Description of Courses Offered
Our Basic Practicum in Conflict Resolution and Mediation course presents a general model of conflict resolution wherein students are given the opportunity to practice and reinforce skills of the basic collaborative model we teach. An alternative starting point for students is the Fundamentals of Cooperation, Conflict Resolution and Mediation in Different Institutional Settings, our theory course where they study the major theories and research of the field from the previous decades to current trends. These two courses serve as prerequisites for students taking the Advanced Practicum Part I - Intergroup Conflict and Third Party Interventions, in which students delve deeper into the issues of conflict, especially intergroup conflicts. They are given the opportunity to put into practice the different and more advanced models of third-party interventions, such as, multi-party mediations. For the second advanced course, Advanced Practicum Part II – subtitled, Designing Conflict Management Systems, students consult to a non-profit organization where they engage in a whole spectrum of professional consulting activities – developing research protocols, survey instruments, needs assessment, handling focus groups, and at times, performing recommended interventions. In addition to the four required core courses, students are asked to take an elective from the wide array of conflict resolution courses the Center offers. Some recent past offerings include: Conflict & Complexity: A Dynamical Systems Approach to Addressing Protracted Conflict; Healing and Reconciling Relationships in Conflict; Conflict Resolution and the Psychology of Humiliation and Creativity and Negotiation. Lastly, students pursuing the Certificate in Conflict Resolution have an internship experience, participating in either community mediation practice or community facilitation opportunities. We are expanding our internship offerings to reflect the growing diversity of interventions in the field.
Core Courses:
ORLJ 5340: Basic Practicum in Conflict Resolution (3 credits or noncredit). An experiential course aimed at developing basic collaborative negotiation and mediation skills for interpersonal conflict in a variety of contexts. Students will have the opportunity to develop more self awareness and basic collaborative negotiation skills with supervised practice. These skills include: identifying the difference between needs and positions, identifying and using cooperative as opposed to competitive strategies, identifying and avoiding fundamental attribution errors, learning to deal with anger and other behaviors in conflict situations; and gaining a better understanding of your role in these conflict situations. In the mediation component of the course, students will be trained in basic mediation skills and will have supervised practice of these skills. These skills include: setting up and opening a mediation, utilizing mediation guidelines to facilitate disputant communication, remaining impartial, reframing, facilitating brainstorming, facilitating cross‑cultural perspective‑taking and closing the mediation.
ORLJ 6040: Fundamentals of Cooperation, Conflict Resolution and Mediation Theory in Different Institutional Settings (3 credits or noncredit). This is a survey course of basic theory & research in the conflict resolution field. Students will cover basic topics such as cooperation and competition, power, culture, justice, negotiation and mediation, violence, intergroup conflict and intractable conflict as they relate to theoretical and practical issues of conflict management and resolution at the intra-psychic, interpersonal, intergroup, organizational, and international levels. It will emphasize the links between theory, research, and practice in conflict resolution.
ORLJ 6350, 001: Advanced Practicum in Conflict Resolution, Part I (3 credits or noncredit). An applied course in the concepts and skills used when intervening in intergroup conflicts. The course is primarily concerned with how group differences (such as class, power, culture, race, and gender) can affect negotiation, mediation and change facilitation processes.
ORLJ 6350, 002: Advanced Practicum in Conflict Resolution, Part II – Designing Conflict Management Systems (3 credits or noncredit). A practical approach that uniquely integrates organizational development, alternative dispute resolution, and dispute systems design principles into a working model to help assess conflict & evaluate processes within organizations. This course offers the unique opportunity for students to develop these skills while working with an actual organization in the area.
Elective Courses:
Each semester the ICCCR sponsors a Conflict Resolution Elective course, based upon new and emerging trends in the conflict resolution field. Although elective courses vary from semester to semester, those that have been offered in the past include:
ORLJ 4861: Managing and Resolving Conflicts Through Large Group Methods (1 credit or noncredit). This course provides students with information and an experiential introduction to four large group processes: Open Space, Future Search, Appreciative Inquiry and Dialogue. After students experience these methods, they work in small groups to lead the class in one of the four methods as they apply it to managing and resolving conflicts.
ORLJ 4859: Conflict Resolution and the Psychology of Humiliation (1 credit or noncredit). This course presents the theory of humiliation, showing that the capacity to humiliate and be humiliated are aspects of a dense web of “hot” filaments wired into the tissue of culture, giving it a potentially explosive character that is too little recognized.
ORLJ 4857: The Art of Listening (1credit or noncredit). Listening is a critical skill in the resolution of conflicts. We all encounter conflict at different times in our lives and the skills learned in this class will facilitate our being able to better resolve these conflicts. It also offers very practical skill practice and advice for those wishing to be practitioners in the field.
