Paideia Fellows build dialogue in Athens

Earlier this summer following graduation, the Class of 2025 SNF Paideia Program fellows capped off their three-year fellowship with a trip to Greece, rounding out the program designed to span differences with dialogue and community building.

The fellows visited Athens, home of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), which supports the Paideia venture at Penn. They toured the Agora and the Acropolis, visited a library and cultural center, and spent time in conversation with SNF interns to learn about their work and lives.

This was the third year that Paideia Fellows have visited Athens for the SNF conference, says Executive Director Leah Seppanen Anderson, who accompanied the group. The trip has evolved into a broader itinerary centered on Athens’ history, its current residents, and conversations with SNF staff and leadership, she says.

The experience built on connections and community between the fellows and the SNF, and among the fellows. “We wanted to better enable them to be a community of practice, even as they disperse around the globe,” Anderson says. “Our hope is that the Paideia values and practices around dialogue are a thing that continue to be front of mind for them.”

Ben Sailors, who graduated with a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in materials science from the School of Engineering and Applied Science, says the highlight for him was the conversation with the SNF interns. “We got to learn what life is like in Greece, and they got to learn what life is like in America,” Sailors says.

View large image

The small groups of fellows and interns were each assigned a prompt to kickstart the discussions.

May graduate Emilee Gu, a philosophy, politics, and economics major from Changzhou, China, says her group’s prompt about social norms or practices that participants wanted to confront or see changed began with a conversation about the success of local recycling programs in both countries and evolved into a discussion about Greek frustration over tourism and managing the economy.

Gu says the discussion presented new ideas about travel and its impact and about how to respectfully interact with people and about how to approach learning about a place, she says.

Anderson emphasizes that there’s no Paideia model for driving dialogue. Rather, it’s about developing the values and equipping students with skills that will help them succeed in those contexts.

“Our fellows have had a couple of years with multiple opportunities to think intentionally about their conditions that cultivate meaningful dialogues across differences,” she says. “They’ve had time to reflect and practice listening.”

The visit to the We Need Books multilingual library and cultural center was another great way to learn the culture and put their dialogue skills into practice, both Gu and Sailors say.

“They’re doing work that’s really important, that really matters,” says Sailors, of Bellefontaine, Ohio, who will be starting a Ph.D. program in materials science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this fall.

He says the trip was a culmination of everything the Paideia fellows have learned in the program: learning about dialogue, learning how to communicate differences, and learning about how to craft solutions that cross those differences.

Gu agrees. “The Paideia Program is unique because it’s the only program at Penn that really focuses on helping you integrate what you love about your studies with the pillars of the program: dialogue, service, wellness, and citizenship,” says Gu, who will return to Philadelphia this fall for a position at Penn.

Reflecting on the trip, Anderson says the Paideia program hopes to strengthen ties with its alumni network and graduates like Gu and Sailors. With about 50 current alumni in a variety of fields, there’s plenty of opportunity for them to engage, returning to campus where they can continue to put into practice the lessons learned, Anderson says.