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September 11, 2009
Dear faculty and staff,
I am writing to invite you to participate in an important
and exciting Five College initiative. Earlier this summer, the Five College Training
and Development Collaborative, in conjunction with the Five College
diversity directors and human resources directors, trained 12
employees from each of our campuses as intergroup dialogue facilitators.
These members of our community are now eager to work with you as
participants in the Day of Dialogue which will be held at varying times
on each of our five campuses on Tuesday, October 27.
The Day of Dialogue is intended
to be a starting point for continuing
conversations about important issues on our campuses. As we work to
diversify our community, it is imperative that we create and sustain
campus environments that are welcoming and free of bias and
discriminatory attitudes and practices. One proven way of developing
more open and diverse campuses is to provide intentional opportunities
for dialogue.
Intergroup dialogues bring members of different groups
together in new
and meaningful ways. Participants listen to different perspectives and
views, find places of agreement, allow for and start to understand
differences, and discover common and collective meaning. Dialogues aim
to build relationships and foster learning from different perspectives.
As an educational institution, we feel this learning process is
essential to our continued growth and success.
All the presidents at the five colleges
support this initiative and
this Day of Dialogue, and I want to encourage you to attend one of the
six sessions we will host on our campus on October 27. Our hope is that
these sessions will help all of us become more effective at talking
about difficult issues and finding common ground in building more
successful campus communities.
There will be follow-up announcements on eDigest describing
scheduling
and further thematic details for these dialogues. Based on the results
of these dialogues we will be able to design ways to follow up and to
continue this effort. I urge you to participate in this important
initiative and join our community in dialogue.
Sincerely,
Carol T. Christ
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