CourtVision’s cultural competence
Despite being members of a relatively young field, organisations in the sports for development and peace sector have greatly influenced many areas of healthy youth development. Beyond the benefits of health and fitness, sports programming has proven to be an effective influencer of emotional and social-learning when these objectives are pursued by intentional design.
Conflict resolution, in particular, has emerged as one of the most salient forms of empowerment achievable through sports programming. Many organisations around the globe have employed sports as a tool to promote healthy dialogue and intergroup contact. Yet, while conflict is a universal concept, the way in which people frame, express, and manage conflict is susceptible to cultural factors. How much of an impact do these cultural factors have on international organisations’ ability to create a sports program generalizable across cultures?
Sports practitioners and champions of the Olympic movement commonly praise sports’ capacity to unite people on a global level, as the rules and values of sports appear universal and easily transferrable across national borders. While international competition may bring different peoples together, does having a set, “universal language” deny learners the ability to create their own cultural context?
Sports for peace organisation CourtVision International (CVI) seeks to answer this cultural challenge with the use of an elicitive model in their conflict resolution programming. Instead of prescribing a pre-packaged set of universal rules and instruction, CVI provides a platform for participants to create a process for conflict resolution and mediation with resources and values pertinent to their specific cultural context. While this method requires more time and effort, esteemed Professor of International Peacebuilding Dr. John Paul Lederach, in his various works on conflict transformation, praised the elicitive model’s regard for culture as the foundation for intercultural conflict resolution training, as opposed to emphasizing the specialized knowledge of instructors in any one particular context.
For an organisation like CVI that works in various contexts ranging from the Middle East to the Caribbean, the elicitive model offers a preferable approach to sports programming as it gives participants the agency to control their learning environment without being inhibited by the prescriptive rules of traditional sports gameplay or the culture of CVI’s multinational staff facilitating the training. CVI facilitators instead focus on the creation of an integrative learning environment filled with participant-led activities, such as storyboarding, rule-changing, and role-playing, all in order to elicit necessary cultural information foundational to conflict transformation. In this way, CVI builds an effective bridge between intercultural conflict resolution and the “universal language” of international sports.
Visit the CourtVision International website to find out more.
[This article has been edited by the Operating Team]
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