ORLJ 4870: Conflict Resolution: Experiential Education Methods and Design (1 credit or noncredit). An interactive course designed for conflict resolution facilitators interested in expanding their skills on planning, delivering, and debriefing experiential learning activities and programs.
ORLJ 5148: Managing Conflict in Organizations. (3 credits) This course is designed to address conflicts that occur in the context of organizations. It is a blend of a strong theoretical foundation with experiential applications to develop skills and approaches to manage or resolve these conflicts. This course is a requirement for Masters Degree students in Social-Organizational Psychology and may be used as an elective for students seeking the Certificate of Attendance in Conflict Resolution.
ORLJ 5016: Conflict and Complexity: A Dynamical Systems Approach to Addressing Protracted Conflict (1 to 3 credit). This course will develop the relevance of dynamical systems theory for understanding protracted and seemingly intractable conflict at different levels of social reality (interpersonal, inter-group, international). The course will outline the conditions under which such conflict can be transformed and thus may point the way to realizable avenues of conflict resolution.
ORLJ 5016: Conflict Resolution in Schools: Pedagogy and Curriculum Design. This course investigates the field of conflict resolution education in the context of supporting student academic achievement, increasing social and emotional learning, and creating positive and caring classrooms. The course will integrate theory and practice, looking at research and evaluation on conflict resolution education, diverse program models, and the approaches of organizations active in this field. Participatory activities will allow students to experience first-hand effective strategies that support students’ learning of essential social-emotional skills.
ORLJ 5016: Healing and Reconciling Relationships in Conflict. This course examines the role that unaddressed and unhealed emotional trauma plays in creating and maintaining conflict. It also highlights unaddressed trauma as an obstacle to reconciliation—our ability to put the past to rest and to rebuild relationships that have broken under the strain of conflict. Using evolutionary psychology theory, a framework is presented that explains our emotional human vulnerability, showing that threats to our inner psychological stability are as dangerous as physical wounds and perhaps more so because they are often ignored and left unattended. The framework uses the language of dignity and indignity to describe the universal effect emotional injuries have on human beings. The course presents the Dignity Model—a way of repairing, reconciling and building human relationships. The Dignity Model has been applied in the workplace, schools, churches, and interpersonal relationships.
ORLJ 5016:Creativity and Negotiation. This course examines creativity within the context of negotiation. Within the negotiation process a clear phase of idea generation emerges. The difference between successful outcomes in negotiation and outcomes that are compromises on both sides is the ability to generate novel ideas that lead to positive results. In order to generate ideas one must become familiar with the creative process. The course reviews the concepts of divergent/convergent thinking, creative negotiation templates, close and distant associations, the role of brain preferential thinking, and incubation periods.
ORLJ 5016: Transforming Conflict From Within: Leadership Interventions in Long-term Conflicts. This course is designed to engage students as leaders and interventionists in their own and others’ long-term conflicts. The course treats long-term conflict as a complex phenomenon that requires a complex approach to transformation. The course applies four realms to transform long-term conflict: wisdom (knowing), cognition (thinking), affect (feeling), and behavior (acting). A particular emphasis is placed on wisdom. Wisdom is developed using a practice called mindfulness.
Internship:
ORLJ 5012: Organizational Internship – Community Mediation (3 credits or noncredit). In mediation, an impartial third party guides disputants through a series of problem-solving steps to diffuse their conflict, communicate more effectively and find their own solutions. This course teaches students how to provide a collaborative way of resolving differences between individuals, groups, and organizations as an alternative to prolonged litigation or violence. Students participate in two weekend workshops & conduct follow-up supervised community mediation.
Certificate of Attendance in Conflict Resolution
The Certificate of Attendance in Conflict Resolution comprises five required courses, an elective and one semester of internship. The Certificate is made up of 16 credit units. This level of study is aimed at developing the core competencies for reflective scholar/practitioners working in conflict resolution. These include:
The Certificate, if pursued for credit, may also be taken as part of a Master’s or Doctorate degree in the Social-Organizational Psychology program or as a concentration in the degree programs in Adult and Continuing Education. Conflict Resolution coursework may, with approval of appropriate departments, be transferred to other Masters and Doctorate programs at Teachers College such as: Arts Administration, Bilingual Education, Computing and Education, Counseling Psychology, Curriculum and Teaching, Early Childhood Education, Educational Administration, Health Care Administration, Higher Education Administration, Peace Education and International and Transcultural Education.
Summer 2009 Course Schedule