Cooperative Communication Skills -- Online Resource Center

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The NewConversations.net Open Source Library

Interpersonal Communication Skills and Conflict Resolution
Books, Essays, Articles, Scholarly Papers & Teaching Materials

Dennis Rivers, MA, Editor

The short URL of this page is http://www.NewConversations.net/library/

   
 

~~~  Table of Contents  ~~~

  

Seven Challenges  Teaching Materials

 

 

The Seven Challenges Workbook and Reader is available free of charge as a series of web pages, each with an easy link to a printer-friendly version and as a single PDF file (2MB). (Printed copies available for purchase.)  (Dennis Rivers)

A one-page summary of the Seven Challenges
A single page version complete with the same color cartoon
illustrations that appear in the Workbook. (Dennis Rivers)

The Cooperative Communication EMERGENCY KIT
    A one-page list of suggestions about how to manage 
    and resolve conflicts. (Dennis Rivers & Paloma Pavel)

What Kind of Person Am I Becoming?  What Kind
of People Are We Becoming Together?
    Reflections on interpersonal communication 
    and the journey of becoming a person. (Dennis Rivers)

Reflections on the Struggle to Be Honest
    Honest conversations viewed as counseling 
    and counseling viewed as conversations that
    allow for honesty (Dennis Rivers)

The Geometry of Dialogue: A Visual Way of Understanding
Interpersonal Communication and Human Development Drawings and book.  (Dennis Rivers) The page linked by the title above contains links to mandala-like flow charts in PDF format, and to my 210-page exploratory study.  This material was a major part of my graduate work toward an M.A. degree in interpersonal communication and human development, which I received in 1997 from the Vermont College Graduate Program.  The study is the theoretical foundation of the the Seven Challenges Workbook, (complete with more footnotes than anyone would ever want to read).  It is my effort to work out the communication training implications of current thinking in the field of human development, using visual models as organizing tools.

  

Sam Keen

Radical Questions For Critical Times by Sam Keen,  teacher, writer of many books, and compassionate observer of the human drama.  This article explores questions that expand our horizons and deepen our engagement with life.  According to Dr. Keen, "Your question is the quest you're on. No questions -- no journey. Timid questions -- timid trips. Radical questions -- an expedition to the root of your being. Bon voyage."  
      This article has been included as a reading in Chapter 5 of the Seven Challenges Workbook.  For more information about Dr. Keen's books and workshops please visit
www.samkeen.com

  


W. Barnett Pearce

has taught communication studies at major universities and written many books and papers on interpersonal communication and public dialogue.  

 

MAKING SOCIAL WORLDS BETTER:  (PDF file)
Towards a grammar of ways of working that improve situations
[great ideas, some sections difficult reading! Editor.]

Note:  In order to keep many footnotes and references in place, this article is only available as an Adobe PDF file.  If you have not yet installed the free Adobe Acrobat Reader on your computer, expand your online experience by downloading (and installing) it today from www.adobe.com.

Introductory excerpt from MAKING SOCIAL WORLDS BETTER:

    A friend exclaimed, "What a wonderful world! Water falls out of the sky; food grows right out of the ground; and we get to keep all the love that we can make!"  In less exuberant terms, Richard Rorty described our social worlds as largely "contingent" and the quality of our lives determined by the consequences of our collective actions.  And so the question is, what kind of world are we making? What kind of world can we make?

    Perhaps there was a time in which predators (the cave bear?), competitors (Neanderthals?) or cataclysms (the Flood?) threatened humankind (the species, not just an individual), but we have become the dominant life form on the planet and - within some broad limits - the collective authors of our own fate. The greatest threats we face, as well as our greatest opportunities, are the products of our own ingenuity, initiatives and actions. Among other things, this implies a dramatic shift from the technical question of "will we survive?" to the aesthetic and moral questions of "how well can we live?" and "how can we live well?"
 

TAKING A COMMUNICATION PERSPECTIVE ON DIALOGUE (web page)
W. Barnett Pearce and Kimberly A. Pearce
(from the www.pearceassociates.com web site)

Excerpt:

