Madisen Carns

Leadership Team Member, Fall ‘22 Program Alumnus, and student at Purdue University

Madisen shared about her experience with the Living Room Conversation tool as a part of the Civic Synergy program.

Civic Synergy and “Living Room Conversations” were two very foreign concepts to me before last fall. I remember starting the first session of Civic Synergy and learning about how “Living Room Conversations” would help me learn more about the individuals I would be working alongside with. It developed from simple questions about where we were from or what our college was to more in-depth questions that pertained to our cohort: education. The next questions took us further into every individual's experience with school and their beliefs on our current education system.

After this conversation, it was already clear that our political labels were not important. What mattered was we all had common issues that we were already able to discuss to start off the first session. An example of this was when I met this girl from New York during the meeting. I grew up in Indiana and most of our lifestyles would be seen as quite different. However, I was surprised to find that we had very similar views on schooling because of our similar experiences. “Living Room Conversations” brought out those conversations that made us relate to each other. We both agreed that there was internal bias to some students over others which made it difficult for some students to receive proper education.

This idea led to our final proposal. We decided that we wanted to create a way for teachers to work on implicit bias training. With this, we hoped that educators would grow to understand their students more personally and work towards providing certain needs. Our group was super passionate about our proposal and it created a great working atmosphere. I strongly believe “Living Room Conversations” was a huge part in making our group more cohesive and energized while working together. I was thankful to both “Living Room Conversations” and Civic Synergy for an incredible experience that let me participate in political discussion.

Madisen is currently a freshman at Purdue University studying Agricultural Economics and Political Science.