UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- World in Conversation, a Center for Public Diplomacy in Penn State's College of the Liberal Arts, will partner with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to sponsor trained Penn State undergraduate dialogue facilitators to lead groundbreaking virtual conversations between NATO military cadets and civilians in conflict zones, beginning with Afghanistan.Cadets from academies throughout the NATO alliance will have the unique opportunity to participate in peer-facilitated dialogue with their civilian counterparts from five different universities in Afghanistan through a recent grant to World in Conversation from NATO’s Science for Peace and Security Programme. "This is an unprecedented attempt to utilize technology to foster greater understanding between military personnel and civilians in conflict zones," said Laurie Mulvey, executive director of World in Conversation. "Our student facilitators will play a key role in making it possible for groups who will eventually come face-to-face in the most stressful of circumstances to meet informally and develop an understanding of one another first. Their work in creating these simple humanizing encounters could prevent unnecessary violence on the ground."The grant will provide more than $500,000 to be shared with research partners in Afghanistan in order to conduct scholarly research on the impact of these virtual dialogues. World in Conversation is the largest cross-cultural dialogue center based at a university in the United States. The center offers a unique approach to public diplomacy by offering facilitator training courses for undergraduates and peer-facilitated dialogues for university students that focus on issues of conflict using a version of the Socratic Method. These trained student facilitators bring their peers into dialogue -- face-to-face or via video technology -- as a way to explore and expand the perspectives of clashing groups and provide the opportunity for greater understanding between them.
Organizations as diverse as the United Nations Development Programme, NGOs in Pakistan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Haiti, the Qatar Foundation, the Afghan Ministry of Higher Education and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) are partnering with the Center. For more information, go to: www.worldinconversation.org