How to connect in a divided world
What you’ll learn
Week 1
- Identifying what you’d like to change about your current interactions with people, online and offline
- Defining and practicing physical and emotional safety in your conversations
- Recognizing the differences between disagreement and debate
- Contrasting curiosity and interrogation
Week 2
- The barriers to meaningful online connection
- How shame affects our ability to interact with other people
- Separating your feelings about systems and ideologies from your feelings about individuals
- Shifting from calling people out to calling people in
Week 3
- Developing empathy for people you disagree with or who have maligned you
- Why empathy isn’t always possible
- Realistic expectations for what conversation can accomplish in the near term and long term
Week 4
- Identifying your "conversation superpowers”
- Putting what you’ve learned into practice by having more conversations!
What you’ll get
- 2-5 video teaching segments/week (50-60 minutes total)
- 3-4 individual activities/week (12-16 total)
- 1 virtual live event/week (attendance is optional)
- Community discussions, polls and chat
- Support from a TED Courses facilitator
- Carefully curated related resources from TED
- PDF course workbook
- After the course, access to an archive of course videos, activities and curated resources
To get the most out of the course,
plan to spend at least one hour each week–longer, if you plan to explore the optional curated resources or join the virtual live event.
Here’s what learners are saying about this course:
“This course made me think hard about my assumptions and my behaviors. I loved the activities and I loved how the topic was broken down into doable tasks.”
“Loaded with insights on how calling out others is so unnecessary and harmful.”
“The course is really clear and helps me understand my own mechanisms.”
“This course touched on areas a lot of people avoid.”
Dylan Marron moved from Venezuela to the United States when he was five years old. Since he was young he’s loved watching movies, but growing up as a “brown kid in America” he didn't see himself and his experiences represented in film. At age 27, he created the critically acclaimed Every Single Word, a video series that edits down popular films to feature just the words spoken by people of color (spoiler alert: often, there aren't many).
More recently, Dylan’s been the host and creator of the podcast Conversations with People Who Hate Me, a social experiment connecting strangers who have exchanged negative or hateful messages on the internet. His book, also titled Conversations with People Who Hate Me, is published by Atria, a division of Simon & Schuster. He described his podcast work in his 2018 TED Talk, which has been viewed more than 3.5 million times.
He recently joined the writing staff of the Emmy-winning hit television series Ted Lasso. Its star, Jason Sudeikis, calls Dylan “a modern Mister Rogers for the digital age.”
Dylan lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his husband.
To learn more about Dylan and his work, visit dylanmarron.com.
