Tag: GAP

As part of its “Can We Talk?” programming, the Pennsylvania Project for Civic Engagement brought Philadelphia residents from various age groups, careers, and political beliefs together Saturday to discuss how to have civil dialogue with people they might disagree with. The Penn Project has been hosting structured civic-dialogue workshops since 1995. That prompted discussion of how to create a conversation in which students could talk about politics from different viewpoints in a way that was constructive and productive. “The people that come are obviously a self-selected audience, and they are hungry for constructive political conversation,” said Sokoloff, who is also a Penn professor. “We also structure the conversations to start with personal story and then go in more deeply,” Sokoloff said. But in her response, she hoped to understand where the driver was coming from, so she asked what it meant to him to contribute to humanity. “I would be interested in asking questions like, ‘What do guns mean to you?’ ” Muniz said. “‘What value or what is important to you about having a gun?’ To kind of clarify the stance, the personal level, without inserting my own judgment on it.” Sokoloff pushed the table to go deeper into Muniz’s questioning: How would you ask someone who feels connected to guns about whether there should be limits or controls on gun ownership? “Things like that, to get them thinking beyond themselves, because I think when people think within their immediate families, it’s really easy to find security there.” Steven Scott Bradley, who runs a commercial-insurance brokerage in Philadelphia, said the range of age groups — from recent college graduates to retired individuals — helped bring a wide array of perspectives to his table. What are questions we can ask?

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