In a conversation recorded in early August 2025, Dr. Angie Chung of the University at Albany and Dr Babette Faehmel of SUNY Schenectady County Community College discuss their experiences as members of SUNY's inaugural corps of Civil Discourse and Civic Education and Engagement Fellows, and share what they've learned about the younger generation's thoughts and perspectives on civic engagement.
Dr. Angie Y. Chung, Professor, University at Albany
From the UAlbany News Center, March 14, 2024: Sociology Professor Tapped for SUNY Civic Education and Discourse Fellowship
Dr. Babette Faehmel, Professor, SUNY Schenectady College Community College
SUNY Civil Discourse and Civic Education and Engagement Fellows
SUNY — The State University of New York
SUNY Schenectady County Community College
The Engagement Ring, Episode 32: “Like Learning to Appreciate Spinach” — Developing Civil Discourse and Civic Engagement Skills
[Lively, upbeat theme music plays as program host Mary Hunt introduces the program and plays excerpts from the program.]
ANNOUNCER /MARY HUNT:
Welcome to The Engagement Ring. Your connection to an ever-widening network of higher education professionals, scholars and community partners working to make the world a better place. I'm Mary Hunt. Today on the podcast…
ANGIE CHUNG:
We're not trying to say that there's a certain way you have to talk with someone and debate with someone, that you're not allowed to express your opinion, or you're not allowed to have an opinion. That's not… that's kind of the image that we get when we talk about civil discourse, right?
BABETTE FAEHMEL:
There is actually no like necessary connection people need to make between civil and polite, because that's not really what the word means, but it's just because it has been used in public parlance or in common parlance in that way for so long. We wanted to get around the idea that some people think about it as behavior, like a behavior, and instead, it's a skill.
ANNOUNCER/MARY HUNT:
I’ll talk with two members of the inaugural class of the State University of New York’s Civil Discourse and Civic Engagement Fellows, Dr. Angie Chung of the University at Albany and Dr. Babette Faehmel of SUNY Schenectady County Community College. The two scholars and eight other SUNY faculty and staff members were asked to develop resources and make recommendations to advance SUNY’s commitment to increase civic education, civil discourse, and civic awareness and participation across its campuses.
BABETTE FAEHMEL:
When I saw the call, it was just like perfect. It just absolutely matched what I though higher education should do.
ANNOUNCER/MARY HUNT:
Here’s my conversation with Angie Chung and Babette Faehmel…
ANNOUNCER/MARY HUNT
Angie and Babette, welcome to the podcast. It’s a pleasure to have you.
[Music fades out]
BABETTE FAEHMEL:
Thanks for having us.
ANGIE CHUNG:
Thank you. This is a pleasure.
MARY HUNT:
I love to have UAlbany here and we have Schenectady County Community College represented so we have a public research university and a community college, and it'll be interesting to hear about the similarities and differences of your approaches to civic engagement at both types of institutions. We will get into that. But let me ask you, were you ladies acquainted before you became civic engagement fellows for SUNY, or is this how you met?
BABETTE FAEHMEL:
Nope.
MARY HUNT:
You did. It sounds like you’ve got a nice friendship going.
ANGIE CHUNG:
Oh, yeah, it's wonderful. We found a lot of commonalities, a lot of different perspectives, and really learn from the other civic fellows on the committee.
BABETTE FAEHMEL:
Yeah. So, it was a really great, very diverse group with, like, what diverse in terms of interest and fields of specialty and such things, and also a good institutional type mix we had, I believe three community colleges three represented.
MARY HUNT:
Excellent.
ANGIE CHUNG:
I think this is the first time I've actually had the opportunity to meet with people across the SUNY campuses, so it was just an amazing experience for all of us.
MARY HUNT:
Well, tell me what your experience has been like serving as a SUNY civic engagement fellow. I guess, first of all, why were you each interested in taking on the role, and what did the role entail?
BABETTE FAEHMEL:
Well, I was interested in the role, and basically when I saw the call, it was just like, perfect. It just absolutely matched what I thought higher education should do, community college education should do, because, I mean, we have such a diverse group of students who will, some of them will not transfer to a four-year college or to a university. So civic education, like a community colleges, is where civic education can then happen and it’s a perfect spot, and plus, I'm a historian of U.S. history. Very few people ever read what a historian writes like an actual book or anything like that. I always thought I'm doing this because I want to teach something about citizenship and like the role of ordinary people in society and in politics. So, for me, this was a calling that was just like, spot on.
