Dialogue Reflection

Over the course of this semester in Honors Dialogue, I have strengthened my critical thinking skills, challenged my underlying assumptions and beliefs, and learned how to develop shared meaning through respectful inquiry in a group setting. When I initially signed up for this class, I did not understand the type of communication that is dialogue. I knew the premise of the class was that each week a classmate would come to class with a specific topic that we would be expected to think about, create our own statement or position on, and then use the class time to debate. I have learned, however, that dialogue is so much more! As Socrates used this type of conversation to search for the truth, we followed suit and used dialogue to understand …show more content…
On the first day of class this semester, we chose our short dialogue topic to be: “is it better to be moderate temperature than hot or cold.” I quickly jotted down my thoughts to this topic about how having a moderate temper better allows relationships to form, based on the assumption that we were using temperature as a metaphor. After hearing some classmates’ initial responses to the topic, however, I realized that I was the person on the wrong page. This made me realize how quickly I am to jump to conclusions and assume everyone is on the same wavelength as myself. Therefore, I was sure to ask a lot of clarifying questions throughout the semester to make sure that I understood exactly what was being asked and to make sure the class had a shared meaning of the topic at hand. Something else that changed in myself and my thought process as the semester went on is the way I synthesized my position on each topic during our brainstorming time to include some underlying assumptions, values, and beliefs that I could quickly find. This type of self-inquiry helped my critical thinking skills and really prepared me to be a first advocate or an inquirer. I would also try to think about exceptions during our moments of process writing so that I could create the best position to start with and help prepare for the discussion …show more content…
Suleman, however, reminded me that there is another major way of interpreting this underlying assumption, as he brought up the fact that many Christians believe that one will be sent to Hell for suicide no matter what his or her reasoning was. Of course this didn’t cause me to drop the religious belief system I possess; it did, however, make me aware of the many different interpretations that can be produced from similar