The Handbook of Conflict Resolution (3rd ed)

by Peter T Coleman

  CONCLUSION

  This chapter has focused somewhat more on the early childhood end of the age spectrum primarily because there has historically been a dearth of research and evidence-based programming on later ages. Perhaps this is because it is far easier to learn good habits from the beginning than it is to have to relearn lessons at a later age. It is important to remember that learning does not stop with any particular age. Developmental advancement brings new levels of complexity to which we must develop appropriate strategies for managing the inevitable conflict that is a fact of living and growing.

  There are several directions for research to improve our understanding and practice of conflict and its resolution. The theory and practice of conflict resolution is a relatively young, rapidly developing field in the process of establishing rigorous evaluation of all aspects of programming. Evaluation studies to establish evidence-based programming will benefit practitioners and consumers by speaking to the efficacy of what is being taught. We need to quantify the amount of training that is necessary for the most effective skills’ development. Second, we need to explore how personal traits and characteristics are differentially responsive to our methods of instruction. Does one approach work for all? Obviously, it does not always or entirely, and we need to be aware of differences. For example, some children lack assertiveness and may require work in this area prior to successful conflict resolution functioning, while others have impulse or self-control issues that may increase their level of aggression in a conflict situation. Finally, research investigating what leads to transforming consciousness so that individuals are more likely to see similarities instead of differences in their lives would be valuable given the protracted conflicts we face nationally and internationally. Given where we are and where we want to go in this world, development in conflict resolution and social-emotional learning skills is so essential to the education of all our children that we must actively support infusion of this instruction throughout each child’s educational experience in school and at home.

  Notes

  1. For information, contact Priscilla Prutzman, executive director, Creative Response to Conflict, Box 271, 521 North Broadway, Nyack, NY 10960; phone 845-353-1796; Crc-global.org.

  2. That statistic will certainly be modified by the increasing use of media by today’s adolescents, given their penchant for multitasking with cell phones, laptops, iPods, social networking, and so on. A study by the Kaiser Family Foundation (Rideout, Foehr, and Roberts, 2010) found that eight- to eighteen-year-olds spend an average of seven hours thirty-eight minutes daily consuming media. This study linked heavy media use (sixteen hours or more a day) with lower grades and personal contentment.

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  PART FOUR

  CREATIVITY AND CHANGE

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CREATIVITY AND CONFLICT RESOLUTIONa The Role of Point of View

  Howard E. Gruber

  First conundrum: educators often view conflict as the problem child, the practitioner’s task as elimination of conflict. Students of creativity often view conflict as its necessary companion: (1) novelty engenders conflict and/or (2) creativity requires conflict.

  Second conundrum: conflict resolution requires collaboration, if not as the goal then at least as the means. Creative work has been treated, by and large, as an individual effort, sometimes painfully isolated.

  As an undergraduate at Brooklyn College, I learned from Solomon Asch, my teacher, about two interesting lines of research: his work on group pressures and his work with Witkin on frames of reference. Both of these bear on the issue of point of view, the major focus of this chapter. It has become clear to me, as to others, that an essential and almost omnipresent aspect of creative work is posing good questions. In studying Darwin’s notebooks and correspondence (Gruber, 1981), one sees that he gloried in discovering questions. He wrote many letters to scientists and naturalists around the world, posing challenging questions. His contemporaries were often mystified: Where did his questions come from? As a student, I adopted the position that having a novel point of view is the main thing. After all, among the contemporaries in question, then as now, were many good problem solvers—but where do their problems come from? Novel problems stem from a novel point of view. Then the central question becomes: How is a novel point of view constructed?

  In his 1996 book, Human Judgment and Social Policy, Kenneth Hammond distinguishes between theories of truth, which center on the correspondence of ideas with facts, and theories that look inward for coherence of ideas with other ideas. The latter, coherence theories, do not offer definite procedures for making judgments and consequently must rely on wisdom and intuition. Correspondence theories do so provide, but in a world teeming with uncertainties, there is a triple price to be paid—which Hammond (1996) sums up beautifully in the subtitle of his book: Irreducible Uncertainty, Inevitable Error, Unavoidable Injustice. In both existing and historically experienced circumstances, this view casts a pretty dark shadow. My chosen topic, however, is not judgment but its necessary prelude, discovering or inventing the alternatives to be judged and among which to choose. Here, what is needed is not so much accuracy or logic but creative imagination and construction.