MARY HUNT:
And, and know, that’s too bad because some of the historians’ writings are beautiful.
BABETTE FAEHMEL:
I know.
MARY HUNT:
It’s like the best fiction you'll ever read. It’s the best writing.
BABETTE FAEHMEL:
Yeah, I know, but we are very long winded.
[Laughter]
ANGIE CHUNG:
I’m sure she has a long, extensive reading list. I was actually just talking about it with her when we were coming in because we also both have interest in AI and some of its roles within civic discourse as well. So, as I mentioned earlier, I think a lot of us came from very different backgrounds and interests, and so my entre into this committee was very, very different. I am a professor of sociology, so my specializations include immigrant politics, ethnic enclaves, international education, just a whole wide range of things. But I also teach a course on social problems. And that was one, kind of my knowledge area of my life. But in my personal life, I had become very involved in my town where I'm from, which is actually very, quite politically diverse, and so a lot of kind of issues on the national arena, but also local and state arena would come up in a lot of our discussions. Some of them were heated; some of them were more cordial, but through my engagement with the public school system, I had volunteered in a wide range of local civic opportunities, everything from community service, you know, shelter, food, kind of organizations, to a lot of public school activities, as well as voter registration, something simple as a local postcard writing party. We would do a lot of that locally, and so it really became an important part of my personal life. And so, when this opportunity came along, I thought that I would have something very different to contribute. Because I do not live near campus, I probably am not as familiar as some of the other folks are that have been very engaged with the student life, but I thought that perhaps if we kind of joined forces, we'd be able to get some of these activities going and learn from each other.
BABETTE FAEHMEL:
Yeah, yeah, I want to add on. After listening to Angie, I was also thinking about how even though I love teaching, what I actually love more is with working with students in like, an extra or co-curricular fashion, like I always had students who wanted to do more than just the class content. And so, I actually taught Politics 101class for a very short time. And the last time that I taught it was, like 2016, an election year. And there was, and I was just amazed by how hungry some of my students in that politics class were to have an opportunity to talk with other students who voted differently. And I found that so inspiring that students had the curiosity and also the courage to talk to somebody who is their ideological other, and how much they experience, and then how like they from there, going from there, how much more they wanted to learn about our system and about civic affairs. I wasn't even calling it that, but just how much curiosity there was for these, among these students, and how they were just really looking for spaces to do more about that.
MARY HUNT:
That's really encouraging.
ANGIE CHUNG:
Yeah.
MARY HUNT:
It's good to know. It really is, because they're, well, they're going to be in charge someday soon. So that's very important. We often hear that younger generation isn't as engaged as past generations. Do you want to talk a little bit more about that, you know, what you see as trends, or what they're asking you, what you see they're interested in? Let me ask you specifically, what kind of tasks were you given as fellows? Did you work with students? Did you develop curriculum? Did you get involved in training faculty? What kind of things were you asked to do over the course of… now it was a year-long fellowship which just wrapped up, I understand, in the spring, but what were the tasks that you were assigned?
ANGIE CHUNG:
I think actually, when we timed it out, it had started a little bit earlier than that in March, in order to prepare for some of the events that we'd be doing in the fall. And so, we had a long time. They gave us a lot of leeway. They did let us know the audience is SUNY Central. So, all of the different SUNY campuses, whether or not our fellowships were representing a particular campus, and it was really for a wide range of audiences, from students to faculty to administration and staff, and it was left up to us is what would be the most effective forum. And so, we actually did a quite a wide range of activities that interested different folks. It's a little bit more difficult, I believe, for students on some level. I think our biggest interactions, which we'll talk about later, was the student leadership conference. But if we're talking about the main population of students, you know, they're juggling classes and work and personal family issues and whatnot. And so that's one area we'd certainly love to, you know, develop moving forward. But we did a webinar series where we talked about everything from the impact of AI on political discourse, on how to navigate class discourse, a classroom discourse as an instructor. We had a session by a scientist who talked about in what ways can science and math can engage in civic work. We had two convenings at Albany. Those were mostly attended by other student leaders or faculty and administration, depending on the time of year. We also held office hours, each of the Civic Fellows on our campuses for different disciplines, and also another subgroup within our fellows developed the resource page which still exists right now, and people can refer to as we head into the Gen Ed requirements.
