Explore Dialogue Across Differences 

The 2025–26 academic year brought a new initiative to the Harvard Graduate School of Education: Dialogue Across Differences (DxD), which aims to equip the HGSE community with the skills, mindsets, and opportunities to engage constructively across differences in perspective, identity, and lived experience.

Utilizing the 4Es (Equip, Engage, Embed, Expand) strategy, DxD is designed to build an inclusive culture along with the skills to hold disagreement in ways that are intellectually rigorous. The initiative holds trainings, supports student-led projects, and leads community programming, all with an emphasis on building dialogue skills and creating space for respectful and productive conversation.

“[DxD events] are effectively practice spaces wherein people can learn how to engage across differences, and they have been received very well with the students,” says Pratyush Rawal, Dialogue Across Differences lead.

Dialogue Circles, launched during the spring semester, saw small groups of students gather in a safe setting to discuss topics such as school choice, parental rights vs. educator judgment, and other sometimes-controversial topics in education.

Further, longstanding HGSE events were enhanced with added opportunities for conversation. DxD Debriefs, for example, take place after Askwith Education Forum discussions These gatherings of about a dozen HGSE students allow conversation to continue beyond Askwith Hall in a more intimate setting that encourages nuanced, candid, and personal reflections on the Askwith dialogue. The Dialogue Across Differences team creates conversation guides that are shared with participants beforehand, helping establish expectations ahead of DxD events and preparing students with useful language that encourages constructive dialogue.

Rawal says the feedback for Dialogue Circles and DxD Debriefs has been overwhelmingly positive.

“Everyone has been pleasantly surprised about the kind of events and the spaces that were generated. Most of the feedback has been ‘We need more spaces’ and ‘Create more such events,’” says Rawal. “That’s the data that gives me a lot of joy.”

Another effort to encourage open inquiry and respectful dialogue across HGSE included adopting schoolwide the Chatham House Rule, which states that you are free to use information from a discussion, but you are not allowed to reveal who provided the information.

As the DXD Initiative expands programming, Rawal says the team hopes those positive experiences spread the word among the HGSE community.

“How do we create champions out of the people who are already participants in these dialogues? How do we encourage them to encourage other people to join these discussions?” says Rawal. “It’s something that I’m constantly sitting with.”

HGSE’s annual Double Take, which this semester celebrated its 10th year, invited community members to share stories about the moments and experiences that have shaped how they see the world and our work in education. And HGSE’s longstanding 3D Dinners continued under the DxD umbrella, inviting Ed School faculty and students to share meals together while engaging in important conversations.

“The 3D Dinners, which stands for Dinners, Dilemmas, and Debates, often framed with a case study, modelled disagreement, or other discussion point, help bring topics difficult to discuss in the classroom to a more informal but still intentional dialogue,” says Rawal.

“I appreciated how participants were encouraged to consider questions on both a personal and systemic level,” says Ph.D. student Caitlin Dermody, who participated in a 3D Dinner this semester about the challenges and opportunities of holding difficult conversations. “At the dinners, we co-created a supportive and open environment that demonstrated how these conversations are both possible and necessary for expanding care and curiosity in our world.”

These are important skills for students to develop, says Senior Lecturer Richard Weissbourd.

"We live in a polarized country where people are too quick to demonize others and to retreat into their own corners,” he says. “We need to be able to do the sometimes-tough work of really listening to and caring for each other when it's hard.”

Weissbourd, who directs the Making Caring Common Project at HGSE, hosted a 3D dinner this semester along with Dean Nonie Lesaux. He noted the initiative reflects the school’s mission.

“We need to have these conversations while holding up basic human rights and principles of justice. A school of education is a great place to model how to do that,” he says. “The wonderful students in our 3D Dinners demonstrated beautifully what this looks like in practice."

Rawal notes that as the initiative continues, DxD plans to collect best practices and other resources so other groups can replicate the work — at HGSE and beyond.

“To expand this, it’s all about doing more research, creating a repository of best practices, and then sharing it with the world,” he says. “We’re the Harvard Graduate School of Education. We should not just be doing it for our students but also telling the world the best ways that this can be done.”