Do you approach conflict and other challenges in your life as problems to be avoided or solved? Or, are you open to the possibility that conflict and other challenges may be an opportunity for personal transformation?

In today’s complex conflict environments, where negotiating differences often devolves to violent struggle, interveners must have heightened capacities for integration, collaboration, and creativity. In working with difficult and intractable conflicts, we believe that interveners, both formal and informal, must develop advanced capacities of perspective-taking in order to navigate the multifaceted challenges these real-life situations present.

Antioch McGregor’s conflict programs are designed to engage the whole person through a process of learning strategies that support the growth of consciousness, contemplative practices, authentic conversation skills, social competencies, and emotional intelligence. Our program design draws on the work of many pioneers in a wide array of disciplines including John Burton, Johan Galtung, Morton Deutsch, Bill Ury, Vamik Volkan, Jack Mezirow, Robert Kegan, Ken Wilber, and Daniel Goleman.

There are three unique hallmarks to our program design:

1. An integral approach to understanding conflict
2. Transformational Action Inquiry
3. A developmental curriculum

To enroll in McGregor’s conflict program is to accept our invitation to join us on a transformational journey, where we will accompany and support you in traveling to the edges of your known world, and where the deep understanding that dwells within you begins to shift and makes room for a new vision, a broader perspective, a new experience of yourself in relation to your world. This transformation happens in our Yellow Spring classrooms, our online virtual classrooms, our university seminars, and in your own thinking, writing, and talking about becoming a cutting edge peace worker and conflict intervener.

Come be with us and let our faculty instruct, guide, and work with you to become more of who you truly are. Come be with us and win a victory for humanity.

An Integral Approach to Understanding Conflict

Just as there are many ways of seeing the world, there are many ways to interpret a conflict. The theoretical and historical roots of the conflict field are admirably inter-disciplinary. At the same time, however, conflict theorists and practitioners have often referred to and emphasized a single perspective, such as an anthropological, sociological, or economical perspective. An investigative outlook that employs only one approach is restrictive because it relies on an incomplete research tool: it limits our capacity to understand, manage, and support the myriad dimensions that underlie a conflict. The application of only one particular theory to the understanding of a conflict will arrive at only one part of the truth, particularly since what constitutes truth is often in question.

Our innovative program teaches you to see the integrated whole of a conflict, not just a part of a conflict. From the integral perspective every conflict has both exterior aspects that can be directly observed and interior depths that must be illuminated and interpreted. An integral approach highlights the multiple truths that are revealed by the individual, culture, and social systems. The integral approach synthesizes these bodies of knowledge into a comprehensive meta-map of conflict, one that both clarifies and broadens our understanding of the interconnected layers of conflict as well as the development and the underlying rationale of conflict. For example, how an individual defines meaning or intentions in a conflict is deeply influenced by his or her given culture, which is, in turn, held within and shaped by a larger social system.

McGregor’s integral model of conflict recognizes that the integration of multiple perspectives of the meaning, experience, and resolution of conflict is essential to understanding conflict theory and guiding intervention work.

Transformational Action Inquiry

Traditional reflective practice approaches ask the practitioner to see more clearly what already is—to gather more information about current practices, current assumptions, and current perspectives. In contrast, transformational action inquiry asks the practitioner to go beyond simply noticing what is, and begin to unpack what is (question assumptions, use new lenses, new perspectives, etc.). Our approach to transformational action inquiry asks you to create new forms of thinking, to allow new discoveries to emerge, and to challenge yourself to expand the limits of your current meaning-making. Through our approach, you are guided to a new form of understanding and, therefore, to a new place and vision in your life. More simply put, you are transformed.

A Developmental Curriculum

The developmental curriculum for McGregor’s Graduate Programs in Conflict Analysis and Engagement is founded on one basic principle: that to encourage and support growth, an environment must offer an optimal balance of challenge and support. We do this through supporting the learner’s current level of understanding, while, at the same time, challenging the limits thereof. Think of our developmental curriculum as a bridge; a structure firmly anchored both in a learner’s current frame of reference and in the one toward which he or she is growing. This bridge fulfills the essential requirement of a transformational journey, of meeting learners where they are and then guiding and accompanying them on the journey of change to a new place in their lives.