BABETTE FAEHMEL:
SUNY put together a whole resource page with toolboxes, with professional development links to organizations, non-partisan organizations, that are doing civic engagement work. We had, we developed some of the fellows, Angela Graves at Alfred, was very active putting together a rubric for assessment of civic engagement skills, because it's so, I mean, it seems such a broad term and a lot of people, I think, are still confused about what it means, and then also how they can, like, use it for a class or program that is not in the liberal arts, in the trades, or in culinary arts or whatnot. So, we did that. And part of the program was also to coordinate a lot with student government and just across the different institutions. And so, yeah, we did we did some of that as well. And then, of course, it was actually not quite clear when we started the fellowship that civic engagement would become a Gen Ed, because that was kind of like all of a sudden it was there. And then, of course, we had to navigate those conversations, because it seemed to some people, probably the majority of faculty as sudden. Yeah.
ANGIE CHUNG:
And I want to say too, I think part of the idea was not to just come in with our own ideas and just put them on the table, but really learn from each other and develop our personal positions or views on what would be the best strategies, right?
BABETTE FAEHMEL:
Yeah, there was a delightful diversity, a civic diversity among the fellows, too. So, I mean, we had… First of all, the institutional mix was very helpful and very… it contributed to a lot of learning because there were some institutions that had highly active and well-funded civic organizations, civic institutes. And that's, for instance, I mean, at a community college, you don't have that, so it's usually a one-person thing, one person on a campus, such as Joe Scanlon at Monroe, Monroe, right? He's basically a one-man civic institute. And at Cortland, they have this entire organization, and just like space for events and funds and bring in speakers and so yes and but, but you learn that way. If you are immersed in such an interdisciplinary and cross institution environment.
MARY HUNT:
You brought up a good point. What? How do you define civic engagement? What do you tell people is the definition of civic engagement?
ANGIE CHUNG:
That probably took up about half a year, right, to figure that out. But I think the one thing that we, we did want to emphasize, and it wasn't clear in the beginning, because people would interchange civil discourse with civic discourse, but we, we pretty much agreed on the fact that civil discourse doesn't describe really, what we're trying to do here. We're not trying to say that there's a certain way you have to talk with someone and debate with someone, that you're not allowed to express your opinion, or you're not allowed to have an opinion. That's not… that's kind of the image that we get when we talk about civil discourse, right? Politeness, and politeness, to some degree, is also very conceals a lot of things, right? We wanted to emphasize this is about civic discourse is that it is a discourse is a two-way exchange. Both sides do not have to agree on an issue and but it's more about understanding why the other person feels the way they do, where they come from, what they may be dealing with that I may not be dealing with that, just listening really, and trying to figure out, well, where do I stand in respect to that, and how do we talk across these different divides?
BABETTE FAEHMEL:
Um-hum. I mean, yeah, absolutely. I mean, there is actually no like, necessary connection people need to make between civil and polite, because that's not really what the word means, but it's just because it has been used in public parlance or in common parlance in that way for so long, we wanted to get around the idea that some people think about it as behavior, like a behavior, and instead, it's a skill, right. And the skill includes active listening, like listening for overlap and values and concerns and such things, and also like inquiry, right. Like there are research and thinking skills involved too. It's not just like, I don't know, an indiscriminate airing of opinion amongst two groups of people or two people. It is really a deliberate conversation about matters of a community concern. And the community can be broadly defined. It doesn't have to be like, like politics. It can be just, basically, I don't know your workplace, right. But it's also, it's not just like, I don't know, learning how to negotiate or anything like that, because there's also really an emphasis on listening for common value, listening for values like, what are our values and what are like ethical concerns. I mean, we are living as a society, as a collective, how do we live together well, and learning how to talk about how to live well as a collective organization like society and without, like with, without discriminating against some group and without just like selfishly or because you can like do what you have the power to do. So that's not civic.
MARY HUNT:
Well, I attended a SUNY conference where you both ladies were presenting and Babette was leading an exercise among those of us who attended in how to have civil conversations, civil discourse over a topic. And she said, you know, you each have to take an opposing viewpoint, but here's what you have to do, here's the kind of the rules of the conversation to forward it. And it was an effort. It was things that you wouldn't normally think about. We normally think we just show and we give our opinion. But no, it really was you have to sort of further understanding of different points of view. And, you know, you want to have a really constructive, productive conversation. So that was, that was very helpful. We all enjoyed that at our table. But I'm interested in what your students are saying to you about civic engagement, civil discourse. I guess I'm also interested in the trends you're seeing, you know, is this generation of young adult students, are they more or less civically engaged or interested in becoming so? Any reflections or any anything you've learned about, you know, the teens and the 20-somethings and their views towards civic engagement?
