This foundational course for Honors at CSU aims to foster socially competent communicators within the Honors community and beyond. In this course, we will examine how our own intersecting identities are reflected in our values, beliefs, assumptions, and communication behaviors. Through relevant texts, examples, and case studies, we will explore how diverse identities and worldviews create larger relational communities within broader social systems and contemporary contexts.

To support this learning, we draw on Intergroup Dialogue (IGD), an educational model that brings students together across lines of difference in cooperative, small-group settings to engage in sustained, constructive dialogue that moves toward shared understanding and collective action (Gurin, Nagda, & Zúñiga, 2013; Lopez & Zúñiga, 2010; Zúñiga, Lopez, & Ford, 2014). In this course, IGD is engaged through a foundation in Indigenous and settler colonial frameworks, centering epistemologies and ontologies grounded in relational accountability. Relational accountability—an ethical stance rooted in many Indigenous knowledge systems—asks participants to take responsibility for how they show up in relationship to others, their communities, and the land (Tuck & Yang, 2012; Wolfe, 2006).