Hi. My name is Ellen Ott Marshall, and I teach at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. Welcome to the second week of this course on conflict transformation our focus this week is self assessment which is the most important starting place in the work of conflict transformation. We can't simply storm into a conflict zone and try to transform things there without paying attention to what we're bringing with us moreover, in just our everyday actions in life we need to be really attentive to the ways in which we experience conflict and how we're sort of triggered or tend to respond to it. So, self-assessment is absolutely key. It's key to constructive engagement with conflict. There are many different ways to get clarity about how you respond to conflict, many different kinds of self assessment. I want to tell you about three of them and each kind has its own purpose. It reveals certain kinds of information about you. And you have a different sort of experience in completing these different, Self-assessments. The first is a self-assessment instrument that is more like a personality test, so you are given a series of questions and you are asked how you respond. It is important to have a concrete example in mind because we respond very differently to conflict in different settings. These instruments are helpful because they give you a result that's related to some five different types of conflict response. And so you can take that individual experience and map it onto a range of possible reactions and we're going to talk about that considerably in a future lesson. The second kind of self assessment are things that you might do with a group and it's helpful to think about these as kind of community building exercises. So, if you were with the group at work, at school and some kind of of community organisation, and any kind of civic setting. Sometimes it can be really helpful to get some understanding of people's tolerance for conflict and the ways that they react to it. And it can be really off putting to hand out a personality instrument as a way to that. So, you might do something else instead either ice breaker exercises where you have people talk about what conflict animal are best captures them. So do they respond to conflict like a turtle going into their shell, do they respond to conflict like a shark on the attack, right? So, you can play with conflict animals, and that's a great icebreaker and a lot of fun as an exercise with a group of people. The other thing that I've done sometimes with groups Is simply to have people complete a sentence. And this is something else that I asked you all to do, as you were getting ready for this week. To think about a conflict, have a specific conflict in mind, or two, so you can get some contrast, and then to complete the sentence, I responded to that conflict like a. And you fill in the blank, right. Do you respond like the great zen master, totally chill, just absorbing, staying grounded? Do you respond like a ball in a pinball machine, just ping-ponging around? The third kind of assessment are more artistic approaches, so think about your own sort of sensibilities and the way you like to investigate things. The way you like to gather information. Some of you might gravitate toward instruments like I described. Some of you might enjoy doing this kind of thing in social settings. Others of you might really love to sit down with some space and time and a big piece of paper and some markers and do what's called a conflict history map. I've done this with students in classrooms and I am always amazed at what they are able to represent. What I ask them to do is to take a big piece of paper. All the markers they want and to trace on that sheet of paper some visual representation of the experience in their lives, the influences in their lives that have shaped their response to conflict. And it's remarkable what comes out for some people it's a pivotal moment, right? That taught them something about conflict and how to respond to it. Other people go deep into a description of their family and their culture and how they have learned in formal settings and informal settings how to respond to conflictual experiences. Some people trace this as a kind of timeline. Other people use images that capture moments but not necessarily in a linear narrative. But it's a wonderful way to reflect pictorially, right, visually who you are and why you are that way, and how you came to be that way, and then to focus more specifically on how all of that identity and formation is at play in an experience of conflict. For the first two instruments, when you are taking a personality test, and when you're doing the sentence completion or thinking about a conflict animal, it's most helpful to complete those exercises with a particular conflict or a context in mind. And that's because we do respond differently to conflict in different context, as we should. For the more artistic version, you have a broader sense of your life and so, that's give you a little bit more freedom to think not so much about how you respond in a particular context but how you have been shaped or formed to respond to conflict. In this week, we will first unpack the self assessments that you completed, looking at five different conflict styles, and then we'll consider the ways in which these conflicts styles match and don't match different kinds of conflict.
