kind of conversation is being pursued, for what purpose, and according to what general norms is an equity practice that prevents conversations from being normed subconsciously to the dominant form of discourse, or suffering from competing forms of discourse, both of which happen very often in, say, a college classroom. Have you ever experienced a classroom conversation in which you felt like you didn’t really understand what the rules or expectations were, but it seemed like others intuitively did? Have you ever experienced a classroom conversation in which it seemed like 3 conversations at once were happening – some people trying to make it a dialogue (bringing in personal experiences and emotions; trying earnestly to ask questions of others), others trying to keep it to a facts-driven, emotion-free discussion, still others fighting hard to turn it into a debate?
Thus there is enormous value in saying “we are doing a dialogue, this is what that means, this is why we are choosing dialogue for this topic, we will be practicing our dialogue for the next 60 minutes, this is the format and here are the rules.”
Why is it unhelpful to only think about dialogue as a discursive genre?
Considering dialogue as only a discursive genre – just as a thing that you do, for an amount of time, and then stop doing; a world that you enter, and then leave again – comes with some potential pitfalls. Not always, but frequently, the cordoning off of dialogue as a special, timebound discursive activity – one requiring special skills and informed guidance to do “right” – leads to some justifiable problematization of dialogue:
- It creates a binary between dialogue and action, leading people to think that we are either “just talking” about something important, or we are “doing something” about it (and the “just talking” is endowed with a perceptibly scornful valence).
- It crystallizes dialogue into a kind of gem: a self-contained, precious, polished little nugget of idealized communicative exchange that is rare, hard to find (or forge), elite, and – some might therefore conclude – somewhat useless. There are those who look upon the practice of dialogue as something that looks lovely and feels nice, but exists as the property of, or under the exclusive purview of, the most privileged: those with the luxuries of time and training to sit around in the ivory tower having deep conversations about fripperies like “identity” and “lived impact.” (Thanks to Adan Hussain for raising this question of dialogue as “an idealized, privileged form of discourse.”)
- It ignores the ways that we may already be engaged in dialogue, or something like it, without trying to be, and what the impact of that dialogic engagement might be: the ways that we might bring (or already be bringing) dialogic practices and mindsets into spaces not specifically designated as “dialogue spaces,” conversations not called or operating as “dialogues,” or pursuits not considered communications-based endeavors (for example: mechanical engineering, or data analysis, or professional housekeeping, or solo hiking).
What does it mean to think about dialogue as (also) a HOW: an ethos or mode of engagement; a way of being and doing; an adjective and not just a noun?
I’m still working this out; I hope you might help me. (And thank you to Clay Colmon for contributing the phrase “dialogue as a way of being.”) But I have been thinking about what the qualities of dialogic engagement with the world are. Here are some qualities I have identified:
Holding space for complexity and ambiguity
- Allowing multiple things to be true at once, even if they conflict with each other; acknowledging that some questions will not be resolved; accepting mystery
Mutuality, interdependence, and relationality (within and beyond the human world)
- Ecosystems thinking; being in active, participatory relationship with your environment, including human cultures and human-made landscapes; understanding the importance of place and context; acknowledging that your actions change the ecosystem around you and that you in turn are changed by what occurs in your environment
Transparency
- Seeking to communicate clearly your own needs, goals, and motivations; seeking to uncover and understand others’ needs, goals, and motivations
Vulnerability and intimacy
- Opening yourself up to the world at the risk of being wounded; seeking connection with your environment and the living beings and nonliving entities in it
Whole-person (cognitive, emotional, social, spiritual)
- Acknowledging and nurturing your emotional, embodied, social, intellectual, and spiritual responses and needs; rejecting fragmentation of the self; striving to allow others to exist likewise as their whole selves by recognizing that they, too, have needs and responses beyond the intellectual
Person- and process-oriented (over profit or product)
- Valuing life, relationships, dignity, meaningful struggle, slow progress, trial and error, etc, over quick resolutions, perfect outcomes, and big pay-offs; practicing compassion without needing comprehension
Awareness of power, (in)justice, and structures of privilege and oppression
- Understanding that nothing happens in a vacuum; noticing how your own power, privilege, and oppression affect your behavior and choices; noticing how the dynamics of power, privilege, and oppression are operating in your environment
Reflectiveness, introspection, and mindfulness
- Practicing intentional “dialogue with the self” (and perhaps beyond: with ancestors or spirits, if this is part of your understanding of the cosmos) to process events from the near and far past, develop insights, practice compassion, interpret your reactions, define your values, align responses with your values, etc.
