Elective Courses

Conflict Resolution Certificate students are required to register and participate in one elective course; elective course offerings vary each semester. Some examples of elective courses offered in the past are listed below.

The regular ICCCR course, Managing Conflict in Organizations (3 credits or noncredit), may satisfy the elective requirement.

Apart from the elective course requirement, Conflict Resolution Certificate students are required to complete the four required core courses (see Core Courses) as well as the conflict resolution internship (see Internships).

ORLJ 5012:
Conflict & Creative Problem-Solving
(1 credit or noncredit)
An experiential approach to thinking about and working with conflict & creativity. Participants work with a model of creative problem solving & apply it to some of the major problems in resolving conflict.

ORLJ 4861:
Managing and Resolving Conflicts Through Large Group Methods
(3 credits 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 4869: Communication Approach to Transformation and Managing Meaning: Using CMM
(1 credit or noncredit)
This course will use CMM (Coordinated Management of Meaning Heuristics) to develop a broader and deeper understanding of yourself, the person or people you are in conflict with, the relationship and the context.  Participants will develop their skills in communication, building relationships and reframing their conflicts.

ORLJ 4859:
Conflict Resolution & the Psychology of Humiliation
(3 credist 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 4875:
Building Cultures of Peace: Nonviolence Strategies & Conflict Transformation
(3 credits or noncredit)
A survey course of non-violent movements in cultural contexts around the world. Exploratory in approach & method, the course builds on previous research and scholarship, but also relies on student initiative, in an effort to understand the cultural phenomenon of domestic and global nonviolence in recent history.

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 5016:
Conflict and Complexity: A Dynamical Systems Approach to Addressing Protracted Conflict
(1 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.