Dorm buildings are places where students cultivate lifelong friendships and take important steps towards living independently from their families. But these experiences in shared living often come with significant challenges, many of which raise genuinely difficult philosophical questions: If you’ve shared your food with your roommate at the beginning of the year, and you’ve watched, without complaining, a gradual escalation to a point where your roommate is now regularly eating your food without asking, have you been wronged? If you suspect that your roommate is agreeing to let you have your partner over merely because they’re too afraid of conflict to risk an argument with you, is it okay for you to go ahead with it? And where, precisely, is the line between an annoying personality quirk that should be tolerated and an inappropriate behavior that you should confront your roommate about?

Over the past two semesters, CEHV has been helping undergraduate students who live in dorms explore these questions and more through our Dorm Dialogues series: a bi-weekly meeting facilitated by Associate Director Aaron Yarmel, Graduate Research Associate Jamie Herman, and Student Curriculum Development Assistant Zoe Lightcap. These meetings begin with an invitation to students to share recent stories from their lives about the situations they are currently navigating, after which everyone works together to find a question that is central to these stories. The next task is to use dialogue to make as much progress on this question as possible before turning to practical advice. In some cases, this takes the form of role-playing activities in which students help each other experiment with methods of initiating a conversation or resolving a conflict with a roommate. In other cases, CEHV facilitators offer advice or additional resources. 

Thanks to a fruitful collaboration with Rebecca Kapusta, Housing and Residence Education’s Assistant Director of Academic Initiative, Dorm Dialogues is growing and continues to improve. It has been gratifying to see students refer other students to attend the program, to hear stories of personal growth that students attribute to the advice they received, and to observe the emergence of a new way of life: a community of students who view dialogue as a powerful tool for understanding their experiences and finding real solutions for the problems that matter to them.