Students, professors create safe space for students to work through conflict
Whether it be conflict in a friendship, relationship or even with yourself, it’s important to learn skills on how to better deal with and work through conflicts, and that’s exactly what the Give Space program is going for.
“We’re trying to expand the conversation of conflict beyond our classes,” said Clair Canfield, a professor of Communication Studies at USU. “To reach the rest of the campus, people in the community, so that they have the chance to shift the way they approach conflict and improve their relationships.”
With that thought in mind, a group of students and professors have come together to create unique conversational spaces that help people practice techniques to handle conflicts such as self-determination, making choices and gaining awareness about what’s important to every individual and, most importantly, being able to be seen and heard so they can feel more empowered and change the way they handle conflict.
“We saw a need for this program,” Canfield said. “We see students come through our classes and have heard them say that this has changed the way they handle conflicts and it’s changed their relationships.”
They decided to start Give Space to allow an open conversation and demonstrate what it looks like to properly work through conflicts. They said when people learn something that has been valuable to them, oftentimes they want to share that with others to help them as well. Sometimes when it’s shared, it doesn’t relay the same message.
“As instructors, we saw the passion and desire in our students to share and engage in this conflict process,” said Carlee Madsen, who is also a professor in the Communication Studies.
Madsen said she wanted to give students the opportunity to serve students while developing their skills. She gave students an opportunity to take a conflict facilitation class where they could be trained on how to facilitate conflict conversations. Then students who didn’t take the course have the opportunity to learn from the ones who have been trained.
These students who have been trained are called space-makers. The term space-making was created as a way of describing what happens in these conflict conversations. In conversational space-making, people create specific boundaries to allow other topics to exist within the conversation.
“For example,” Canfield said, “we want to keep judgement out and we want to be able to keep safety in. So we have a boundary of confidentiality. We don’t give advice or judge you for your conflicts. We keep that out, which allows really good listening to be inside. Our space-makers witness people. They are fully engaged and aware of what you’re saying so they can ask more open and honest questions.”
These space-makers help create a space for students to discover more about themselves and their conflicts and help them feel more empowered. They said students leave their conversations with feelings of being seen and witnessed, knowing more about how they feel in their unique situations and ideas on how to fix it.
There are questions on how to deal with conflicts that cannot be answered by other people. The spaces that are created within these conversations allow students to feel safe to explore themselves and their emotions with no distractions.
“People have the ability to self-determine, know who they are, know how to act and know what they want,” Madsen said. “We try to get out of people’s way and provide a space where they can discover these things within themselves.”
Many of the space-makers provided metaphors to better explain this process. They called it “yoga for conflict” and said, “It’s like having someone in my forest to hear the tree fall” and, “Having a conversation in a safe, judgement-free bubble” and, “Going on a journey to find the answers, and realizing you had the answers the whole time.”
These trained students are waiting and willing to help their fellow students create spaces to work through their conflicts.
“When I have these conversations, I think of myself as a body of water,” Canfield said. “If I can make myself be still, be present and not bring my own stuff into the room, then the other person can see themselves reflected back.”
As college students, we are surrounded by conflicts. Perhaps with roommates, with significant others or even within ourselves. There are always better ways to handle those types of conflicts with roommates, significant others or oneself, and the professors and students who created Give Space want to be there to help students through it.
“When we were developing the social media platform, we went back and forth on what we could name this whole idea,” said Tara Martin, who is in charge of the program’s social media account and helps run the labs for Canfield’s conflict class. “Using Give Space is something that people will understand more than space-making. It helps people understand that we’re giving space.”
They say this is a safe program for students to work through conflicts. It’s completely confidential. Space-making can open a new door on how one sees and handle conflicts.
If you would like to meet with a space-maker, email conflictcenter@usu.edu, or reach out through their Instagram page @givespaceusu.