Collaborative-Dialogic Practice: Relationships and Conversations that Make a Difference Across Contexts and Cultures

Collaborative-Dialogic Practice provides counselors, psychotherapists, and other mental health professionals a humanizing approach in facilitating transformative dialogues with their clients, making a difference in our fast-changing, diverse, and ever-shrinking world.

Written alongside a collection of international experts, Harlene Anderson and Diane Gehart introduce collaborative-dialogic practice as a method of encouraging relationships and conversations that create generative space and promote meaningful changes in clients, even in the most difficult situations. Promoting an epistemological and mindset shift, the main feature of the practice, the philosophical stance, guides the professional in particular ways of being, talking, thinking, and acting with others, informing future possibilities that were previously unimagined. Split into theory and practice, Part 1 introduces collaborative-dialogue and locates it within traditional and contemporary challenges and practices, providing an overview of its conceptual framework. Chapters in Part 2 then detail the practice in a variety of contexts, cultures, and diverse populations, such as educational settings, communities, businesses, organizations, research and psychotherapy, illustrating how readers can translate the concepts to their distinctive practice settings, their unique styles, and their clients' unique situations.

Accessible and applicable, this book will be an essential resource and guide for professionals in diverse contexts, cultures, and disciplines, including counselors, psychotherapists, consultants, leaders, mentors, educators, and trainers. Written for those new and familiar to the ideas, it will open doors for professionals to expand their competence and to take time to pause, step-back and reflect on their practice.