Faculty promote talking toward understanding on international conflict

Learn more about Global Leadership, the School of Business and the Master of Arts in Higher Education Administration and Leadership at RRU.

In these often polarized times, people are abandoning the vitriol of X, reconsidering their involvement in Meta’s social networks, and even switching off the news to avoid being reminded of constant conflict.

But a group of Royal Roads University faculty have walked into the centre of one the planet’s most extreme conflicts — the war between Israel and Palestine — with the goal of determining whether there’s a space where people on different sides of the issue can gather, learn and maybe not yell at one another.

Wanda Krause, Robin Mueller, Amy Zidulka and Erin Dixon all participated in last fall’s International Leadership Association Global Conference, which was held in Chicago and began two days after November’s U.S. election.

At the conference, Krause, an associate professor and program head in Global Leadership, and Zidulka, an associate professor in the School of Business, hosted a roundtable called Holding Complexity and Multiple Truths: A Listening Circle for Israel and Palestine Leadership Development. Mueller, program head for the Master of Arts in Higher Education Administration and Leadership, gave a presentation on “structured controversy” to address polarization. As well, Krause and Dixon, who’s an associate faculty within RRU’s Global Leadership program, held a workshop called Indigenous and First People’s Leadership Returning to Checagou: A Call to Action and Living Framework for Planetary Health Leadership.

The listening circle was one of the key means and at the core of the circle was gathering leaders and allowing them to express their opinions without being shouted down.

“What our sense was going in was that this is such a heavily polarized topic that leaders, from educational leaders to organizational leaders, back away from it,” says Zidulka. 

“What we proposed was just a listening circle, where the goal is not to agree… but, as a first step, just to be able to hold that tension of listening to people with different perspectives on a very hot topic and go around in a circle. And when each person's turn to speak arises, you can respond and build on what people have said before but you're not arguing, you're not persuading, you're just sharing space and coexisting with people who have different perspectives.”

Adds Krause: “It’s just being able to be able to see how we might be digging our heels into a certain perspective or viewpoint, and allowing an opportunity, if we are willing, to come together around the table.”

Mueller also addressed polarization in her presentation about structured controversy, which she explains is “like a highly modified debate, where the purpose is not for people to win or lose an argument, but to uncover as many perspectives on a given controversial issue as possible.”

She adds: “I have seen I've witnessed extraordinary shifts in people's thinking and perspectives on controversial, polarizing issues occur in these spaces — even on issues that are extreme.”

Similarly, Dixon references, Etuaptmumk, or Two-eyed Seeing, a concept promoted by Mi'kmaq Nation Elder Albert Marshall that “refers to learning to see from one eye with the strengths of Indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing, and from the other eye with the strengths of Western knowledges and ways of knowing, and to use both of these eyes together for the benefit of all creation.”

The concept is often invoked around issues related to reconciliation and planetary health but it’s also about bringing forward the knowledge needed for future generations, she says, noting, “I don’t think there’s any other way forward.”

Indeed, Krause says Two-eyed Seeing is a way of bringing people together while Mueller says she came away from the Chicago conference and its sessions that addressed the Israel-Palestine conflict hopeful “because I could see a different way and I could see it unfolding in in front of me in real time.”

Mueller adds: “I really strongly feel that if we don't start these conversations, we're going to offload it onto our kids, and I absolutely, steadfastly refuse to do that. If we don't start now, we're just diverting the issue and compounding it and making it worse for someone else, or for a whole generation of people. And to me that's incredibly irresponsible.”

“I use any means possible to try to make the world a better place,” Krause says, “whether it's writing a paper, whether it's having conversations.”

Zidulka notes that this kind of work is essential for academics and for institutions such as Royal Roads.

“For the change-making university, what are we doing if we're not doing this?”

Learn more about Global Leadership, the School of Business and the Master of Arts in Higher Education Administration and Leadership at RRU.