Introducing Center Stage
Welcome to Center Stage, a new blog from the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics, where curiosity meets action! We explore what it takes to have better conversations across differences in everyday life. By bringing together researchers, students, educators, and civic leaders, we test new ideas, share what we're learning, and turn big questions about civil discourse into practical tools anyone can use. Whether you're interested in bridging divides, improving dialogue, or simply having better conversations, Center Stage offers fresh insights for a more connected world.
Why the focus on civil discourse at an Ethics Center? Since its founding in 1986, the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics has focused on practical ethics: a “linking discipline” that bridges theory and practice, bringing philosophical ideas into conversation with real-world moral questions. Civil discourse is a natural extension of that mission. How we talk with one another — how we listen, disagree, deliberate, and navigate differences, is itself an ethical question — with consequences for classrooms, institutions, and democratic life. The Center’s work on civil discourse builds on this long-standing commitment to reasoned disagreement and to connecting ethical scholarship with practical tools for public life.
What is The Research & Design Studio (R&DS)? The R&DS puts that theory-to-practice approach into action. At its most basic, the process is a cycle: we develop pedagogical tools and activities grounded in research and designed to help students and educators practice civil discourse; we try them out in classrooms and workshops; we measure what happens; and then we use what we learn to improve the tools and try again. Research informs pedagogy, pedagogy generates new questions for research, and each round of testing helps make the next one better. The R&DS’s pedagogy team develops lesson plans, activities, training materials, and other resources, while its research team conducts basic research to inform their work, evaluates pedagogical methods, and develops ways to assess civil discourse. Together with colleagues across Harvard, they help make the R&DS a place where theory and practice take center stage.
Leading this work is Kelly Siegel-Stechler, the Center’s Director of Research & Strategic Initiatives. Dr. Siegel-Stechler’s research focuses on civic education and political socialization, including how experiential learning, civil dialogue, and institutional climate shape young people’s civic development and democratic engagement. At the R&DS, she is helping build a research program that contributes new knowledge about civil discourse while developing better ways to measure its practice and outcomes. She is also focused on translating research into useful tools, evaluating the Center’s current programs, supporting Harvard faculty and groups working on civil discourse, cultivating a community of scholars and practitioners, and expanding the reach of this work across higher education.
In our next Center Stage post, we’ll sit down with Kelly to hear more about her vision for the Research & Design Studio, what she has learned from working in the higher education civil discourse space, and where she thinks the field is headed. Stay tuned!