BABETTE FAEHMEL:
I would say neither nor. They are differently engaged, I would say, compared to, I don't know, like another generation, like what came before Gen Z, whatever. And I would also say that if you talk about them, if you ask a random student, who you run into, what do you associate with civic engagement they will probably draw a blank, at least, yeah, for many of them, it sounds too much like a school subject, so I think, but once you, once you put it in the context of talking about matters of community concern, it becomes more tangible, and then they definitely are more engaged with that. I think where they are definitely differently engaged than previous generations is that most of them have a very negative view of partisan politics, and very few of them or like a plurality of them don’t want to identify as left or right or Democrat or Republican.
ANGIE CHUNG:
Yeah, I have to agree with that. I think it's more how we define civic engagement really changes the dialogue. I do think, though, I read an article once about how this generation is also dealing with a lot of social problems that our generations didn't have to and so even if we look at the students’ lives on our campuses, you know, how would they have room to go around doing voter registration or, you know, learning about everything they need to learn about politics when they have to, you know, afford the tuition at their schools or feed their families, or, you know, navigate Covid at one point, you know? And so, I think that to some extent, disillusionment does certainly have a tangible basis, a material reality that we have to acknowledge. But I agree with Babette that there are many ways to be civically involved. And if we could broaden that definition, there's, you know, certainly they are active, and we just have to find a way to tap into those different outlets. So, an example, for instance, also would be the mediums to which they articulate their opinions. Granted, there's pros and cons we could talk about with social media, you know, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, whatever you want to name. But if there, I think that politicians have even shown us that there are ways to tap into that, to grow knowledge as opposed to misinformation and disinformation.
MARY HUNT:
They seem to be very interested in community service, maybe not as much traditional, what I might think of as traditional community engagement. But as you say, Babette, they're interested in matters of their community and getting involved. Is that true? Did your experience bear that out?
BABETTE FAEHMEL:
Yeah, they are definitely also very, very interested in, like, fairness, equality, justice issues. We have a service-learning course, and some courses in which service learning is required Those are very popular. We have a student volunteer organization, which is very, very popular. So, they love that. They definitely like that. Um, where I think there is a like, negative reaction like, or where we can see, once again, less engagement is voting. Voting is like… it’s not, like voter turnout among the current youth generation is like, down, surprisingly so in a way, because, I mean, they are the future, and they should definitely or well, but what, who am I to tell them what to what they should do? Right? But it's also like, I think there's a widespread sense that our political system is dysfunctional, and it does not really meaningfully include young people, and it doesn't really, it's like basically just a make believe.
MARY HUNT:
Well, it's interesting that you say that because we, our office, the Office of Government and Community Relations at UAlbany meet with a group of freshmen. There probably about 20 to 25 freshmen in this group. They're new to the university. They were being oriented over the summer, and we were talking about issues related to community engagement and government relations. And we asked how many are registered to vote. Everybody was registered to vote. And I was really surprised at that, all 20, 25 of them were and, you know, they all expressed different degrees of interest in politics or in community issues and things like that. But I thought, wow, they're all, you know, these are just fresh 18-year-olds, you know. So, they're all registered and ready to go. So, I thought that was interesting, um, students at the community college, I'm wondering the differences, if there's any, if you're seeing differences among, I guess, the student body at the community college versus the university, and their interest in any particular areas or topics or ways that they engage. I mean, is there more, say commuter students as opposed to residential students, does that make a difference? The age of students, maybe at community college, there could be older students coming as well as young students, I say young, but traditional age entry level college students. Just curious, what differences you see among the two kinds of institutions throughout SUNY.
BABETTE FAEHMEL:
Well, first of all, most of our, okay, the students who are in a four-year university like SUNY, Albany, many, I think, like 60% came from a community college. So, we are feeders. So, so the students that you see are not all that different from the students we see, but the commuter aspect is a big thing. And plus, a lot of our students are caretakers. A lot of our students work like well and more than 20 hours a week and matters that are more based on well, existential issues such as making rent, health, health issues, the costs of that, and then also taking care of younger siblings or older parents, or like community affairs in terms of like noise, violence, police interactions, all these kinds of things can be more of an issue for community college students, but in general, I would also say there is more overlap than differences but taking… because what Angie was just saying about her students, and students at SUNY Albany also really concerned about these financial and economic issues, it seems to be increasingly almost universal for young people, and then student loans, student debt, right, all these kinds of things are very much of concern.
