About the Symposium:

This full-day event is dedicated to advancing dialogue as a powerful approach for connection, inclusion, and collective action. Grounded in the work of the Difficult Dialogues National Resource Center, this year's theme — "Dialogue as a Campus and Community Approach" — explores how institutions and community organizations can embed dialogic practices across curricular, co-curricular, and administrative spaces. 

What You'll Experience:

• Interactive sessions and hands-on workshops exploring facilitation, trauma-informed practices, and community connection. 

• Peer-led exchanges and an "Unconference" segment where participants co-create ideas and partnerships in real time. 

• A focus on tools for embedding dialogue into teaching, learning, engagement, and community collaboration. 

Who Should Attend:

Whether you are faculty integrating dialogue into your courses, staff facilitating community or campus engagement, a student leader leading coalition building, or a community partner working across neighborhoods and beyond — this symposium is for you. 

Want to Present? 

The committee invites proposals from students, staff, faculty, and community partners. We invite proposals that will:

• Build strategies for institutional leadership and resource alignment to sustain dialogue programs and initiatives. 

• Deepen facilitation and practitioner skills (with attention to trauma-informed practices & facilitator well-being). 

• Explore concrete tools and techniques for integrating dialogue into classrooms, curricula, departments and community engagement. 

• Co-create new directions for dialogue work that connects campuses and communities across the region. 

• Submit your proposal here: https: //umbc.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_b2fZiJ2jngIFWES

Registration & Next Steps:

• Student attendance is free; other categories have nominal fees as outlined on the CSJD website: https://csjdialogue.umbc.edu/the-dialogue-symposium-bringing-colleges-and-communities-together/

• Registration opens December 1, 2025. 

• Keep an eye out for the full program and registration link soon.

• For questions, contact Chloe Kastner (ml82770@umbc.edu).

Join us in shaping a day of thoughtful connection, courageous conversation, and collective reflection as we build toward a more dialogue-rich, inclusive campus and community culture.

We look forward to seeing you on January 29!

A SHARED STORY OF DISTANCE (2023)
by UMBC Student Giovanna Orfali (Visual Arts, '26)

"A hybrid short film that captures the connection between a Brazilian mother and daughter living nearly 5,000 miles apart. Blending real voice messages with intimate point-of-view visuals, the film gently explores love, memory, and the quiet ways we remain close across distance."

BRIEF TENDER LIGHT (2024)
by Arthur Musah and Brook Sitgraves Turner

"Ukrainian-born Ghanaian filmmaker Arthur Musah follows four African undergraduates through MIT, America's premier technological university and his alma mater. The students embark on their MIT education with individual ambitions –  to engineer infrastructure in Tanzania; to secure a better life for family in Nigeria; to contribute to post-genocide reconstruction in Rwanda; to advance democracy in Zimbabwe. Their missions are distinct, but fueled by a common goal: to become agents of positive change back home.

While their dreams are anchored in the societies they have left, their daily realities are defined by America – by the immediate challenges in their MIT classrooms, and by the larger social issues confronting the world beyond those classrooms. Their new environment demands they adapt. Over an intimate, decade-long journey spanning two continents, students and filmmaker alike are forced to decide how much of America to absorb, how much of Africa to hold on to, and how to reconcile teenage ideals with the truths they discover about the world and themselves."