Dr. Deborah Lehman met Dr. Cambria Garell when Garell was a medical resident at UCLA. The pediatricians connected over shared values, their commitment to academic excellence, and a passion for delivering outstanding patient care. Lehman saw a rising star in the field and Garell recognized an opportunity to learn from a respected expert.
“[Dr. Lehman] has always been regarded as one of the best teachers and I specifically sought her out during my infectious disease elective so I could learn from her,” Garell said. “I joined the faculty in 2014 and have had the opportunity to learn from Dr. Lehman with various faculty development initiatives she has spearheaded.”
Now colleagues, the two are once again collaborating to develop a dialogue experience for pediatric residents through their participation in the Dialogue Across Difference (DaD) Faculty Fellows Program. As part of this partnership between the Teaching and Learning Center (TLC), DaD Initiative, and Center for Education Innovation & Learning in the Sciences (CEILS), Lehman and Garell join a group of 18 other instructors across the UCLA campus to make up the second cohort of the program.
“As I listened to cohort members introduce themselves, I was thrilled to hear the broad representation across UCLA,” said Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning Erin Sanders O’Leary. “This impressive group has the capacity to reach UCLA students, fellow instructors, alumni, young learners at our K-12 schools, and patients in our medical centers. There is no member of our Bruin community that this group does not touch.”
Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Darnell Hunt joined O’Leary and the fellows for the September cohort 2 kickoff event. He recognized the need to bring dialogue practices to UCLA when he worked with David Myers, the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History and Director of both the Bedari Kindness Institute and DaD, to launch the initiative in 2023. Hunt continues to champion the program and the fellows’ work to infuse the DaD values into their teaching approaches.
“Our DaD Fellows are role models and ambassadors to peers and students,” Hunt noted. “The values of respect and curiosity, and inclusive excellence, are easy to claim; the hard work is to embody them in the ways we engage with one another on campus.”
The program’s second cohort will be taking on that hard work throughout the 2025-26 academic year. Over the next several months, the group will meet regularly to build a community committed to developing teaching practices that reflect the DaD values and put them into action. They will also hone their facilitation skills, craft new course materials, and revise syllabi while reflecting on their experiences.
“It can be challenging and fraught for instructors to know how to navigate charged differences in the classroom,” said DaD Staff Director Maia Ferdman. “Not only are dialogue skills important for instructors to know what to do when charged difference arises, but they also help instructors generate the space for meaningful exchange, critical discourse, and learning to take place.”
Cohort 2 is up for the challenge, and the fellows already have plans for how they will incorporate what they learn into their courses. Lehman and Garell are considering how they might adapt their takeaways into a variety of educational opportunities for medical students, residents, and faculty.
Raffi Joe Wartanian, a lecturer for UCLA Writing Programs, is also excited to learn from his colleagues’ perspectives and experiences.
“My fellow cohort members represent countless disciplines and encounter a variety of challenges and opportunities when navigating difference and debate in classrooms and around campus,” Wartanian shared. “I hope to refine the readings, resources, conversations, strategies, and course design principles that inform my current approach, and to introduce new tools and methods that I’ll discover in our upcoming sessions.”
The second cohort builds on the success and lessons learned from the first DaD Faculty Fellows cohort that launched in fall 2024. Inaugural cohort member and Sociology professor Abigail Saguy joined the new cohort for the kickoff event and shared her experience using the Sway app to help students have difficult conversations in the classroom. This year, members of the first cohort are also supporting the new group of fellows by participating in learning pods to help expand the learning community across cohorts.
