6-7 March 2025
Dialogue Centre, Aberystwyth University
Harbouring Collaboration: A Retreat for COAST-R Network Researchers
Step away from your routine and journey to the coastal town of Aberystwyth to connect with yourself and the COAST-R Network. Hosted by the Aberystwyth University Dialogue Centre, this 1.5-day retreat is structured into three key parts. First, you’ll learn and practice essential dialogue skills while reflecting on your personal role in fostering effective community engagement. Next, we’ll delve into the real challenges of working in coastal areas, drawing on each other’s experiences for wisdom. An evening activity and meal will provide time for reflection before we reconvene the next morning to discuss how to apply our learnings to remove barriers and enhance our work. You’ll leave with new strategies, stronger connections, and valuable tools to elevate your projects.
The Dialogue Approach
Dialogue is an approach for hosting workshops and facilitating meetings. It emphasises recognizing each participant as an expert in their own right and creating conditions that help groups listen more effectively to one another. Workshops using dialogue focus on slowing individual thinking and breaking down complex topics into smaller, manageable parts that encourage exploration before focusing on outcomes. This approach helps groups improve their active listening, mutual respect, and ability to explore diverse perspectives together.
At its core, William Isaacs describes dialogue as the “art of thinking together.” And thinking together is best when it is supported by individual practice and facilitated processes.
Individuals need to practice skills that enable them to think collectively as part of a group: listening, curiosity, suspending judgment, asking questions, and demonstrating empathy.
As a facilitated process, a workshop host is responsible for creating the conditions for this kind of work, including curating a series of activities that shape the group’s journey.
To create the best journey possible, dialogue practitioners focuses on building relationships and creating spaces where participants learn side by side. Only after these foundational steps do workshop agendas shift toward evaluating options and making recommendations. By including these important early stages, dialogue seeks to transform both relationships and the range of options being considered. In well designed and practiced dialogues, participants often shift how they talk about their perspectives and the challenges at hand as the process unfolds, leading to more productive and meaningful discussions. Often new phrases or words emerge and become core to the discussion, people change their mind, and they take these new skills with them into the next challenge.
Timings: 9am-4pm 6th March; 9am-12.30pm 7th March. As we will use the full day on 6th March, please allow for travel to Aberystwyth on 5th March.
Location: Ty Trafod / Dialogue Centre, The Visualisation Centre, Penglais, Aberystwyth, SY23 3BF
Costs: Workshop catering and dinner on 6th March will be covered by the Coast-R Network. We have a limited number of travel bursaries available to support those for whom the costs of travel are a barrier to attendance.
Intended audience: Investigators on the ReCCS Programme projects. If space allows, additional places will be opened up to Network members and other interested parties.
Bookings: Please email coastr@hull.ac.uk if you are interested in attending.
