Courses for Graduate Credit and Professional Development

Gloria Rhodes, Gaurav Pathania and Osar Siwali 

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Analysis focuses on understanding the factors that cause conflict and violence and those that support peacebuilding. Good conflict analysis skills are a central component of designing effective strategies for transforming conflict and building peace.

Course participants will use lenses including identity (gender, religion, nationality, etc.), human needs, narratives, power, culture, worldview, and others to understand conflict and propose possibilities for change.  Case studies of conflicts at multiple levels will provide content and an opportunity to practice analysis skills individually and in small groups. Participants will become more aware of their own roles and biases in conflicts through self-analysis and will develop their ability to “see” and describe conflict from different perspectives. The class will also focus on research strategies for gathering and organizing data and developing theories of change as an intermediate step from analysis to designing effective social change.

Syllabus

Katie Mansfield & Ram Bhagat

During STAR Level II participants are invited to:

• Share STAR experiences from your context with each other.

• Review the core concepts of STAR and the 3-part STAR snail model, using Village STAR, a practical and simply illustrated manual.

• Practice exercises and skills that promote healing and build resilience.

• Plan and receive feedback on how you will engage STAR concepts and tools.

• Reflect on your own position, power, and challenges as a STAR practitioner.

• Envision and understand how to shape structural and organizational change toward trauma-informed, resilient organizations and communities.

The Level II training includes additional content, exercises, and skills for addressing trauma and building resilience to deepen the experiences from STAR I. Participants will create and present action plans about how they will adapt and apply STAR concepts and pedagogy within their work and life contexts. Upon completing STAR II, participants are invited to join the STAR online learning community, a group of STAR Practitioners working in a variety of contexts, sharing their questions, learnings, and experiences.

Syllabus

Paula Ditzel Facci

In this course, participants are invited to investigate ways in which colonial violence, oppression and unequal power dynamics are reproduced and perpetuated in peacebuilding, conflict transformation and justice initiatives, and to collectively explore possibilities to decolonize them. Decolonizing is approached as individual and collective creative processes through which to critically reflect and address colonial violence, to harness the potential in existing alternatives and strengthen solidarity for further creation of interdependent possibilities of transformation. 

Discussion, exchange and artistic practices like movement, music, contemplation, storytelling, poetry, painting and other possibilities will provide the means to foster the decolonizing creative process. Absolutely no artistic experience is necessary. The goal is to sparkle imagination through broadening ways of knowing, being and doing that nurture the emergence of decolonial possibilities of re-imagined peacebuilding. 

Some of the questions that guide this exploration are:

• How can decolonial approaches to peacebuilding address colonial violence? In what ways do these approaches facilitate a more transformative peace experience through artistic processes? 

• What if arts are not only hanging on the walls of meeting rooms, but decolonization as an art practice is part of the decision-making process itself? 

• What if peacebuilders, leaders and participants engage collectively in creative processes of artistic peace-making as a decolonizing strategy? 

• What if the roles of leaders, artists, peacebuilders and participants are re- signified in a participatory manner and participants are seen and encouraged as creators in the processes of art-making and peacebuilding? 

• How can decolonizing as art-practice by people in daily lives envision new possibilities of peaces? 

• Considering your own location in colonial systems, as well as in the web of relationships, what next step can you and your communities or organizations take to creatively respond to colonial violence and foster transformative peacebuilding initiatives?

Amanda Gross

How do we build collective power to hold systems and structures accountable while co-creating life-giving alternatives? How can we organize from a place of solidarity and align our methods with our peacebuilding and social justice goals? This seven-day intensive will delve into strategies, considerations, and tensions within intergenerational grassroots community organizing for collective liberation with a focus on leadership development, political education, power mapping, mutual aid, and culture shift.

Gloria Rhodes and David Malual Wuor Kuany

As individuals working for peace, social justice, and the reduction of violence, we are the instrument of the work. Therefore, we need to cultivate our ability to engage conflict and injustice with wisdom, compassion, and clarity.

Participants will strengthen their abilities to understand and manage self and to attend to self-care, to listen and communicate, create and maintain healthy boundaries, recognize and promote diversity, lead from their vision and values, and engage people in dialogue and decision-making. The course will survey leadership roles, key skills, systematic processes, and varied contexts within the broad field of peacebuilding and conflict resolution/transformation. Contemporary strategies for structuring conversations and decision-making, including arts-based approaches, will be explored along with traditional processes of negotiation, mediation, and facilitation.  