ANGIE CHUNG:
And we may be taking a different segment of that population. I mean, I agree with you on the point that some of those basic daily survival issues are common across the campuses. Our campus, though, also has a bit of a more developed institutional structure for allowing for activities outside of the classroom. So, I don't know to what extent you know, comparing with other SUNY campuses, but I do know that we have student offices that are devoted to increasing voter registration in terms of getting students involved in the local Albany commute, no tri-state, or is it tri-city community and different types of community service activities. They have internships and volunteer opportunities. So, I think in that sense, there is certainly an advantage that they can certainly bank on when they come to the campus. We are a state university, though, so this is all relative and something we have to think about. But that was one thing that we noticed was vastly different from the community colleges.
BABETTE FAEHMEL:
Earlier you asked anything that you noticed about this generation of students or what surprised you. So, one thing that I know I learned is that… even a… like we have clubs too. We have student clubs. And what I learned is that even a club that doesn't seem to be directly about public affairs or politics, students are in there because they want to be civically engaged. So, for instance, we had, like, I had a group of students on our SUNY SCCC podcast, the Many Voices, One Call, and they were talking about civic engagement, what it means to them. And the most active person in that group of students was the president of the E or E-game, or, like, electronic…
MARY HUNT:
eSports?
BABETTE FAEHMEL:
Yeah, eSports, eSports. So, the president of the eSports Club, and I would not have, like, looked for that. And he actually, he was saying, every club meeting I have a captive audience, so I bring voter registration forms and so, I mean, for any student who wants to be civically engaged, any kind of forum that takes, like a club, and any kind of club, an athletic team, anything like that, would be the perfect forum for that. It doesn't have to be student government, like plain and like directly, explicitly.
MARY HUNT:
You've answered some of these, but some of the students, as I mentioned, the group that we met with, we asked them, “What questions would you have for Angie and Babette? You've got your chance to ask SUNY fellows some of these questions.” And they came up with a few for you. So, I promised them I'd ask these questions, and we'll get, you know, get them access to the podcast so they can hear your response.
BABETTE FAEHMEL:
Awesome.
MARY HUNT:
A couple students asked, “What impact can I have? I'm just a student.” What kind of impact can a student have on, I guess, community affairs, or the affairs of the campus and when it comes to civic engagement? So, do they really have an impact, and do they really have a say?
BABETTE FAEHMEL:
As a student who is, well, the students are the lifeblood of the institution. And if students, I would say for my campus and for community colleges, students might have even more of an impact if they organize, if they make their voices heard in and more than just like the squeaky wheel, the isolated squeaky wheel, they have some impact. They have definitely some impact. How much of it? I mean, sometimes it just collides with certain realities, such as the budget. I mean, our students on my campus have been complaining for semesters now about the food, and I know where they're coming from, and it's a budget issue.
MARY HUNT:
Are students’ voices, well, this is similar, really taken into consideration on campus and off? I mean, what can a student really say or be heard?
BABETTE FAEHMEL:
Yeah, that’s difficult.
MARY HUNT:
I guess, but it goes back to the clubs you mentioned the power in number, you know, working as a club that goes and does community service or that is represented at an event, you know, sort of the power of the number there. I mean, it does show that you have something to say and that you're organized and want to say it in an organized, effective fashion.
BABETTE FAEHMEL:
So, so actually, you know, I mean, I appreciate the question from the students, because I think there is, there's the question is, like, is it meaningful participation. Is it, do they have a meaningful voice? Do they have, is there, is there something that that they can really well, I would say there's oftentimes a fear among administration and faculty that the student voices become disruptive, that this conversation verges into something, yeah, that's just into controversy and into conflict and I don't think there is usually, there's always enough room for constructive conflict, like it's, it goes back to the civil versus civic right. Civic engagement doesn't have to be polite. Doesn't have to be like you have to ruffle some feathers sometimes, and you have to shake like the bath water, right? And that on a on a campus, can oftentimes create a lot of concern among the people who are supposed to keep it all quiet.
ANGIE CHUNG:
Yeah. I think one of the presentations I had given, besides the ones that we had discussed, I kind of did a more historical… Actually, I did more of a historical overview from the perspective of social movements and in that history one of the things we've learned in America is the freedom of expression of speech, right, that there are different ways of engaging in civic discourse, depending on what the issue is, depending on the different outlets we've tried, the traditional mechanisms and that they're not always the ones that necessarily everyone you know agrees with. I do think, though, going back to your earlier point, Mary about kind of the rules of engagement, that there is a way to be heard and there's also a way to be not heard as well, right. So, I think from both sides, it's very important that students be able to find the people who will listen. You know, I can't speak for everyone, you know, every campus, every administration, whatnot, but I can say there are people who are here to figure out what they want, what their issues are, what are their anxieties and frustrations, and it's important to develop those networks, right. And the same thing with student-to-student relationships. I think it's very important that they be able to understand what the issues are for the larger body, that it's not just about me and my individual concerns, but there's a lot of things and dynamics and variables going on. But I do believe that there are forums and spaces for students to be heard, and it's a matter of being able to identify and find those and then being able to represent those particular matters to people who can do something (word inaudible) with the institution.
