Conflict Resolution for the Helping Professions

Features

• Strategies for enhancing mindfulness (meditation, reflection, emotional regulation).
• Preparation tools for negotiation, mediation, and advocacy.
• Conflict Styles Inventory to assess one's preferred style of dealing with conflict.
• Comparative approaches -- power-, rights-, interests-, transformation-, therapeutic-, and identity-based conflict resolution.
• Varied contexts of practice.
• Use of nonviolence -- asserting needs and promoting justice in a manner that is peaceful and respectful.
• Learning how to use conflict to build better solutions, enhance relationships, and build better understanding between individuals, families, groups, organizations, and communities.
• Role-play exercises and discussion questions.

About the Author(s)

Allan Edward Barsky, PhD, JD, MSW, is Professor of Social Work at Florida Atlantic University. Dr. Barsky currently teaches conflict resolution at the Florida Atlantic University School of Social Work. He has presented his work in conferences and trainings in the United Kingdom, Israel, Finland, Canada, Netherlands, and across the United States. Dr. Barsky served on the national board of Family Mediation Canada and has chaired the National Ethics Committee of the National Association of Social Workers. Dr. Barsky is a certified family mediator with the Supreme Court of Florida and has extensive experience advocating for many social justice issues.

Reviews

"With the recent proliferation of graduate and postgraduate programs aimed at training professionals to practice dispute resolution as an alternative to court, this book remains relevant and an important source for educating aspiring students to work in this challenging and rewarding field of practice. Dr. Barsky is well suited for this task as a renowned scholar, expert in the field of conflict resolution, clinician, and educator." -- Family Court Review

"This book is an engaging, insightful, and invigorating treatise offering a broad array of teaching and learning resources for educators and practitioners in multiple disciplines... As Barsky rightly explains in the preface to his book, the field of conflict resolution today has evolved and expanded to a wide range of professional contexts locally and internationally. Given the current pervasive climate of complex conflict situations throughout life, escalated by trauma, incomprehensible violence, negative peace, and a fight for resources, the search and effort for positive peace is consciously growing at multiple levels. Especially for those of us in the human service professions, this book offers a renewed focus and an incentive to craft interventions toward positive peace using what it has to offer." -- Journal of Baccalaureate Social Work

"In [the book], [Barsky] offers a comprehensive, in-depth application of the theory and practice of conflict resolution to the work of helping professionals. Barsky travels both deeply and widely in this work. He takes us through basic conflict theory, relevant research, and different philosophical approaches to conflict intervention. He also encourages us to think deeply about how we ourselves approach conflict and the values and messages we have learned about how to interact with others experiencing conflict... Not only does conflict engagement as a field of practice offer helping professionals an addition to their intervention toolbox, but it also provides an important new dimension for how to understand our role as interveners. Therefore, courses based on books like Barsky's ought not to be simply elective offerings but rather foundational courses both on the theory and practice of social work and allied human service professions." -- Journal of Teaching in Social Work

" With the third edition, Dr. Barsky has provided essential updates in mindfulness, restorative justice, and online dispute resolution while still maintaining the core of negotiation and mediation theories and their application to practice. Social workers, mental health counselors, marriage and family therapists, psychologists and pastoral counselors will find Conflict Resolution for the Helping Professions both an invaluable antidote and a practice guidebook to helping professionals transform conflict in their clinical and administrative practice from crisis to opportunity" - Mitch Rosenwald, PhD, LCSW, Professor and Interim PhD Program Director, School of Social Work, Barry University

"Conflict Resolution for the Helping Professions provides both students and conflict resolution practitioners with a clear, concise guide to understanding, assessing and addressing conflict across professional domains. Allan Barsky blends a broad survey of scholarly research with a wide variety of practical applications drawn from today's headlines, all the while expertly modeling the language and communication skills so needed by helping professionals. As a practitioner, I found the exercises at the end of each section to be thought-provoking and challenging. I highly recommend this interesting, informative, and useful text." -- Rick Lewis, MPS, Specialist, School Climate Initiatives, School District of Palm Beach County, FL

"Conflicts are part of our daily life and daily professional practice. Hence, conflics are an explosivie potential in the work of the helping professions, and training materials like this are most welcome...The text is very accessible, not difficult to read and understand, distinguished with a rich number of illustrations, clear guidelines, focused discussion questions, role-plays, assignments, etc." -European Journal of Social Work