(FULL) Transformative Dialogue Training: Co-creating and Facilitating Conversations in Organizations and Communities

Transformative Dialogue Training:  Co-creating and Facilitating Conversations in Organizations and Communities

Tuesdays, October 4 – November 29 (no session Nov. 22) from 12:30-2:30 pm ET

Lead trainer Judy Saul, with weekly guest trainers, including Mia Bowers, Erik Cleven, Cherise Hairston, Susan Jordan and Sheri Tardio.

Transformative Dialogue:  Co-creating and Facilitating Conversations in Organizations and Communities provides participants with the understanding and skills to support people in communities and organizations in having meaningful and constructive conversations across differences; conversations that help change the quality of their interactions whether or not they agree at the end of the process.   

Participants will:

·           Learn how the transformative understanding of conflict applies to group and community conflict

·           Gain a relational understanding of identity, race, ethnicity, culture and power, and learn how transformative facilitators respond to these differences

• ·           Understand how transformative dialogue is consistent with trauma-informed practice
• ·           Learn to organize a participant-driven dialogue process through one-on-one and small group meetings and conversations with community members
• ·           Learn the goals, roles and core skills of a transformative facilitator
• ·           Learn techniques for facilitating open conversations and options for structuring interactions transformatively that allow even very large groups to share ideas and make decisions

About the course’s organization: 

This training consists of synchronous and asynchronous elements over 8 sessions. Each week participants will watch videos containing the course content and be asked to reflect on and apply the content. The videos are all newly produced and include a range of different practitioners working in a diversity of contexts and situations. The two-hour live sessions will include discussion and exercises that will allow participants’ to further engage with the content, learn and practice core skills and consider the best ways to put what they’re learning to use.

Who the course is for:

This course can be taken by people who are new to transformative theory and practice and those who may have more experience with transformative mediation or self-managed conflict. This training is a significant revision of earlier trainings in transformative dialogue, so even if you have taken an earlier training there is much to learn here. New elements include expanded premises on identity and people in groups, incorporation of trauma-informed practice into the training, and centering discussions of race, culture and power in the training. Whether you are interested in organizing and facilitating conversations in your local community, or in your workplace or organization you belong to, or you are working in an area of ethnopolitical conflict, this training will be an excellent starting point for this work.

• About the trainers:
• ·           Judy Saul is an ISCT Fellow and Board member and founder and former director of a community mediation center in Ithaca, NY. She has extensive experience planning and facilitating dialogues for municipal government, businesses, educational institutions and community-based organizations
• ·           Erik Cleven is a professor at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, NH and is vice president of the board of the ISCT. He has many years of experience working with dialogue in areas that have experienced ethnopolitical conflict.
• ·           Mia Bowers is executive director of Community Mediation of St. Mary's County in southern Maryland and has many years experience in transformative mediation and dialogue.
• ·           Cherise D. Hairston is a long-time staff member of the Dayton Mediation Center. She has extensive experience with transformative mediation and dialogue as well as with transformative conflict coaching.
• ·           Susan Jordan is executive director of Susquehanna Valley Mediation in Pennsylvania. She is a transformative mediator and facilitator and has experience with large group facilitation and family crisis mediation.

·           Sheri L. Tardio is director of Community Mediation Center of Calvert County in southern Maryland. She is a transformative mediator and facilitator and has worked on facilitating conversations on race in Calvert County.