Attention, attunement, and deep listening
- Working consciously to “tune in” and attend to your environment; working consciously to (re)build your capacity for focus without distraction or self-centering; practicing receiving new ideas, difficult truths, upsetting realities, other people’s pain, etc, without being crushed
Responsiveness, adaptability, and transformation
- Allowing yourself (actively seeking) to be changed; seeking and enacting ways to contribute meaningfully to your environment and respond to the needs you see in it; adapting your behavior and thinking in response to what you learn and what is needed for better collaboration and coexistence
Overall, dialogic engagement stresses relationality, intentionality, curiosity, and humility as the underlying core values. (No, it is not coincidental that these align with the Paideia core values for dialogue!)
My thinking here is informed by a strong lineage of dialogue workers and thinkers, including but not limited to:
- Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
- bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress
- Libby Roderick and Ilarion Merculieff, Stop Talking
- adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy (in turn heavily influenced by Octavia Butler’s Parable series)
- Thich Nhat Hanh, The Art of Communicating
- Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
- The Difficult Dialogues National Resource Center (DDNRC) community of practice
And you’ll notice, too, that there is significant concordance between the qualities of dialogue as ethos and the qualities of dialogue as discursive genre listed previously (connection, listening, collaboration, whole-person, reflection, transformation). That is not an accident either – dialogue as ethos is not a fundamentally different concept than dialogue as activity or genre. It is also not the case that dialogue-as-ethos is an exclusively theoretical concept, whereas dialogue-as-genre refers to dialogue in practice. They both represent a praxis, a confluence of theory and action.
Morever, dialogue-as-genre and dialogue-as-mode exist in important (inter)relationship with each other. The practice of dialogue as a formal(ized) activity is one way to live out the dialogic ethos, among many others. (Thank you to Ian MacMullen for contributing this thought!) Many people engage in dialogue because they are already oriented towards dialogic engagement – like our Paideia Fellows, who apply to our program with the hope of both participating in and leading dialogues because they already tend towards a dialogic mode of interacting with the world. But by the same token, participating in the activity of dialogue can be the catalyst for developing or deepening a dialogic ethos that didn’t perhaps exist before – as is often the case, I think, with students in my COMM 2510 class “Good Talk,” who regularly arrive with a narrow, literal understanding of dialogue as just a verbal back-and-forth and leave (after having participated in many structured dialogues) with an expanded sense of “dialogue” as an ethos, a way to be in relationship with the world across many different contexts.
What, then, are the meaningful differences in thinking about dialogue as an ethos or mode of engagement? Why is it helpful to think about dialogic engagement (and not just engaging in dialogue)?
Again, help me out here, but here are some of the answers:
Engaging in dialogue is an activity that requires at least two parties, a sense of purpose (though that purpose may be emergent rather than predetermined), and (usually) some form of explicit structure: norms, a format, a timeframe, etc. It benefits from a skilled facilitator or guide, or some amount of dedicated skillbuilding on the part of the participants.
Dialogic engagement is a mode that can be brought to any number of activities, including ones that are not considered “dialogue activities.” It is its own purpose: to remain in active, participatory, aware relationship with oneself, one’s environment, and the diverse wealth of objects and beings (cultural and natural) within one’s environment. It also benefits from dedicated skillbuilding and practice, but doesn’t require a facilitator or a moderating force, though guidance and teaching are helpful, as is always the case when one is building new skills. It also doesn’t require that someone else opt in and agree to the same rules of engagement: you can engage dialogically whether anyone around you is choosing to do likewise or not.
Dialogic engagement, or dialogue as a way of being and doing, allows for dialogic thinking and dialogic practices to be woven into other genres of communication. In this way, you can practice a more dialogic version of debate, in which the structure of thesis-driven argumentation holds, but the purpose is reoriented away from winning the argument and towards perspective taking to understand the viewpoints of various stakeholders in a holistic, embodied way. (Libby Roderick taught me about this years ago.) You can practice a more dialogic version of discussion, in which the goal is still consensus and singular shared understanding (everyone needs to understand the same thing about the topic or text), but there are more collaborative structures built in to get there. You can practice a more dialogic version of lecture or presentation, in which the basic format of a single person or small group of people holding forth to a larger audience is retained, but interactive or reflective elements are included. Thus you might more effectively practice debate, or discussion, or a lecture by bringing a dialogic ethos to it, without converting it wholesale into “a dialogue” – which is not always the best genre of discourse for all goals.
A pre-law student in my most recent (spring 2026) Good Talk class reflected in her final essay about how what she had learned about dialogue might apply in her future career: “Law is often framed as adversarial, as a high form of debate, but I think the lawyers who actually change things are the ones who know how to listen.”
Another student from that class who is going into public policy wrote: “Policy work needs more than knowing the facts. It requires being able to communicate with different audiences, hear people’s lived experiences, and explain why an issue matters. In this context, dialogue becomes a persuasive tool that should be used with caution as it can easily be manipulative.”
