“Let’s begin,” I’d say, and all of us would clap our hands three times, in unison, twice softly followed by a louder third clap. In my course Arguing as an Art of Peace, I opened class sessions by “clapping in” with students, a ritual that signaled the beginning of our work for the day. I introduced this practice on the first day of the semester, evoking a few looks of confusion and concern. Arguing as an Art of Peace fulfilled the first-year seminar requirement in the College of Arts and Sciences, so the students were all freshmen, taking one of...

When we imagine a fight, most of us think about a face-to-face confrontation, an encounter in which combatants engage one another along a linear axis; it’s a structure we recognize from fistfights, duels, and showdowns in old western towns. To demonstrate the linear nature of a fight, I often used large cardboard arrows, holding them up so students could see that they pointed directly at one another, representing a clash of forces in which the stronger will presumably overpower the weaker and emerge victorious. I illustrated the opposite situation, flight, by turning one arrow around 180 degrees and moving it...

By the beginning of the second unit, a month or so into the semester, students recognized that the seminar on arguing as an art of peace was different in a number of respects from a conventional college class. Of course, they were learning about some new ways to engage in conflicts, using tactics associated with an open hand. But the approach teaching and learning was also different because it included movement and mindfulness practices alongside relatively familiar activities such as examining arguments and writing papers about controversial issues. One student wrote this reflection after her first month in college:

Unorthodox...

In the third unit of the course, students explored ways to mediate disputes and integrate opposing viewpoints, encouraging adversaries to cooperate on the basis of shared interests or goals. Although the project introduced a new set of circumstances for arguing, it also incorporated skills and tactics familiar from our work on reframing and attentive listening. The main difference from previous assignments was that the writer would be intervening in a dispute between other people, acting as a third party to a disagreement.¹ To illustrate the act of mediating a dispute, I used my red cardboard arrows, positioning them in the...

Over the five semesters that I taught the course, Arguing as an Art of Peace was an ongoing experiment, an effort to find better ways to incorporate three modalities of learning—contemplative, kinesthetic, and conceptual-procedural—into a course structured around a series of projects, each affiliated with a different tactic for arguing with an open hand. In the preceding chapters, I’ve focused on those projects—deliberative, conciliatory, and integrative—and the associated tactics of reframing, attentive listening, and mediating. Although I’ve considered the learning modalities throughout my discussion, in this final chapter I want to structure my review around them,...