Have you ever had a conversation go terribly wrong? When communication breaks down, it can seem like everyone's talking, no one is listening, and no progress is being made. Being able to talk effectively among people with diverse views, experiences, and communication styles is essential to fostering strong communities.

Talking Community: The Dialogue Workbook was developed by NWREL's Rural Education Program to help community organizers, and others seeking to build active, involved communities, initiate dialogues in their own localities as a strategy for supporting community education. Author Dr. Diane Dorfman notes that dialogue is different from other kinds of talk. Dialogue can develop important ties and relationships by ensuring that everyone involved in an important issue has a chance to voice his or her opinions. While talking and listening, participants are learning important things about the issue, as well as about the people with whom they are talking. Because their minds are open to all sides of the dialogue, the dialogue informs them and connects them to each other.

Dialogue can be a means to a couple of common purposes, says the author.

"Dialogue can be goal-oriented, where, for example, individuals come together to think, discuss, and reflect on a specific topic or issue in order to make decisions about emerging choices," she says. "In other cases, dialogue may have no clearly defined goal. Participants may simply have gotten together to explore and discuss the purpose, say, of schooling or what it means to live well in a rural community. The focus on purpose or on living well has no intended result other than to gain individual and group knowledge and insight."

The author identifies types of dialogues that range across a continuum—inclusive, divergent, convergent, and critical—and stages that typical dialogues pass through, from initiation through instability and suspension, to collective exploration. The roles of the dialogue facilitator and of the participants are also explored. The author points to three essential rules for effective dialogues: participation, commitment, and reciprocity. Dialogues can fail when communications and relations cease to be cooperative and when participants fail to act with commitment.

Talking Community is the last of four workbooks in the series, Strengthening Community Education: The Basis for Sustainable Renewal, that evolved as part of the Laboratory's Rural Education Program's School-Community Development Project. The other workbooks address partnerships, community assets, and community resources. The workbooks are available online at www.nwrel.org/ruraled/index.html. To order, please turn to the Document Order Form.