Student-faculty dialogue: meaningful perspective taking on campus

ABSTRACT

The student-faculty dialogue (SFD) program brings students and faculty members together for five monthly group meetings in one academic semester. Each month, students and faculty engage in meaningful conversations to share and learn about each other’s experiences on campus. Nine undergraduate students, two graduate students, and four faculty participated in this study. All participants completed a pretest before the first meeting and a posttest after the final meeting. I compared pretest and posttest results to understand participant experiences, including how their perspectives changed as a result of taking part in the five-month SFD program. I compared mean scores associated with participants’ responses to quantitative Likert scale questions about their current interpersonal communication skills. I also summarized qualitative question responses to understand how study participants’ perspectives changed as a result of engaging in dialogue together. This paper ends with implications, limitations, and recommended research directions.

KEYWORDS:

• Students
• faculty
• dialogue
• interpersonal
• communication

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Special issue statement

I submitted this manuscript for the Collaboration in Social Work with Groups: Implications for Clients, Practitioners, Administrators and Students special issue. This manuscript focuses on a dialogue group including undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty members. The working relationships between students and faculty, existing in the social environment of college campuses, represent an opportunity for collaboration and mutual aid between these two parties. This manuscript presents a dialogue program to support understanding and perspective taking within the context of the culture of academia and the institutional structure of higher education.