Courses for Graduate Credit and Professional Development

Gloria Rhodes 

Watch a video about this class

Watch a video about this course!

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

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. 

Jason Ferenczi

Peacebuilders work in situations marked by uncertainty, overlapping identities, and continual
change all playing out amidst complex historical circumstances. Yet the institutional frameworks through which most peacebuilding is conceived, organized, funded, and evaluated assume a predictable world: identify the problem, develop an appropriate intervention, implement it effectively, and measure the resulting change.

Experienced practitioners often know that their work does not actually unfold this way.
Communities and conflicts are living and continually evolving. Interventions produce unexpected consequences. Histories remain active in the present. The people seeking to influence a situation are themselves participants within it. Change emerges through relationships and interactions that no individual actor can fully understand, much less control.

The dissonance between these realities and the ways practitioners are often expected to work
can take a significant toll. Peacebuilding frequently attracts deeply committed people who carry a strong sense of responsibility for addressing suffering and injustice. Practitioners often find themselves searching for the right intervention, theory, or framework that will finally produce the change they seek. When the world repeatedly resists these expectations, the result can be frustration, exhaustion, cynicism, or an ever more determined search for better tools and greater control.

This course invites students to consider another possibility: What might it mean to practice
peacebuilding as a responsible participant in complex realities that we cannot fully know or
control?

Drawing on diverse traditions of complexity thinking, living systems, and peacebuilding practice, the course will explore ways of knowing and acting marked by epistemological humility, attention, relationality, and responsiveness. Complexity will not be offered as a new master framework or a replacement for existing peacebuilding approaches. Instead, students will use complexity thinking as a collection of lenses through which to examine and reinterpret the realities of their own work.

Two questions will guide the course:
How do we act responsibly in a world we cannot fully know or control?
What do you see now that you couldn't see before?

Joe Cole & Toya Fernandez

What does it mean to practice restorative justice when the harm we seek to address did not begin with us, but lives within our histories, institutions, identities, bodies, and relationships?

Rooted in the Akan principle of Sankofa; the responsibility to return to the past to retrieve what is necessary to move forward; Sankofa Circles expands approaches to restorative justice that focus on interpersonal harm to practicing and examining the historical, cultural, structural, and intergenerational conditions that shape our relationships and our capacity for collective healing.

Through an integration of critical dialogue, restorative circle processes, storytelling, ancestral reflection, embodied practices, and experiential learning, participants will engage in three interconnected phases of the Sankofa framework.

Ancestral Grounding and Community Formation: Participants begin by exploring identity, lineage, belonging, historical memory, and the ancestral experiences that inform how they navigate the world. 

Racial Affinity Work and Collective Healing: Participants move into differentiated racial affinity spaces designed to support deeper reflection, healing, and accountability. 

Reconciliation, Accountability, and Repair: Participants reconvene in a shared restorative process grounded in courageous truth-telling, deep listening, witnessing harm, accountability, and collective responsibility.

Guiding questions include:

• How do historical and intergenerational harms continue to shape identity, relationships, institutions, and our understanding of justice?
• How might restorative justice move beyond responding to individual incidents of harm toward addressing structural and historical violence?
• What responsibilities do individuals and communities carry in confronting inherited systems of racial oppression?

By the conclusion of the course, participants will have developed a deeper understanding of decolonial restorative justice and gained experiential tools for facilitating healing-centered, culturally responsive, and accountable restorative processes within their own communities and professional contexts.

Gloria Rhodes and Brittany Caine Conley

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

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.

Syllabus

Lisa Collins & 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

Kimiko Lighty and Liz London

Katie Mansfield and Saulo Padilla

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

Eunice Githae & Jake Cook

While transformative approaches to conflict, trauma, and justice hold space for the possibilities of forgiveness and reconciliation, these concepts often present with a great deal of tension and sometimes are gestured toward as distant, even remote possibilities. This course will start at this point of possibility, offering not only a theoretical analysis of these concepts but also frameworks and strategies for their application. This work will move across and between the scales of harm and healing, from macro-level structural reform to micro-level individual and interpersonal healing and repair.

Sharon McKenna

Peacebuilding projects require both thoughtful planning, an understanding of processes and tools that can support any size project, and the ability to lead people through complexity and change. This interactive course brings together practical project management skills and tools with a whole-person approach to leadership, exploring how we organize the work while cultivating the relationships that sustain it. Through real-world peacebuilding cases, hands-on activities, and shared reflection, participants will practice defining a project’s purpose, developing plans, coordinating resources, navigating conflict, and adapting as circumstances change. Attention to communication, team development, and participants’ own leadership strengths connects these tools to everyday practice. Participants will leave with approaches they can apply to projects in their own communities and organizations.