Negotiations, Writing&Conflict

Catalog description

The course involves students in an eclectic writing process that includes legal research, conflict analysis and public speaking. Modeled in part upon the Harvard Negotiation Project's Getting To Yes methodology, the course also involves newly emerging practices that challenge the notion of argument and encourage exchange between disputing parties. The thesis of the course is that, when individuals embroiled in a conflict begin to hear and understand one another's stories, they have the option to change and to grow. Although courtrooms and trials will be examined, quite unlike a law course, the format for our class includes dramatic performance, passages from fiction and poetry as well as essays to reveal the common sense that can provide peace between warring interests. The focused goal of this sequence of readings, dramatic exercises and writing is for each student to evolve and to articulate communication strategies for crisis situations.