  In this chapter, I give a brief account of the evolving systems approach to creative work, with special emphasis on point of view and social aspects of creativity. In addition, I explore some possible relations between creativity and conflict resolution, presenting experimental work with a “shadow box” designed to illuminate collaborative synthesis of disparate points of view.

  EVOLVING SYSTEMS APPROACH

  This approach is predicated on the uniqueness of each creative person as he or she moves through a series of commitments, problems, solutions, and transformations. These aspects of the creative process are not fixed, and they are not universal. Rather, they constantly evolve, and they differ from one creator to another. The system as a whole is composed of subsystems that are loosely coupled with each other. This looseness provokes the emergence of disequilibrium and the finding of new questions; consequently, it opens the way to unpredictable innovation.

  Our task is to describe how a given creator actually works. It is not our task to measure the amount of creativity or to find factors that apply in the same way to all creators. What is necessary for one creative person confronting a problem may be unnecessary or even ill-advised for another.

  The creative individual described here, interested in creativity in the moral domain, is only a first approximation. People who take responsibility want to make something happen. For this, they need allies, who must be persuaded, recruited, trained, and supported. Moreover, a full expression of morality would bring together moral thought, moral feeling, and moral action. Beyond these components, there must be creative integration. Although this last is rarely discussed, Donna Chirico has made an interesting effort in her integrative article, “Where Is the Wisdom? The Challenge of Moral Creativity at the Millennium” (1999). And of course, Erich Fromm’s whole oeuvre is a reflection on such a synthesis. (See Fromm, 1962, for example.)

  In her case study of Niebuhr, Chirico shows how the quest for integration of thought, feeling, and action can lead to surprising results, can even go astray. She shows how Niebuhr achieved such an integration, but at a price. As he grew in influence, he gained new opportunities to move to the plane of moral action. But this brought him into collaborative interaction with a largely conservative establishment. In a series of such contacts, he became more conservative. Chirico (1999) writes, “As Niebuhr became involved increasingly in the political power structure as an insider, his radical views about the role of government shifted toward those of the authority figures he had previously denounced. Niebuhr moved from speaking as an independent thinker, whose ideology was informed by the Christian message, to acting as an advocate for the prevailing opinions of the United States government.”

  Chirico stresses the difficulty, the need for the hard and steady work required, if we want to contribute to social transformation. She writes, “In a postmodern world where all is relative anyway, it is easier to accept inequity in the guise of personal or cultural differences than to take a moral stand . . . without moral creativity there can be no attempt. This involves self-sacrifice so that a community of concerned selves can come together and provoke change. It starts with taking a moral stand.”

  Each creative case presents different aspects for study. These evolving opportunities may be grouped under three major headings: knowledge, purpose, and affect. All of them apply in the first instance to the creative individual at work. In addition, there are aspects that apply to the creator as a social being: social origins and development; relations with colleagues, mentorships, and so on.

  Since each creative person is unique, if col
laboration is needed, it must be collaboration among people who differ (in style, background, ability profile, and the like). Collaboration and similar relationships may take many forms: working together on a shared project where both members of a pair do work that is essentially the same (as Picasso and Braque did in inventing cubism); working together in a teamlike setting where participants complement each other (as in the production of a film, an opera, or a ballet); and sharing ideas either face-to-face or in written correspondence (as Vincent van Gogh and his brother, Theo, did through the medium of thousands of letters mostly about Vincent’s actual work, his plans for future work, and his sensuous experiences).

  Networks of Enterprise

  It is well established that creative work evolves over long periods of time. Some writers even speak of the ten-year rule. Whether this duration is two years or twenty or simply highly variable, it is certainly a far cry from the millisecond flashes vaunted by the devotees of sudden insight and mysterious intuition as the essence of creative effort.

  If creative work takes so long, we must have an approach to motivation that recognizes the time it takes. I have found that one important aspect of creative work is the way each creator organizes a life so that diverse projects do not become obstacles to each other. I use the term enterprise to make room for the typical situation in which a person who completes one project does not abandon the line of work it entailed but picks up another that is part of the same set of concerns. I use the term network to accommodate the finding that creators are often simultaneously involved in several projects and enterprises linked to each other in complex ways.

  Time and Irreality.

  One of the most persistent myths about creative work is the allegation that novelty comes about through lightning-like flashes of insight. On the contrary, serious studies reveal accounts in which the time taken is on the order of years and decades. Even when a moment of sudden transformation occurs, it is the hard-won result of a long developmental process.