BABETTE FAEHMEL:
I mean, so one of our podcasts about civic engagement, we also included local officeholders. We had the president of the Schenectady City Council and a member of the legislature. I might be wrong here, but and they were both talking about how like the long duration of their engagement in local politics. And one of the things that can be frustrating for a young person to realize is how long you have to be the duration it usually takes to really deliver uh, to um, basically do some research, some conversations, engage in conversations, reach out to stakeholders, present your case, present your position, lobby for your interest. And this can be like a year-long process. And if you are only stopping by a community college for two years to get your associate degree, sometimes it just seems like why even start, right. But civic engagement is kind of, it's a disposition too, right. It's a skill, it's a disposition, it's an outlook at life and at engaging with the community around you. And it's just sometimes things really take frustratingly long.
MARY HUNT:
Yeah, absolutely. You answered a… you touched on a number of points related to one question. Next question I had which was about how can a student effectively engage with community, so I'm going to jump to another question the student asked, “What skills should college students focus on now in order to be prepared for public service?” I guess they mean careers in public service, or just to be of service to their community in general.
ANGIE CHUNG:
I think one thing that I learned through all my years of activities on the local level, initially, I believe that in order to be civically engaged you have to do this, this and that, right. You have to be vocal. You have to be able to do presentations and public speaking. You have to be able to, you know, canvas and interact with strangers. But I think the wonderful thing about civic engagement is that there are so many things that you can do to be involved with the community, and they don't all involve being on the front stage, right. I began actually with postcard parties, right. I just sat together with a bunch of local residents who were very concerned about lack of, you know, voter registration activity. We would sit, talk, gather; they'd have great food, and we'd write postcards just encouraging our neighbors to vote this election, right. A lot of those parties were even non-partisan, right? And so, I, I started that way, but as I began to become more comfortable with these people, many of whom would later show up at other events, I began to kind of up the… advance to the next level doing canvassing or doing public presentations on this topic, even doing the Civic Fellow work. And I think that it's important to understand that there are many ways to do it, and this includes, kind of the younger generations’ medium of blogs and social media, but also remembering that there's a lot of things that go into spreading knowledge. Again, I want to emphasize that point. This is about spreading knowledge, not about misleading people, not about presenting biased or problematic data that's pulled out of somewhere or some quote that comes from some random, you know, YouTube channel. So, I think that their skill that they need to probably work on they can get through college. I think they have a wonderful opportunity to learn information literacy, to understand where knowledge comes from and how you create it. They have great opportunities to engage in leadership in many different forms. They have wonderful opportunities to get active in their community with a lot of these partnerships that some of these campuses offer.
BABETTE FAEHMEL:
I would totally second the importance of information literacy. Students have an amazing opportunity to talk… to like educate peers and to learn with their peers about like, social media, digital literacy, right… how important it is to also understand, like, how algorithms curate the content that gets in front of people, how like spaces online are like, we don't have a shared information ecosphere anymore, and how important it actually is to have that kind of understanding, and then also to talk to your peers and your community members, to elders in the community, to young folks, to younger siblings about how that impacts discourse and how that impacts our understanding of the society that we live in, right. So, information literacy is definitely pretty big. And then also, kind of, like, I don't know how to call it, like discourse sensitivity, maybe. I mean, there are some patterns that are easily have spread for a long time in social media spaces where you can basically say, that's, that's demagoguery, right. I mean, like, certain kind of patterns of talking, um, it's kind of like easy binaries, like us versus them. And I have to say, this is not a young folk problem. I mean I have some like acquaintances on social media who are older than me, and I'm pretty old, who engage in the same kind of, like constant, polarizing discourse. Because politics for many people cuts close to the core, right. It gets emotional. It gets personal and then people get nasty. And those, those kinds of things like, how do you choose? How do we tune that down? How do you turn down the valve volume on this abrasive way of speaking, which by the way, when you are, as a as a young person, you are, your experience of having political communication or political conversations is abrasive and emotionally jarring. Why would you want to get into a civic space? Right. So, because that's also a thing that we have to like, really make sure that we create not safe spaces, but spaces that are actually open for hearing and listening and communication, which is, which is kind of a rare aware space.
