Fiat Lux Spotlight: How to help students have difficult conversations in the classroom

By UCLA Newsroom | September 18, 2025

Sociology professor Abigail Saguy has been teaching the sociology of gender at UCLA for 23 years. But it was while on sabbatical in 2023-24, writing a book on debates about sex and gender, that she realized how many people have become afraid to discuss these topics. This led Saguy to begin thinking about how best to teach topics that provoked hesitancy, given today’s increasingly polarized political climate. 

Jumping into her academic networks, Saguy, who in 2017 received a UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award, joined the Heterodox Academy, a nonprofit group promoting a diversity of viewpoints and intellectual curiosity in universities. There, she signed up for a webinar on the new Sway app, an AI-assisted chat platform that tries to facilitate open and honest conversations between students. 

After a few follow-up conversations with developers Simon Cullen and Nick DiBella, two philosophy professors at Carnegie Mellon University, she was invited to be the first professor to use the app in her course. Around the same time, Saguy was selected for the inaugural faculty fellows cohort of UCLA’s Dialogue across Difference initiative, where she learned techniques for facilitating discussions. 

Newsroom spoke to Saguy to find out how these innovative techniques to promote dialogue are working in the classroom, based on her use of the app in both her fall 2024 sociology of gender course and her spring 2025 Fiat Lux course; she’ll use it again in the sociology of gender course this fall.

Read the Q&A on the UCLA Newsroom.