Course participants will gain a holistic understanding of self as person, practitioner, and leader, with emphasis on the importance of intellectual, emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being and growth.

 Syllabus

Joe Cole and DeMointé Wesley

For Restorative Justice practitioners, what core competencies support the work of addressing differences in culture and power? Although RJ practices seek to equalize power and difference, they do not eliminate them. In fact, RJ has often been accused of protecting institutions and their representatives by obfuscating harmful power dynamics

This discussion, theory, and practice-based course offers an in-depth exploration of core competencies for working across lines of difference and power. Questions and topics include: organizing and working across lines of difference; addressing issues of power, identity, positionality; the origins of RJ and settler-colonialism; critiques of RJ from transformative justice; distinguishing between conflict and harm; and how RJ work is connected to historical and ongoing institutional harms. Students will develop, practice, and apply facilitation skills and reflective practices to address power dynamics in different contexts. By the end of this course, students will be equipped with the foundational knowledge and practical tools necessary to apply Restorative Justice facilitation in real-world situations and contribute to living and practicing restoratively in their personal, community, and professional lives.

Bridget Mullins

Communities worldwide are navigating profound ecological shifts - water scarcity, land displacement, climate adaptation, resource conflicts, loss of biodiversity, and others. These interconnected, context-specific challenges require us to reimagine how we collaborate - practicing approaches that can hold uncertainty and complexity, navigate power, engage diverse knowledge and perspectives, and support collective action.

This course develops your capacity to design and facilitate participatory processes for ecological and social change. You'll learn skills for convening people across difference, creating conditions where collective wisdom can surface, and supporting individuals and groups to expand their capacity for skillful action, whether you're working within grassroots movements, civic institutions, or multi-stakeholder initiatives.

Through hands-on practice and experiential learning, you'll explore:

• Designing participatory processes that engage diverse stakeholders and knowledge systems
• Building trust and working adaptively with what emerges across a group
• Holding space for the full range of human response to ecological loss and change
• Developing your presence, attunement, and skillfulness as a facilitator
• Coaching individuals and groups to cultivate new capacities for generative action

We'll practice with methods communities are using around the world, including:

• Climate scenario planning and collective sense-making tools
• Participatory design and co-creative approaches
• Group coaching frameworks for transformation
• Structured methods for unlocking collective intelligence and creativity
• Nature-based and somatic practices for individual and group resilience

You'll leave with:

• Reconnection to yourself and to the living world as you develop your practice
• A toolkit of methods you can apply immediately
• Processes you've designed for your own context and workshopped with peers
• Connections with a global community committed to ecological and social transformation

No prior facilitation experience required. Bring your questions, your context, and your willingness to practice.

Paula Ditzel Facci

This course will focus on social and global processes of transformation by exploring global challenges, local experiences and struggles, and transnational solidarities that emerge in response to those challenges. It will be concerned with institutions, relations of power, and the relationship between power and the production of justice and peacebuilding theories and practices. 

The course will pick up where the core courses Formation for Peacebuilding Practice and Analysis: Understanding Conflict left off, aiming to add to students’ comprehensive overview of justice and peacebuilding practice and its multi-disciplinary, multi-level aspects. Whereas Formation for Peacebuilding Practice and Analysis: Understanding Conflict centered on personal, interpersonal and communitarian transformation analysis, theory and practice, this course will equip students to further develop their knowledge and skills for dealing with conflict and situations of injustice and building sustainable peace. Particular focus will be given to social, state, and political change with increased sensitivity to race, gender, ecology, and other political economy traditions. Particular attention will be given to the colonial legacies and decolonial possibilities in justice and peacebuilding, exploring decoloniality as both an epistemic and a political project.

Action and struggle for justice and peacebuilding are always found in peoples’ local, place-based experiences, but to gain understanding in order to effect change, we have to explore their global features. To do this we will examine the intersections and overlaps among the local and the global, including the transnational solidarities that connect local struggles around the world. Students will become familiar with theories and frameworks that help explain the causes and dynamics of larger-scale conflicts, injustice, and structural violence. Students will work individually and in small groups to apply these ideas and skills to cases that progress in complexity from the community to the national and global levels (and back again). Students will also continue to develop their self-awareness as well as their capacity for professional judgment and reflective practice with attention to vocation, values, ethics, faith and spirituality. 