MARY HUNT:
I think they're very interested in that. Because whenever we bring up the topic of what kind of programs do you want to hear and we suggest what about topics about, you know, talks about having difficult conversations, we seem to get a lot of interest.
ANGIE CHUNG AND BABETTE FAEHMEL:
Yeah.
MARY HUNT:
So, I think they do want to know how to do that.
BABETTE FAEHMEL:
Yeah. And it's hard. It's hard. I mean, we had, like, I don't know, three, four sessions, training sessions, just about dialogue, like deliberative dialogue. And, I mean, it's just, I learned a lot, and it's one of those things. It's sort of like learning how to appreciate spinach, right. Or broccoli. It's like, it's not, it's not the sexy stuff. It doesn't give you a big sense of satisfaction. I bested this person in a debate. No, you, you are. You have to learn how to have a dialogue and actually hear what the person is saying and why, right? This? Yeah, those are back to the civic skills.
ANGIE CHUNG:
I agree with you. I think that part of the roots of some of what's going on is that some of these channels feed and develop on fear and anxiety, right, things that… the worst-case scenario that could happen, the click baits, and then they start an echo chamber. They start saying, “Okay, why don't you listen to this podcast or this YouTube video,” and then it just leads to a chain reaction of, oh, my God, the world around me is horrible, and I gotta do my part as a justice warrior to… but I think that I agree with you. The hardest thing to do is to sit down and try to understand that world in all its entirety, right. And I'm not going to claim to be the best representative. I think if any of my friends and family were to listen to me, certainly they know that I have a hard time, but it's a good thing. It's because I'm passionate about my values, and that's great. But that does not, that should not bar me from having these conversations, right. I don't have to, you know, all of a sudden say, oh, I'm going to embrace someone who wants to, you know, do this to me, but just sit down and say, well, where are they coming from? Is it really what I think it is, you know? And it is hard. I'm not going to…
BABETTE FAEHMEL:
It is hard, yeah, and it should be hard, because, I mean, if it's too easy, then that means that you are actually not inviting in some of the voices that would make it hard to sit there and listen, right. And if you really want to have a dialogue, it has to be inclusive of the voices and the people you don't want to talk to, but you have to, because they're part of yours, of the tribe, too.
MARY HUNT:
Well, you know what's interesting, too? You guys make me think that it can also be fun, yeah, have good, spirited discussion, and then they can leave friends and to agree to disagree.
BABETTE FAEHMEL:
Yeah, yeah.
MARY HUNT:
We have a couple gentlemen that we work with at the university, good, good friends, communications experts, and they could, I don't think there's anything they agree on but they’re best of friends, and they have spirited discussions all the time. We always get a kick out of it, but they always leave, you know, happy to hear what the other person said. But it can be fun.
BABETTE FAEHMEL:
Yeah, we forgot how, like, I mean, because of social media and the kind of, like, siloing of communities, I think we, we have, we have to develop that muscle again, and we have to have to develop that muscle memory. Like I disagreed with this. I disagree with this person on everything, pretty much, but all our disagreements are about the main topic, how can we make our community do better, right. Or this community? And that's just, I mean, like that's once again, a skill that we need to learn,
ANGIE CHUNG:
The one difficult conversation that we had, and Babette, may or may not agree, is the concept of boundaries. Where do we draw the line? Right. And that's trickier. That's a grey line. That is very hard, but that's very different from saying, I'm not even going to start the conversation, right.
BABETTE FAEHMEL:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean that first of all is it's a hard line to draw, and I think then also it's related, but also separate, because, like, how do we deal with, communicate with partners in a conversation where we assume they are bad faith actors, and sometimes they might not be. They might just have, like, be, like, on a very different, I don't know, like end of the spectrum of politics and of approaches to the community and society and organization of it all, but, but I don't think I mean it was like how to when you are dealing with a bad faith actor in a conversation that is also kind of a limit to what you can do.
MARY HUNT:
Um-hum, it’s challenging.
ANGIE CHUNG:
If you don't mind. There's actually one important thing I also want to discuss.
MARY HUNT:
Yes, please.
ANGIE CHUNG:
One thing that we talk about in sociology and conversation analysis is also how engaging in a dialogue also involves power, and that who's in that dialogue, they already come to the table with, would be the word?
BABETTE FAEHMEL:
Some privilege? Status?
