Association awareness: Pedagogically reframing difficult dialogues

Most post-secondary institutions implement diversity initiatives to create safe, welcoming, and inclusive environments for all campus constituents. Faculty can proactively encourage dialogue by intentionally facilitating workshops where students have courageous conversations on challenging topics such as prejudice, discrimination, biases, and microaggressions. These difficult topics, conscious or unconscious, have historically plagued society and are displayed on college campuses. Allowing faculty to facilitate these necessary discussions benefits the campus twofold: Students are able to view faculty as social justice resources and the institutions are able to leverage resources by utilizing existing personnel, ultimately increasing diversity sustainability efforts. Association Awareness was a faculty led workshop to explore a student’s implicit biases. The workshop was designed to uncover student biases in hopes of proactively changing their perspectives and advancing cultural awareness. Campus faculty from different demographic backgrounds and academic disciplines facilitated the two-part workshop. During the workshop, participants engaged in a brief implicit bias introduction, took the Implicit Association Test (IAT), and lastly discussed their results with peers. Through self-reflection and guided dialogue, participants could challenge assumptions about bias. In this essay, the authors will: (1) explain the challenge of facilitating difficult dialogue and (2) share an innovative pedagogical model employed to have courageous conversations on implicit bias.