Abstract

This article presents insights from a two-year educational innovation project (August 2023–July 2025) conducted in the Education and Pedagogy programmes at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. The project focused on creating dialogic spaces for engaging with sensitive and controversial topics and was developed in response to a growing demand for opportunities that enable meaningful dialogue between students and lecturers on contentious social and political issues in higher education.

Drawing on project-based data, our analysis pursues three interconnected aims. First, we offer a reflective analysis of the dialogue project to contribute to practical knowledge about the design and implementation of such interventions in universities internationally. Second, we situate both the project and our reflections within the historical, current, and anticipated socio-institutional context of European higher education, particularly its ongoing struggle to engage productively with diversity and controversy. In doing so, we reflect on the broader need for dialogical initiatives in universities across different contexts. Third, informed by a cultural-historical activity theory perspective on learning, we use these analyses to critically examine underlying assumptions about the purposes of learning and education in universities, with particular attention to how diversity and controversy are currently managed. In this discussion, we engage with competing expectations and assumptions concerning academic freedom, divergent political values, ideological positions, and the responsibilities of higher education institutions in responding to these dynamics.

Dialogue initiatives at universities 

In recent years, we are observing that universities are confronting wider social polarization, in which complex and often painful issues, such as the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, climate change, or “woke” culture, make their way into academic life. We see lecturers and students expressing their views on specific conflicts in different ways. These can range from staying silent to sharing one’s own opinion and emotions during a lecture, to demonstrating, or even occupying university buildings. Parallel to these developments, at many universities, both in the Netherlands and internationally, there has been increased attention to the question of how lecturers and students can engage in a meaningful conversation about sensitive issues (Shaffer and Longo, 2023).

Although dialogue trainings in which students learn how to conduct dialogue on sensitive topics with people who hold a different position or come from a different background are not a new phenomenon in higher education, the recent politicized context asks for a rethinking of such interventions.

Politicization of Higher Education

Recent political tensions have heightened the relevance of such interventions for universities in Europe and beyond. Despite the fact that many universities have developed support provisions for lecturers, and in some cases for students, to facilitate conversations on so-called “hot topics,” there remains limited scholarly attention to the analysis of these initiatives, particularly with regard to the nature of the increased demand for them and the characteristics of the interventions themselves. This lack of analysis may, on the one hand, be related to the ways in which topics concerning social justice, diversity, and inclusion are subject to censorship or de-prioritization (Garces et al. 2025; Darian-Smith 2025), while, on the other hand, equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) policies, including those related to dialogic pedagogies, may be adopted by university management as a result of external policy pressures and accountability regimes without substantial ownership or involvement from university staff and students (Cho et al. 2024; Walker 2025).

Methods Background and project description In the academic year 2022–2023, both our master’s and bachelor’s programs in Pedagogical Sciences encountered several instances in which students critically evaluated teaching content. These often concerned examples used in lectures on inclusion and the representation of diverse perspectives and student populations. We addressed these situations through individual teacher–student conversations and group sessions involving students and teachers. Nevertheless, both the teaching team and a group of master’s students expressed a need for clearer guidelines for handling such confrontational situations in teaching. Following an initial student-led initiative to explore dialogue between teachers and students and to articulate shared guiding values, the idea for an educational innovation project emerged. The project aimed to develop a “living code of conduct” consisting of principles, core values, attitudes, and speech rules to support teachers and students in addressing sensitive issues in our programs. The term “living” highlights the dynamic and situational nature of these rules, allowing them to evolve over time. After each event, written participant feedback was collected and discussed in project team meetings to refine the code. Research questions and analytical approach In this paper, we address the following research questions: • What does this dialogue project reveal about the learning processes involved in the design and implementation of dialogic initiatives in higher education? • How can the project’s design—and comparable initiatives globally—be understood within historical, institutional, national, and global contexts, particularly in relation to the political dimensions of diversity and inclusion, societal conflict, and academic freedom? • Building on these analyses, how do universities learn collectively as organizations when responding to such challenges, and how are these collective learning processes envisioned, enabled, or constrained? Methodologically, our analytical approach integrates a case-study approach (Stake 1995) with critical incident analysis (Halquist and Musanti 2010). Our data consist of meeting reports, project minutes, teachers’ and students’ written evaluative reflections on the living code after dialogue sessions, as well as descriptions of incidents gathered over a two-year period. To analyze our collective experiences, we apply a cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) perspective alongside work on societal polarization and its impact on academia. While CHAT provides a lens for understanding these experiences as collective, transformative learning processes in times of rapid sociopolitical change (Adams-Wiggins, 2024), Morin and colleagues (1999) notion of “poly-crisis” informs our analysis of how such crises affect academic communities.

