Embracing Dissensus: Facilitating Meaningful Disagreement in Educational Spaces
Embracing Dissensus helps schools and organizations build the capacity to engage in meaningful dialogue, navigate conflict productively, and stay in relationship across difference. This workshop supports educators and leaders in developing the mindsets, skills, and structures needed to move beyond avoidance or polarization and toward thoughtful, courageous conversation.
Ideal for communities seeking to strengthen trust, deepen collaboration, and create cultures where complexity, multiple perspectives, and honest dialogue are welcomed as essential to learning and growth.
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TIME
1 or 2-day sessions, or 3 session series over several weeks/months (virtual or in-person)
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GROUP SIZE
This program is designed for anyone who is looking to cultivate healthy disagreement on their teams, in their department, or in their workspaces.
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FORMAT
Available both in-person, virtually, and hybrid as well.
About Embracing Dissensus: Facilitating Meaningful Disagreement in Educational Spaces
This one-day workshop explores how productive dissensus—the generative tension that emerges when different perspectives collide—can transform K-13 classrooms and institutions.
Drawing from Jacques Rancière's theory of intellectual emancipation and bell hooks' engaged pedagogy, participants will discover how embracing disagreement creates intellectually vibrant learning environments where dissensus functions as the engine of genuine learning rather than an obstacle to overcome.
The morning session immerses participants in the student experience through exploratory exercises and structured dialogues that challenge traditional classroom hierarchies.
In the afternoon, colleagues analyse these experiences and develop practical applications for dissensus-based learning across disciplines and institutional roles, repositioning classrooms and schools as spaces where multiple voices and perspectives generate richer understanding and a more authentic community.
Intended outcomes:
✔︎ EXPERIENCE and UNDERSTAND dissensus firsthand
✔︎ CREATE classroom environments that value and manage multiple interpretations and approaches
✔︎ IMPLEMENT inclusive protocols to ensure all voices are heard
✔︎ FACILITATE productive disagreement and effectively de-escalate tensions
Sample Activities Include:
Identifying the commonalities within polarities
Practicing grounding techniques when experiencing dissonance
Exploring and dislodging certainty around beliefs
Co-creating practices to decenter hierarchies
Engaging in Socratic dialogue
Facilitating de-escalation practices
Designing a learning experience that invites dissensus
Included in this package
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Up to 2 hours of planning/logistics calls prior to the workshop.
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Workshop preparation time (~2-3 hours of prep per one hour of workshop time)
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A materials kit for each participant that includes reflective tools and practical guidance for coaches.
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Workshop presentation time that is flexible and adaptive
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The opportunity for follow-up to transfer and implement workshop practices
featured projectEnglish Schools Foundation in Hong Kong (SAR) China
Educators from across 22 schools in the Hong Kong region gathered for a daylong workshop focused on ways to embrace “dissensus”—the necessary and healthy tensions in spaces where people disagree—and ways to cultivate these conditions in schools.
Participants co-created agreements, explored beliefs outside their own, engaged in discussions, and developed a plan for supporting these skills at their school sites.
Group size: 20+
What ESF participants had to say:
featured projectThe Bay School of San Francisco, CA
As part 2 of a three-part yearlong series, staff and faculty gathered for their mid-year professional learning day to focus on ways to nurture adult culture and navigate healthy tension in the workplace. In this half-day session, participants learned how to navigate their own emotional complexities while also cultivating conditions to support adults in the community.
Group size: All staff at Bay School
What Bay participants had to say:
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