Meet the academics who want to teach the art of agreeing to disagree
Look left, look right and all you see is polarisation.
From war in the Middle East and Europe, to the widening wealth gap in the west, to arguments about immigration, racism, gender violence, vaccines, conspiracy theories, even what constitutes the truth … disagreement and a bellicose disregard for “others” is rife.
It’s this widening gap that a new Monash University project is stepping into.
Brave Conversations - a joint initiative between Monash’s Centre for Consciousness and Contemplative Studies (M3CS) and the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation (ACJC) - is the brainchild of the ACJC’s Dr Daniel Heller and Dr Farid Zaid from the Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health.
Its aim is to empower educators, students and the community to engage in meaningful and constructive conversations about the most pressing issues of our time and help address and reduce polarisation by sparking those conversations through innovative research and teaching.
As Daniel says: “Talking to people with whom you disagree can not only improve your life, but it can also be fun. Disagreement can be a source of innovation, of growth.’’
Farid chimes in: “The Brave Conversations Project is built on the premise that diversity, intellectual humility and open inquiry are not peripheral values — they are essential to a functioning university and to a healthy democratic society.’’
M3CS director, Professor Jakob Hohwy, says the project is a “wonderful idea” because the focus of the project isn’t the subject matter of controversial conversations but what it is to have a brave conversation in the first place.
“How can we come into those conversations with intellectual humility?” he asks.
“So it’s about waking up to ourselves, waking up to the world, waking up to each other, noticing each other more, engaging mindfully with each other, with an accepting attitude which doesn't mean accepting everyone's views, but accepting that they might have different views as well.’’
The project kicked off in November 2024 with a training programme for educators. The response was overwhelming. Registrations were filled within three hours with educators from every faculty across the university signing up.
The workshop empowers university staff to navigate and teach through classroom tensions fueled by global and community conflicts. In the anonymous feedback forms, the vast majority of respondents asked for longer training sessions.
“That’s surely a first for a university,” Daniel quips.
“We are delivering these workshops throughout 2025, including customised sessions tailored to each faculty's unique needs,” says Farid.
The next step is a pilot undergraduate workshop, "How to Have Brave Conversations," which will equip students with practical skills to facilitate difficult discussions on campus. A student leadership programme is also in the works.
Key initiatives include developing and sharing transformative tools to cultivate humility, curiosity, open-mindedness, deliberative thinking, and compassion — within and beyond the university and assessing best practices for embedding dialogue skills into university curricula to strengthen student engagement and critical thinking.
A pilot study involving more than 120 students is under way with results due in the second half of 2025. It’s hoped this will guide the future of dialogue-based education.
But what does that look like?
“So, we keep using the words ‘constructive disagreement’, ‘constructive dialogue’. But you might say, Wait, okay, what is that? What does that even mean?” Daniel says.
“Believe it or not, most researchers, and most practitioners who say that they do this work couldn't tell you what are the most important components of it. There's no agreement. So one of the first things we need to do is figure out what are the core factors that make disagreements happen in a poor way, and what can make them better? How do we create outcomes?
“Step 2 is figuring out what classroom strategies will work best, with which particular audiences, and in which particular classes. The ways that universities in the United States are responding to the crisis is to have mandatory one-hour online trainings for freshmen students. But is compulsion really the best approach here? Or might it be more effective to weave dialogue skills into the existing curriculum, gradually, over the course of a semester?”
“That’s just one example of the kind of question we want to wrestle with—and eventually answer through evidence-based practice—so we can begin to shift the culture, at scale.”
Farid jumps in: “That's the idea … how to navigate the empirical aspect of this field. It's our own toolkit. A lot of it's through iteration and experimentation.”
“We focus on managing emotions. On cultivating intellectual humility. On recognising the cognitive biases that distort how we see the world. And we feel it, every time we stand in front of students. Just saying these things out loud—none of them new—can still land with surprising force.
"We start to see it—we’re all biased. And we fall short all the time: in our friendships, our relationships, with our students, with our colleagues. But naming these psychological patterns out loud, sharing them with students and peers, helps build something rare in the classroom: a community of understanding.''
Daniel, who trained as a historian at Stanford University, says his fascination with constructive dialogue and disagreement probably took hold because of his grandmother, a Holocaust survivor. “Of her family of ten, she was the only one to survive,” he says.
“My grandmother taught me three things. The first was about the terrifying capacity humans have to harm each other.
“Despite all she endured, she believed in the sanctity of human life, that every single person carries within them the potential for good. This was her second lesson: have faith in humanity. It wasn’t just about being kind to those who looked or thought like you. She believed in reaching beyond—toward the ‘Other’. That was the harder task, but it was essential.
“And then, she taught me about hope. Not as a feeling, but as something you practice, something you work at.’’
Farid is motivated by what he sees as a shift in how universities operate.
“For as long as I can remember, I romanticised academic life. As an adolescent, inspired by ancient Greek philosophers like Zeno of Citium and Socrates, I innocently imagined a university as a kind of modern-day agora—a place where intelligent, kind, and opinionated minds gather to argue, challenge, provoke, and explore the most urgent questions of the human condition,’’ he says.
“What once felt like a melting pot of ideas and open inquiry has begun to feel like a battleground of ideological orthodoxy. As the ideological temperature rose — in academia as well as broader society — the margins for dissent grew narrower. Positions hardened. Words became landmines. And too many of us — myself included — began to look over our shoulders before speaking freely.
“I’m saddened to see how much self-censorship is going on. So I'm just extending an opportunity to my students, to my colleagues and friends. ‘Hey? Let's give each other the benefit of the doubt. Let’s give each other the leeway to make mistakes. But let's talk. Say what's on your mind. Say that silly thought that you have and I'll share mine, and then together, through constructive disagreement, we can come to a better understanding and both benefit.”
“That's the goal. Let's speak. Let's stress-test each other’s ideas. Let's argue and then grab a beer later. That's my ambition. That's my dream.’’