ANGIE CHUNG:
Yes, some amount of privilege. People who come with privilege that can dominate the discussion, that can be heard more, right, by the people around them, that may not allow others to be heard, right. And so, I think there's a kind of balance between understanding that power dynamic but also trying to create that equal space where people can at least engage in that conversation, even if the world around them certainly there's a lot of problems that we need to still resolve.
BABETTE FAEHMEL:
Yeah, yeah.
MARY HUNT:
Angie, you mentioned the conference, the student conference. I don't know if you wanted to say anything about that before we go.
ANGIE CHUNG:
Yeah. I mean, I think that you, one of the questions people may ask is anything that surprised you. And I don't know if this is a terrible or wonderful thing to say, but when I went to the Student Leadership Conference, because of all the impressions that we had about the younger generation, that we felt that, oh, they weren't involved, and that they're only consumed with their own studies and problems and whatnot. But there were some brilliant ideas. We actually had a moment where we went across the room and asked each student to tell us what they were doing on their campuses, and the amount of things they're doing was just astounding. And I do think that part of the problem is that we don't have these opportunities to communicate between faculty, staff and students to see what they're doing, because they're doing quite a number of amazing projects that range… I don't know… maybe you have better examples than I do, but it's from local community service volunteer opportunities, to civic actions on campus, to voter registration, you know. And it was just really, I just, I was blown away by that. And I always bring that up as an example.
BABETTE FAEHMEL:
Yeah, absolutely. Like, I remember their concern about the cost of textbooks and their interest in open educational resources. And like, I mean, those are, once again, things where you might say, well, this is particular to that individual student and their family. But no, it's not. It's a shared concern amongst a larger group of people, and it's definitely as it's certainly a community matter. The other thing that I think is important, and that's for faculty, right. Faculty needs need to get out of the habit of thinking that we know best what they need, because, like, we need to actually, like, talk to students about, like, what they see as most relevant for their community and for their like, even if it's only within a class or within a like, a cohort, right. Because we still kind of, I think, have that a lot, like students should be interested in this, but they are not, and it's just a lot of assumptions that we bring to this equation.
MARY HUNT:
I want you, Babette, to tell us about your podcast before we go, and where can we hear it? What's the name of it? What's the topic focus, and where can people access it?
BABETTE FAEHMEL:
Yeah, so we on Spotify, and the name is Many Voices, One Call. And we actually started out doing at the end of Covid as a D E I-focused podcast, we are now, I believe, in our fourth season. And we have, for the last two seasons, I would say, pivoted to more like civic dialog. And we had a bunch of, we had two very good episodes on artificial intelligence, one from the faculty perspective, one from the student perspective. We had a number of we had two on civic engagement, including a kind of like, well the morning after the election kind of thing, which is, which is very good, very, very balanced and very optimistic. And then also where we are trying actually to pick up on what is of great interest among our students at Schenectady Community College, and to give that, to give a forum for that. So, we had, we had a one, a really, very informative session on trans joy and trans history, which I, I would definitely recommend people check out.
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MARY HUNT:
Well, I think SUNY had a couple of really terrific inaugural members of the SUNY Civic Fellows class. So, thank you so much, ladies, for being my guest today. I learned a lot, and I hope… I could talk to you forever.
ANGIE CHUNG:
Yeah.
BABETTE:
Yeah, it was great.
[Laugher]
BABETTE:
Thank you so much for having us.
MARY HUNT:
I just have to say I hope you'll come back. All right. You take care and I look forward to hearing more from you in the future.
ANGIE CHUNG:
Thank you.
BABETTE FAEHMEL:
Thank you.
ANNOUNCER/MARYHUNT:
Dr. Angie Chung is a professor in the Departments of Sociology and East Asian Studies at the University at Albany. Her research interests include immigration, urban sociology and community studies, race and ethnicity, and gender and family.
Dr. Babette Faehmel is a member of the Liberal Arts Division at SUNY Schenectady County Community College. At SUNY Schenectady, she teaches the U.S. History Survey, Modern World Civilization, History of Women and Gender in the U.S., Introduction to Black History, and Introduction to U.S. Politics and Government.
For more information on Dr. Chung’s and Dr. Faehmel’s work, and the SUNY Civil Discourse and Civic Education and Engagement Fellows, visit the resource page for this podcast online at the dash engagement dash ring dot simplecast dot com.
The Engagement Ring is produced by the University at Albany's Office for Public Engagement. If you have questions or comments or want to share an idea for an upcoming podcast, email us at UAlbany O P E at Albany dot E D U.
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