Until recently, the disciplinary study of communication has apparently had little impact on the development of thought and practice of dialogue. To the best of our knowledge, none of the seminal figures in dialogue formally studied communication and none based their thinking about dialogue on theories of communication. For example, although the first chapter of David Bohm’s (1996) On Dialogue is titled “Communication,” the short (four page) treatment shows no connection to the scholarly work done by the academic discipline of communication. Martin Buber’s (1958) work was grounded in his philosophical investigations of the qualities of different forms of interpersonal relationships. Mikhael Bakhtin’s concept of dialogue emerged from a preoccupation with language and literature from the perspective that “No word can be taken back, but the final word has not yet been spoken and never will be spoken” (Morson & Emerson, 1990, p. 52). In a similar manner, most practitioner organizations that focus on dialogue ground their work on sources other than communication theory and research. For example, the Public Conversations Project applies concepts from family therapy to the public discourse (Chasin, et al., 1996); the National Issues Forums grounds their work on classical models of deliberation (Mathews, 1994, pp. 111-116); and Study Circles (2002) develop their practices on concepts of participatory democracy. ...

In addition to asking what [the growing body of work on] dialogue has to offer [the field of] communication [studies], we wonder what communication theory and research might offer for understanding and practicing dialogue.

 

Leah Wells

Teaching Peace

 

 

from the introduction:   This is a book for people who are interested in learning more about not only what peace education is, but where it is, when it is and how it is. It is about hearing perspectives on how it is taught, reading evidence that peace education is working, learning about the struggles and case studies and present-day evidence that nonviolence works and is not mere passivity as it is often mislabeled. This book is an opportunity to learn more about liberation education and to participate in the vision of how American education is an integral part of a global revolution to create balance and harmony between people, nature, technology, religion, economics and many other disciplines.

Leah Wells is a teacher and writer with a Bachelor of Science in Linguistics from Georgetown University. She has taught high school classes in Washington, DC, and California, lectured in cities all over the United States, and written extensively on the topic of teaching peace. Leah co-coordinates the National Campaign on Peace Education, a project endorsed by several notable organizations such as the Hague Appeal for Peace and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, to network teachers and learners working on peace education across the US.

Thanks to Leah Wells and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation for making this document available.

  

  Gene Knudsen Hoffman

Essays by Quaker peace activist, teacher and writer on compassionate listening and the search for reconciliation

  

COMPASSIONATE LISTENING: AN EXPLORATORY SOURCEBOOK
(a free, 33-page PDF document, also in web page format)
Perspectives and Resources About Conflict Transformation
By Gene Knudsen Hoffman, Leah Green and Cynthia Monroe.
 Introduction by Dennis Rivers

EIGHT ESSAYS BY GENE KNUDSEN HOFFMAN

"An enemy is one whose story we have not heard."  (GKH)

An introduction to these essays

1.  How Can We Make Peace 
If We Don't Listen to Our Enemies?

2.  Speaking Truth to Power 

3.  A New Approach to Peace 

4.  No Conflict, No Reconciliation 

5.  An Enemy Is One Whose Story We Have Not Heard

6.  Listening for Truth 

7. On Preventing Future Holocausts

8. Review of Forgiveness: Breaking the Chain of Hate, by Michael Henderson.

 

  

 

David Richo

Essays and exercises focused on personal relationships, from the books of Jungian psychotherapist David Richo 

 

Human Becoming << NEW: free e-book in PDF format
  (may take 2 to 4 minutes to download the file)
  An anthology of excerpts from Dr. Richo's many books
  on our journey toward becoming whole and human.
  Touches on love, fear, ego, drama, loneliness, courage,
  and kindness,among the many topics covered.(88 pages)

      Note:  In order to preserve the page formatting of this book,
      it is only available as an Adobe PDF file.  If you have not yet
      installed the free Adobe Acrobat Reader on your computer,
      expand your online experience by downloading (and installing)
      it today from     www.adobe.com

Self-Respect
   This exercise is about gently expanding the horizons
   of our own personal development, by coming back
   again and again to an extensive list of virtues, which
   actually represents the kind of person that life is
   yearning to become in and through us.  [This exercise
   is part of Dr. Richo's online book, Human Becoming,
   described above.]

Freedom From Fear
  An extended series of deeply personal affirmations
  intended to help a person move from fearing the next
  catastrophe to trusting life and their own inner resources.

Notes on Love as a Practice
