The Little Book of Police Youth Dialogue by Micah E. Johnson

Author:Micah E. Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781680997316
Publisher: Good Books
Published: 2021-02-02T16:00:00+00:00

Dialogue is an exchange based primarily in mutual respect and deep listening without judgment.

Dialogue Foundations of PYD

Three central dialogic formats serve as the foundation for many Police Youth Dialogue programs today. Relationships between police and marginalized youth are plagued with many of the same issues dealt with in these dialogues, and understanding these foundations can aid in the innovation of new approaches to achieving open and respectful communication.

Bohmian Dialogue

Surprisingly, one of the most prolific texts on dialogue was written by a physicist named David Bohm in the 1970s and 1980s. He argued that any chance for real communication breaks down when the compulsion to speak and defend oneself overtakes any willingness to listen. Instead of a volley between opposing thoughts, real dialogue entails a free-flowing group conversation in which participants experience everyone’s perspectives equally and without judgment, practice mutual compassion, and ultimately develop deeper connections and understanding. In Bohm’s words, “In a dialogue, however, nobody is trying to win . . . there is no attempt to gain points or make your particular view prevail. Rather, when any mistake is discovered on the part of anybody, everybody gains . . . a dialogue is something more of a common participation, in which we are not playing a game against each other but with each other. In a dialogue, everybody wins.”2

Bohmian dialogues provide a space in which thought processes, emotions, and intentions can be reflected and examined collectively and individually. Participants are invited to consider the patterns of preconceptions and prejudice that influence their opinions, thoughts, and actions, and also share these insights with others. While dialogues can happen on a range of scales, Bohmian dialogue involves a group of 20–40 people seated in a circle talking to each other. Other characteristics of Bohmian dialogues include a suspension of impulses and reactions, a duration of roughly two hours over multiple regular sessions, the presence of facilitators to aid the process of collective reflection, and subjects and topics that are meaningful to participants.

For Bohm, dialogues are a collective process in which new shared meaning is created. In a passage in his essay collection On Dialogue, he describes this process in the following manner: “When one person says something, the other person does not in general respond with exactly the same meaning as that seen by the first person. Rather, the meanings are only similar and not identical. Thus, when the second person replies, the first person sees a difference between what he meant to say and what the other person understood. On considering this difference, he may then be able to see something new, which is relevant both to his own views and to those of the other person. And so it can go back and forth, with the continual emergence of a new content that is common to both participants. Thus, in a dialogue, each person does not attempt to make common certain ideas or items of information that are already known to him. Rather, it may be said that the two people are making something in common, i.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.