Findings and conclusion The findings illustrate how dialogical spaces, such as the ones constructed by our educational innovation project, enable the reflection on and reconsideration of teaching practices, student engagement and critical thinking, next to the limitations and boundaries of such spaces in terms of power relationships, emotional labor, and institutional expectations. For instance, we found that “hot” cases, tied to ongoing conflicts, are emotionally charged yet highly instructive, whereas “cold” cases provide reflective practice. Persistent dilemmas involve power asymmetries, minority–majority relations, and the tension between spontaneity and institutionalization. Nevertheless, the project illustrates that openness, flexibility, and bottom-up rule-setting foster ownership and engagement, which allow us to pose that this kind of open, bottom-up initiatives contribute to re-imagining universities as communities where friction and disagreement are not suppressed, but cultivated as productive elements of academic life (Parra et al., 2021). In our analytical reflections, we problematize the managerial approach to controversial topics in university settings and underscore the intertwined nature of academic freedom, discomfort and disagreement, particularly so in the social sciences. The paper finally presents a reflection on the boundary between teaching in the social sciences and the assumed political neutrality of higher education, while also offering perspectives that can address such tensions from CHAT scholarship, such as polyphony, multivoicedness, collective agency (Adams-Wiggins, 2024), or redistribution of authorship (Gutierrez et al. 2019). In conclusion, the implications of these are offered for educational developers and policymakers in higher education seeking to support teachers in addressing controversial topics in their teaching.

References: Adams-Wiggins, K., Bal, A., Choudry, S., Cortez, A., Ferholt, B., Guarrasi, I., … Welsh Mahmood, M. (2024). Regenerating CHAT through learners’ voices and collectivism. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 31(2), 83–84. Brar, M. D., Morales-Chicas, J., Morris, S., Rivera, I., & Cannara, R. (2025). Intergroup dialogue empowering action for transforming equity in higher education. Education Sciences, 15(1), 38. Cho, K. S., Davis, C. H., III, & Morgan, D. L. (2024). What’s under attack: Activism and institutional conflict within US higher education. Education, Citizenship and Social Justice. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/17461979241291009 Darian-Smith, E. (2025). Knowledge production at a crossroads: Rising antidemocracy and diminishing academic freedom. Studies in Higher Education, 50(3), 600–614. Garces, L. M., Pedota, J., & Epstein, E. (2025). A call to build coalitions to disrupt a climate of suppression. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 57(2), 4–10. Gutiérrez, K. D., Becker, B., Espinoza, M., Cortes, K., Cortez, A., Lizárraga, J. R., Rivero, E., & Yin, P. (2019). Youth as historical actors in the production of possible futures. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 26(4), 1–18. Kris D. Gutiérrez & A. Susan Jurow (2016): Social Design Experiments: Toward Equity by Design, Journal of the Learning Sciences, DOI: 10.1080/10508406.2016.1204548 Halquist, D., & Musanti, S. I. (2010). Critical incidents and reflection: Turning points that challenge the researcher and create opportunities for knowing. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 23(4), 449-461. Lester, J. (2023). Supporting intragroup and intergroup dialogues: A model for collaborative campuses. In Contested issues in student affairs (pp. 75–81). Routledge. Parra, S. L., Bakker, C., & van Liere, L. (2021). Practicing democracy in the playground: Turning political conflict into educational friction. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 53(1), 32-46 Morin, E., Kern, A. B., Kelly, S. M., & LaPointe, R. (1999). Homeland earth: A manifesto for the new millenium. Nagda, B. R. A., Gurin, P., & Lopez, G. E. (2003). Transformative pedagogy for democracy and social justice. Race, Ethnicity and Education, 6, 165–191. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613320308199 Shaffer, T. J., & Longo, N. V. (Eds.). (2023). Creating space for democracy: A primer on dialogue and deliberation in higher education. Taylor & Francis. Stake, R. (1995). The art of case study research. Sage. Walker, K. S. (2025). Managing campus dissent: An assessment of university responses to pro-Palestinian protests. Murray State Theses and Dissertations. [Doctoral dissertation] 391. https://digitalcommons.murraystate.edu/etd/391