  Love is a sustained and active presence with unconditional 
  attention, acceptance, appreciation, affection, and allowing 
  others to be as they are. [I call these "the five A's."]

A Brief View of Confessing and Amending
  To heal the distances that can grow out of unacknowledged
  hurts partners can practice an occasional confession to one
  another using these steps 

How to See

  Why do some things upset us so much? We sometimes
  notice that our reaction cannot quite be accounted for by
  the stimulus we have encountered. An introduction to
  looking within.

 

Dennis Rivers

Essays, articles, drawings, poems and science fiction.  For Seven Challenges books and teaching materials, click here. Dennis welcomes dialogue on all these topics.  You can e-mail him through our contact form.  (For a complete listing of Dennis's books and essays, all available free of charge in pdf or html format,  please visit www.karunabooks.net )

 

 

 

July 2005 Issue  -- Journal of Cooperative Communication Skills

Beyond the Hall of Mirrors
Reflections on War, Terror and Human Interaction

 


Essay: The Love of Children May Hold the Salvation of the World
 --  Reflections on Israel, Palestine and America

    This essay explores one possible value or principle that could make a stronger claim on people than revenge and nationalism.  I am especially concerned about this because personal and national revenge seem to make so much sense, yet lead their followers into a spiral of escalating injury from which there appears to be no exit.  I propose that focusing on the love of children could provide a face-saving way for all sides to back away from the brink of mutual destruction.  It would not be easy or automatic, but it would be worlds better than what is going on now.

Book on Web: Prayer Evolving
    My spiritual autobiography and exploration of meditating and
    praying with vivid imagery.  One approach to the question
    of how to stay positive and compassionate in the middle
    of difficult and/or chaotic situations.  My effort to write a
    23rd Psalm for the 21st century.


Book: Turning Toward Life: An Invitation to Explore Reverence for Life as a Spiritual Path (5.5MB PDF file. Book of essays, two by DR).

Includes contributions by Vijali, Joanna Macy, Rabbi Michael Lerner, Prof. Eugene Bianchi, and many others.  The is a pre-publication draft of a manuscript I hope to publish through traditional publishing channels as well as making it available on the web for free.  Green spirituality belongs to everyone!

Essay: An Ecology of Devotion, (PDF file) first published in EarthLight Magazine, explores five dimensions of reverence of life as expressed in the following morning prayer:

    I give thanks for the life that lives within me
    breath and heartbeat, joy and sorrow, dance and stillness

    I give thanks for the life that lives between us
    as loving, understanding, creating, embracing and letting go

    I give thanks for all the life forms that surround and support us
    for the web of life that feeds and protects us and also needs our care

    I give thanks for all the life of the future
    hidden in the present moment and inviting us
    to walk the path of infinite compassion

    I give thanks for the source of all life, and the source of my life,
    this living universe, of which my life is an expression.

Poem:  I found my father's little tape recorder today

One-page science-fiction manifesto about better communication
(large pdf file may take 10 to 20 seconds to download):

MORE...  complete listing of
Dennis Rivers's web sites plus books and essays online

  

Invitation to help/contribute...

write -- You are invited to submit essays, book reviews and papers on interpersonal communication, cooperative problem-solving, conflict resolution and related topics as candidates for inclusion in this library and the e-mail Journal of Cooperative Communication Skills.  Please submit articles intended for general and multi-disciplinary audiences. (The web site Editor reserves the right to select articles for publication on this site.)  If items are already on the Web, please submit URL.  We can accept documents in e-mail text format, RTF format, Word 97 or later, or Adobe PDF.  In keeping with the public service theme of this site, all items in the Library are accepted without royalties to writers and offered without charge to readers.  If an item has been previously published, please include signed permission from copyright holder to place on Web.  (Mail to address shown below.) E-mail documents to rivers@newconversations.net and please include postal mailing address.

Journal of Cooperative Communication Skills
c/o Dennis Rivers, Editor
1563 Solano Ave. #164
Berkeley, CA 94707
USA

Copyright 2007 by Dennis Rivers.
Permission to make copies of this page granted by authors.
May be included in course readers. See copyright page for details.

 .....




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