Lisa Collins and Hyojin Chang

Traumatic events impact how individuals and groups think, feel, and behave as well as how societies are organized. Unhealed trauma often leads to violence and violence causes more violence as victims act out against others or become self-destructive. Created to help those who work with individuals, groups, or communities suffering from current or historic trauma, the STAR training presents – in both theory and practice – an integrated approach to understanding the trauma, conflict, and violence caused by nature, human beings, and/or structural systems.

STAR is for those who want to bring a trauma-informed perspective to their work. The course brings together learnings from neurobiology, conflict transformation, human security, spirituality, and restorative justice to:

• Increase awareness of the impact of trauma on the body/brain, beliefs, and behavior of individuals, communities, and societies;
• Offer tools and processes for addressing trauma and breaking cycles of violence;
• Explore ways of building individual and collective resilience, including self-care strategies.
• Discuss meta-level trauma awareness as well as personal/societal situations that have caused trauma and how to move forward.

Syllabus

Catherine Barnes

How do we help create and hold space for people and groups of all sizes to engage with each other in transformative change amidst conflict? How can dialogue support conflict resolution, while empowering shifts in relationships and system-structures? How can facilitation help to strengthen social movements and prepare for engagement across divides? How can we proactively cultivate spaces in which all feel empowered to be their authentic selves and where systemic power asymmetries are addressed within and through the process? How can people feel compassionately held as they grapple with complex, contentious and even harmful issues and situations? And how can they do their best thinking together, so as to find creative and integrative solutions to contentions and complex challenges?
This class is intended for people already experienced in facilitating groups who want to engage more intentionally with conflict and change processes. It will help deepen understanding and skills for:

 Integrating conflict analysis lenses and principles with deliberative dialogue process design to enable purposeful and effective process design.
 Consultative assessment stage: exploring and assessing the context, framing the guiding questions and enabling co-design, and grappling with ethical and strategic issues in convening processes.
 Creating the container to hold challenging conversations with courage, care and creativity.
 Methods for deep dialogue to foster human connection, empathy and widening perspectives and understanding.
 Principles and practices for collaborative decision-making and facilitating consensus building.
 Methods for working with the past and for envisioning the future.

Sheryl Wilson, Christine E. Crouse-Dick, Rachel Epp Buller

The Slow Leadership Framework emerges from our shared experiences as higher education
leaders in communication, restorative justice, and the visual arts. This course offers an
alternative to forceful, autocratic, and anxiety-driven models of leadership. Grounded in
Circle Process and Deep Listening, it invites participants to explore how centering
relationships in the workplace fosters more equitable and sustainable forms of leadership.
Through a sequence of reflective processes, creative prompts, and interactive exercises,
students will experiment with shifts in language and behavior and cultivate awareness of
physical and emotional contexts. These practices help reduce stress, strengthen
community, and open pathways to more inclusive, collaborative problem-solving across a
range of settings.

Wayne Marriott

This graduate-level course introduces students to the evolving role of the Organisational Ombuds as a strategic resource for fostering ethical culture, psychological safety, and constructive conflict engagement within institutions. Drawing on interdisciplinary frameworks from peace-building, conflict management, organisational behaviour, and restorative justice, students will explore how Ombuds offices operate as confidential, informal, independent, and impartial spaces for navigating conflict and disputes and surfacing systemic concerns.

Through a combination of theory, case analysis, and experiential learning, students will Explore:

• Multi-party meetings and group work: Examine the principles and practices of restorative processes in organisational settings.
• Organisational culture: Develop skills in conflict analysis, facilitation, and systemic issue identification.
• Standards of Practice: Explore the ethical practice dimensions of informal dispute resolution.
• Conflict Coaching: Understand the Ombuds' role in enabling people to create, apply and maintain conflict competence.
• Return on investment. Critically assess the impact of Ombuds programs on organisational health and governance.

This course is ideal for graduate students in fields such as conflict resolution, peacebuilding, public administration, psychology, and business who are interested in careers that involve mediation, organisational leadership, transforming engagement into peaceful organisations, or human resources. It prepares students to contribute to the design and implementation of Ombuds programs and to become advocates for restorative and inclusive approaches to conflict in complex systems.