Authors: Carlton E. Green & Jazmin P. Pichardo
Faculty are teaching in a moment when political violence, campus protests, and polarized public discourse regularly enter the classroom. Students and colleagues turn to faculty as trusted educators and mentors to help make sense of what has happened. What faculty do with that trust shapes both learning and democratic life.
After violence or controversy, the familiar public pattern is quick condemnation and blaming the other side. Social media and news commentary can become battlefields of dueling narratives that harden blame before they deepen understanding. If faculty hope to disrupt that cycle, condemnation alone is not enough; we need dialogical practices capable of holding conflict without reproducing it.
Intergroup dialogue scholarship suggests that durable change often begins within groups, not only between them. In this work, that practice can be named relating in: a disciplined way communities turn toward one another inside their own “in-groups” when fear, blame, and rupture arise. For faculty, relating in offers a concrete approach to navigating tension in the classroom without avoiding hard conversations.
Relating in happens when people compassionately turn toward one another within their own group to name strong emotions, painful narratives, and blaming speech before projecting outward. Consider a class that meets the morning after a widely publicized protest turns violent near campus. Several students share outrage and quickly frame the situation as “their side” being dangerous and irrational. A typical move might be to redirect the conversation to course content or to debate who is at fault. A relating-in move, by contrast, might sound like this:
“I hear a lot of anger and fear in how we’re talking about this. Before we talk about ‘them,’ can we check in about what’s coming up for us? What stories or experiences are shaping our reactions?”
That move invites students who feel politically aligned with one another to pause and examine what is happening among “us” before directing frustration at “them.” A faculty member might also ask students to write briefly on, “When have I felt blamed or misrepresented in public narratives about my group?” and then share in pairs. This exercise helps students surface their own experiences of othering and can soften the impulse to reduce others to one-dimensional versions of their worst acts.
Relating in helps classrooms process fear, anger, and grievance so those emotions do not harden into dehumanization. For educators, this is a pedagogical discipline: helping students metabolize conflict into reflection and informed action rather than performance and polarization.
Relating in also requires what might be called a progressive stance. Drawing on Janet Helms’ racial identity development theories, faculty can recognize that students do not enter difficult
moments with the same readiness for reflection or accountability. Productive in-group intervention often depends on those with greater critical consciousness bringing empathy, patience, and principled challenge in ways that support others’ growth rather than simply exposing their limitations.
Imagine a seminar in which some white students share discomfort about being “blamed” in discussions of racism, while students of color express frustration that the harm they name is minimized. A progressive stance might lead an instructor to say to the white students:
“It makes sense that feeling implicated brings up defensiveness and worry. At the same time, our responsibility in this space is to stay with the discomfort long enough to understand how the histories we’re studying show up in our lives now. Let’s notice where we feel defensive and ask what that might be protecting.”
This response offers emotional generosity while also naming the need for accountability. With students of color, the instructor might validate the burden of repeatedly naming harm and invite them to identify what support and solidarity from peers would look like.
A progressive stance does not assume everyone enters in good faith. When a student uses dehumanizing language or shares a meme that inflames grievance, relating in is not about accommodating that behavior. Instead, a faculty member might say:
“That meme relies on a stereotype that reduces people to caricatures. What makes that appealing to ‘our side’? What does it cost us, as a learning community, when we lean on dehumanizing images rather than more complex stories?”
That move challenges what hardens division while drawing the group toward greater reflection.
Experience with dialogue and classroom facilitation also suggests that in-group reflection can become performative. Faculty meetings, affinity groups, or politically aligned student organizations can unintentionally turn into echo chambers that convert fear into righteousness rather than responsibility. For example, a department debriefs a contentious campus event and quickly settles into a narrative: “Our students are under attack by intolerant outsiders.” There may be genuine concern, but little attention to how departmental policies or classroom practices might also contribute to tension. A relating-in move would be to ask: “Where might we be reinforcing polarization in how we talk about this with students?” or “What are we not yet examining about our own practices that could be part of the picture?”
Without accountability, perspective-taking, and examination of complicity, in-group dialogue can intensify polarization instead of interrupting it. That is why relating in must remain disciplined rather than self-congratulatory.
Several practices can help faculty take up this work. First, relate in before reacting. When blame-filled rhetoric or raw emotion emerges in class, pause before amplifying it. Ask what fear or injury is driving the moment, and invite students to name feelings before positions. Second, surface stories and values. Begin with reflective questions rather than immediate debate: What
experiences have shaped your views on justice, dignity, and fairness? Third, interrogate rhetoric within the group. Invite students to analyze headlines, memes, or talking points from “our side” and ask what language dehumanizes or escalates conflict. Finally, create norms of mutual accountability. Early in the term, faculty can co-create commitments about how the class will challenge harmful rhetoric, resist othering, and call one another back toward shared values when tensions rise.
These are not merely dialogical skills. They are democratic practices familiar to educators who use dialogue, facilitated reflection, and critical inquiry to help communities confront conflict without reproducing it. Calling out the other side is easy; calling in one’s own communities is harder. At a time when campuses are often portrayed as sites of fragility or battlegrounds in culture wars, faculty can model a different civic practice: disciplined self-examination within communities before denunciation across them. If democracy depends not only on argument but on capacities for self-examination across differences, then this work is not peripheral to higher education’s mission. It is central to it.