When Kim Roberts, cultural program leader for the Town of Cary, attended “A Day of Civic Learning”, hosted by the NC State College of Education’s North Carolina Advancing Civic Engagement (NC-ACE) Interdisciplinary Research Hub last April, she was excited to engage in intellectual conversations and network with people from other sectors in the state and beyond.
The event also turned into a partnership that was able to bring a civic engagement program to the Town of Cary during their lineup of events scheduled in recognition of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in January 2026.
During “A Day of Civic Learning,” Roberts and other attendees had the opportunity to engage in a demonstration of Dining with Democracy, an event created by Associate Professor of Social Studies Education Paula McAvoy and Associate Professor of Educational Psychology Christy Byrd. While participating in Dining with Democracy, which uses facilitated activities to enable people with different perspectives to engage in conversation about contemporary issues, Roberts realized the event would be a great opportunity to bring people together for conversation in Cary, too.
“When I participated in Dining with Democracy, a lightbulb went off and I thought about how we could do this program somewhere else, so that’s how I got connected and invited [McAvoy and Byrd] to come to the MLK weekend event,” Roberts said.
Hosted at First Cary United Methodist Church in collaboration with several other community groups, the Jan. 18 event invited participants to discuss the issue of school voucher expansion in North Carolina.
Although the day was plagued by bad weather and the threat of ice, Andrea Blyther, a middle grades English language arts and social studies major who served as a facilitator at the event, said that she was impressed to see a crowd of more than 100 people who were excited to engage in discourse with their fellow community members.
“It was truly inspiring and showed just how much the community needs a space where tough conversations can be had,” Blyther said.
Blyther was inspired to serve as a facilitator for the event after taking McAvoy’s “Methods and Materials for Teaching Social Studies” course last semester. That course, she said, changed her perspective on meaningful classroom conversations and prepared her with strategies for navigating difficult conversations in her future classroom.
She was excited for the opportunity to practice the skills she learned in McAvoy’s class in a real-world setting and hone the skills she will one day use as a K-12 educator. The materials used for the event are also available online for use by other teachers.
“This experience affirmed the importance of teaching [students] how to listen, engage thoughtfully and disagree respectfully,” Blyther said “Dining with Democracy showed me that when people are given the tools and the space to talk, real learning and connection can happen, and that is something I hope to bring into my own classroom every day.”
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Following the success of the Jan. 18 event, Roberts said she sees a place for future Dining with Democracy gatherings in Cary, but the impact of her work with McAvoy and Byrd, and her attendance at the NC-ACE event last year, continues to grow.
For example, thanks to connections she made during A Day of Civic Learning, Roberts was recently able to attend a conference on civic health engagement at Elon University, which she would not have known about otherwise.
“I would not be as engaged as I am now if I had not gone to the NC-ACE event,” she said.
Dining and Cooking