Students learned how to keep the peace for Thanksgiving dinner at the Peace at the Table event held in the Wilkinson Student Center on Nov. 21.
This event, hosted by the BYU Peacemaker Project, invited students to learn how to navigate contentious topics such as climate change, the recent presidential election and the death penalty. The goal was to help attendees prepare to discuss these topics heading into Thanksgiving.
This event was smaller than the last Peacemaker Project activity, titled Debate Like a Peacemaker, which attracted 700 people. The project’s co-founder Alexander Keogh said the smaller size makes attendees more likely to connect with each other.
He explained that because there were so many people at the last event, which was a debate about immigration, it became “hard for everyone to share their opinions and for everyone to share them respectfully.”
“By splitting people into small groups this time, we hope to increase the accountability for everybody's comments,” Keogh said.
This was also done to increase the attendees’ desire to truly connect with the people in their group.
Jessie Moore, an event planner for the Peacemaker Project, said the idea for the event came when she had a few conversations with people on how Thanksgiving dinner can be contentious.
“We wanted to create an environment where students could come together and practice having a conversation and getting through contention and being peacemakers,” Moore said.
To prepare for this event, the project’s leadership had a few meetings with some of their members. They thought of current issues that would come up at Thanksgiving dinner.
To help create a realistic representation of what Thanksgiving dinner could be like, organizers used a role-play setting where everyone assumed a role around the dinner table.
Roles included liberal, conservative, mediator and devil’s advocate.
Keogh said attendees were invited to take the perspective of one they might disagree with.
“I think that helps you to try to understand why would somebody actually think this way and take their perspective for 10 minutes,” Keogh said.
At the event, attendees were assigned a table with a group of eight to nine people where they would talk together while being treated to a full Thanksgiving meal.
Once everyone was seated and received their meal, Peacemaker Project members acted as moderators to assign the attendees one of the four roles for their table discussion.
Mirabella Keogh, also co-founder of the Peacemaker Project, explained that the event was structured so that for the first two topics attendees would take a role different than their own opinion so they could practice engaging in a peaceful way.
Once the final topic was announced, which was the death penalty, the moderators did not assign roles to the group members. Instead, they were each able to express their real opinions.
“My favorite topic was this last one, where everyone had their real thoughts about the death penalty, mainly because I've never had a discussion about it and I found that we all mostly agreed on about the same thing,” George Ramsey, a BYU student from Switzerland, said
Mirabella Keogh said that by giving students these two opportunities to practice how they will engage in a conversation that can potentially become uncivil, “they will be prepared by the third scenario to express themselves in a way that is in keeping of what being a peacemaker is.”
Overall, students attending this event had a positive experience.
“It was super fun to be able to just share opinions and a safe space where we can all just get to know each other and learn new things,” Isabelle Homer, a freshman at BYU, said.
Marie Heder, a student at BYU studying family life, described how her thoughts changed as the event progressed.
“At first I was really nervous because I don't like feeling attacked and I wasn't sure who I'd be sitting with, but it was super peaceful and fun,” Heder said.
Students were able to get through the contention and be peacemakers.
"I didn't have to step in very much,” Emma Conde, a junior and a moderator for the event, said.
Even after the activity ended, students were still talking at the tables.
“My big takeaway probably will be that students care and that they are eager to talk about these topics,” Mirabella Keogh said.
Students shared that the lessons learned from this event will help students prepare to engage peacefully during Thanksgiving dinner.
"I will probably not try and say inflammatory things as sometimes our role was tonight," Conde said.