Collaborative-Dialogic Practice: Relationships and Conversations That Make a Difference Across Contexts and Cultures
Description:
Have you ever wondered how to successfully communicate with someone who sees the world from an entirely different angle than you do? Often the chasm seems impossible to navigate, even with the best of intentions. Whether you work in a boardroom, schoolroom, therapy room, or community organization, Collaborative-Dialogic Practice offers a humanizing approach to facilitating dialogues that make a difference in our fast-changing, diverse, and ever-shrinking world. These practices encourage relationships and conversations that create a generative space and promote meaningful transformations, even in the most difficult situations. This approach involves an epistemological and mindset shift in how we think about ourselves, the people we meet, what we do together, and how we do it. Grounded in social constructionism, the main feature of the practice, the philosophical stance, guides the professional in particular ways of being, talking, thinking, and acting with others. Rather than assuming an expert position of authoritative knowledge, collaborative practitioners use curiosity, not-knowing, and uncertainty to engage others in meaningful dialogue that generates new understandings, informing future possibilities that were previously unimagined by either person alone.