Both of these students are thus thinking carefully about how they can bring a dialogic ethos to fields where the genre of communication is more often argumentative and persuasive. The pre-law student considers listening, humility, and mutuality; the public policy student expresses awareness of power and brings in dialogic skills like listening, adaptability, and responsiveness. Even students who are not sure of their professional pathway are already thinking about how to engage dialogically: a third student wrote, “In friendships, in family, even in whatever professional life I end up in, I want to be someone who doesn’t just talk at people but someone who deliberately creates space for something real and human to happen.”
The work that these students do in each of these fields (including the one yet to be determined!) will be more human-centered, more relational, more respectful, and more mindful as a result of bringing a dialogic ethos to non-dialogue based work. And, as the third student emphasizes, it takes more than just an intention: there are real skills and concrete practices one can and must learn and apply – space that must deliberately be created – to actually live out a dialogic ethos.
We can also bring a dialogic ethos to our academic work in any discipline. My own discipline is Comparative Literature, and in addition to dialogue, my teaching centers on guiding people to learn how to read and analyze texts (broadly defined to include film, music, and visual art as well as literature, plus theory from a range of disciplines) more deeply, more critically, and more meaningfully. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my pedagogical obsession these days is elaborating a theory and practice of what I call dialogic reading. Dialogic reading is a way to bring a dialogic ethos to the study of texts, and it is based around the idea of building a relationship with the text: considering and enacting reading as a listening practice, as a dialogue. It comprises a host of practices and skills that are teachable and learnable, which I will share about in detail in a future DiaLogic post.
Here is where I really need your help: What would it look like to engage dialogically in your chosen discipline? What does dialogue-as-ethos look like in STEM fields? In healthcare? In the social sciences? In business? And what is the (experienced or imagined) benefit of bringing a dialogic ethos to your study and practice of this field?
There is so much more to be thought about and written about, but as a final note, of course: the concept of dialogic engagement also allows for dialogic thinking and dialogic practices to be woven into activities and pursuits that are not (traditionally understood to be) communications-based at all, as well as personal relationships and interactions with the more-than-human world. Of course, for many people, they already are: whether we are aware of it or not, whether we intend to or not, whether we want to be or not, every cell and neuron and nerve and microorganism in our bodies is in constant dialogue with other cells and neurons and nerves and microorganisms: receiving stimuli, processing feedback, transmitting messages, working together. (For a brilliant and beautiful explanation of dialogue in this sense, see Allison Leigh Holt’s 14-minute short film “Stitching the Future with Clues.”) But I’m thinking about a dialogic ethos as a conscious orientation, an applied mode that, hopefully, becomes “second nature” over time. Maybe, as Allison’s work also suggests, part of that ethos is becoming more aware of and learning from our “first nature”: how our bodies (including our brains) are already engaged in dialogue, as well as how other animals and organisms are engaged in dialogue or dialogically engaged. (Robin Wall Kimmerer’s work is helpful here, as she talks about talking to and listening to plants, water, stone…so is Peter Wolleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees and Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals.)
What do we get from dialogic engagement? What’s the point of it?
This, too, is a question I will leave open for further exploration (as I said before: it’s its own purpose). But I invite you to try it and see for yourself, starting small, by shifting some aspect of your daily habits or usual practices, and noticing the effect. Even this noticing, this consciousness, would be a way to engage more dialogically.
And I will leave you with one person’s answer to this question (another spring 2026 Good Talk student), which inspires me to keep engaging dialogically and to keep engaging in dialogue:
“I have learned that dialogue exists in everything, and that by doing everything with care, it is possible to find meaning in all of the different kinds of dialogues that I encounter. In parallel, I have learned that love exists everywhere, and that by being in mindful dialogue with the world and myself, it is possible to acknowledge and be grateful for love in its range of forms.”
Acknowledgments
These thoughts emerge (unsurprisingly) from and are enriched by conversations with many different colleagues who are engaged in dialogue and dialogically engaged. Thank you to all the participants in the March 23, 2026 DDNRC community of practice led by Sam Anderson. At Penn, thank you to our Paideia Fellows, to my Good Talk students, and to colleagues Clay Colmon, Lia Howard, Ian MacMullen, and Brighid Dwyer. All of these people raised good questions and shared smart insights that helped me think through these ideas.
Dr. Sarah Ropp is Dialogue Director of the SNF Paideia Program.
This entry is part of DiaLogic: Thinking Through Big Questions for Dialogue, a monthly series in which SNF Paideia Dialogue Director Dr. Sarah Ropp and guest contributors from the SNF Paideia community explore key questions and share ideas, experiences, resources, and practices related to diverse dialogue topics. We invite you to respond with your own thoughts and ideas in the comments. If you’re interested in contributing an essay or if this post sparks any ideas about collaborating to create more dialogue at Penn and beyond, please reach out directly to Sarah Ropp at sropp@upenn.edu. For more DiaLogic posts, visit this page here.
