Costruire spazi di dialogo per la risoluzione dei conflitti

Conflicts on the workplace are recognized as one of the main sources of psychosocial risks in Switzerland and in Ticino in particular. Escalated conflicts generate negative effects for individuals and organizations. In the face of these risks, it has been noted that dialogic approaches to conflict in organizations can help dealing with disagreement, transforming relationships and avoiding conflict escalation in a perspective of promotion of restorative culture in the society. Research shows that dialogic approaches that contribute to design dialogue spaces to avoid conflict escalation are related to argumentation tools, such as understanding the parties’ conflicting frames or perspectives and reframing them to get to a common understanding; or naming emotions to allow parties to relate them to their personal reasons and viewpoints. Learning these tools is particularly important for young students at professional schools, who are likely to live conflict on the workplace for the first time.Currently, however, there is no training on a dialogic, argumentation-based approach to conflict in professional schools in Ticino; and in general, as stated by the Cantonal Dipartimento dell’educazione, della cultura e dello sport (DECS), professional students are less exposed to communication of scientific findings. To address the need to learn argumentation tools to build dialogue spaces to solve conflicts, the project “Costruire spazi di dialogo per la risoluzione dei conflitti” (Building dialogue spaces to resolve conflict), in short “Costruire dialogo” project, proposes an argumentative toolkit, based on dialogical tools derived from discourse and argumentation research on dispute mediation and the resolution of conflicts. Costruire dialogo sets out to reframe the culture of conflict on the workplace in Ticino, promote a restorative culture and show that, as based on recent research, it is possible to learn argumentation tools to deal with disagreement and avoid conflict escalation on the workplace and, by extension, in everyday life.In order to present and discuss this toolkit with students and accompanying teachers, Costruire dialogo has designed an innovative package of activities, whose core includes communication events in classrooms: a LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® (LSP) workshop explicitly designed for students to reflect on their conflicts and how to deal with them, and a dialogic classroom session following LSP in which the argumentative toolkit, based on research in linguistics and argumentation, is introduced, answering to needs and concerns emerged from the participants involved in LSP. Other in person and online activities include open events for teachers, a final event for the population, a website with podcasts and LSP installations on display at Città dei mestieri and in the involved schools. These activities will enable going beyond the involved number of participants, enabling scaling effects in terms of numbers and cultural transformation. Overall, our activities set out to change the culture of conflict, promoting linguistic and argumentative tools that can be applied to build dialogue spaces in order to establish a restorative culture. The Costruire dialogo project can count on a solid existing collaboration of the three applicants and project coordinator, both at the scientific level and at the level of communication of scientific findings on argumentation as an alternative to conflict. All the project members, including the experts, intend to be as close as possible to the public during the activities. Our tight collaboration with the DECS, Department for Professional Education has allowed to design the package of communication activities taking into account the needs of professional schools since the beginning. The DECS will contribute to the success of the activities through involvement of schools and teachers.