Agreements for Courageous Conversations and Active Learning
Stay engaged.
- Remain morally, emotionally, intellectually, and socially involved in dialogue.
- Stay present: guard against the learned tendency to disengage.
- Collectively make the commitment to embrace the conversation/dialogue.
Experience discomfort.
- Deal openly and honestly with challenges: open up and examine your own core racial beliefs, values, perceptions, and behaviors.
- Engage in the dialogue authentically: be personally responsible for pushing yourself into real dialogue.
- Recognize that discomfort often leads to real growth.
Speak your truth.
- Be willing to take risks
- Share honest thoughts, feelings, and opinions.
- We are experts in defining our own experiences and personal realities.
Expect and accept non-closure.
- Solution may be revealed in the process of dialogue itself: There is no "quick fix."
- Dialogue triggers a moral, intellectual, social, and emotional shift that allows for opportunities.
- The more one talks, the more one learns; the more one learns, the more appropriate and promising your actions and interventions.
Maintain confidentiality.
- Honor privacy by avoiding "who said what."
- Uphold discretion.
Listen with the intent to learn.
- Listening is a skill.
- Be present: attend to the conversation.
- Listening with an openness to learning: reciprocity of sharing creates an opportunity to learn from others.
Suspend judgment.
