Coordinated Management of Meaning – Center for Intercultural Dialogue

Designing Community Engagement and Public Dialogue Using CMM (USA)

Designing Community Engagement and Public Dialogue Using CMM, CMM Institute, USA, 25 March 2026, webinar.

Join the CMM Institute for Personal and Social Evolution as they welcome Public Dialogue Consortium President and Senior Consultant, Shawn Spano, for a webinar titled, Designing Community Engagement and Public Dialogue Using CMM, on Wednesday, March 25, 2026, at 11:30 am Eastern US Time (UTC-5). In this 90-minute webinar, Shawn will share insights and provide practical tools that have emerged from his years of experience consulting with community and government agencies and facilitating public dialogue using the Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM) as the applied theoretical framework.

In the context of this important and urgent work of facilitating public dialogue, CMM prompts us to look at communities as complex webs of interconnected conversations involving residents, elected officials, and administrative staff. Bringing these diverse community members together to address issues of common concern (i.e. community engagement) requires careful attention and practical skills in developing processes that enable community members to express their views while simultaneously being open to hear the views of others (i.e. public dialogue).

Consider the following questions:

What do community engagement practitioners need to know and do to facilitate public dialogue?

How does this form of communication help community members develop a deeper understanding of the issues that divide them?

What are the practical tools that can enable community members to bridge their differences?

How does the current climate of polarized politics and adversarial confrontation impede public dialogue?

How can it open possibilities to build relationships and strengthen communities?

Shawn will address these questions by traversing across both theory and practice, offering a bridge between the two. He will demonstrate how community engagement practitioners can integrate CMM concepts into applied activities to improve patterns of communication in local communities. We seem to be at a crossroads in how people engage with each other in community contexts. We can continue to splinter and wall ourselves off from each other, or we can find a better way. This webinar will help chart the path to a better way.

CosmoKidz Resources (USA)

CosmoKidz resources, Coordinated Management of Meaning Institute for Personal and Social Evolution, USA.

The global problems of today and of the future will require leaders who are able to helpfully engage with others of varying backgrounds, beliefs, and perspectives. CosmoKidz is providing the building blocks for this kind of leadership. Helping to build better social worlds, one conversation at a time.

The CosmoKidzTM program consists of sets of conversational activities for adults to use with children and teens to help them develop constructive social and emotional intelligences. The CosmoKidzTM activities fit in with a new move in educational thinking: a shift from training students for cleverness and competition to helping them become fulfilled individuals and active, caring, compassionate people. The conversational activities are developed for different age groups—from children, to tweens and teens—based on something CMMi calls a cosmopolitan sensibility. It’s a different way of looking at how adults relate with children and how we would like them to relate with others. It also helps us focus on important things that most people don’t pay attention to that happens in our communicating with others.

CosmoKidz materials are now available in English, Pashto, Farsi, Norwegian, and Romanian. And there are related materials for CosmoTweenz, CosmoTeenz, and CosmoParents, as well as more general SOAR (Sense what’s around you, Open your hands to help others, Act with kindness, Respect other people) activities.

CMMi: CosmoTeenz Fellows (USA)

Call for proposals 2022-23: CosmoTeenz Fellows (15-21 year olds), Coordinated Management of Meaning Institute, Phoenix, AZ. Deadline:15 April 2022.

The CMM Institute is offering Fellowships for 7-10 teens or young adults from different countries to work together to develop products, projects, and activities as part of the Institute’s CosmoTeenz program for 2022/2023. The goal is to enrich young peoples’ lives, create improved futures for the planet, and to help make better social worlds wherever we are at, whether school, work, or socially—any place where people meet, interact, and communicate. This includes communicating about difficult issues, such as exclusion, diversity, differences, mental health, sexual orientation, grief, and more. It means helping us to talk, live, and work well together, despite our differences.

Fellows will work together as a group for the duration of their Fellowship using Zoom and other online platforms to stay in touch and to work across time zone differences. They will be in mentoring relationships with members of the CMM Institute throughout the year, working on developing their final product(s). In conversation with CMM mentors, the group of Fellows will decide how often they will meet and how best to structure their meetings and work together. There will be a US $500 personal grant for each Fellow, as well as up to $15,000 USD (in consultation with the CMM Institute) for the group to put towards whatever they develop from June 2022 to June 2023.

KC4: Coordinated Management of Meaning Translated into Arabic

Continuing translations of Key Concepts in Intercultural Dialogue, today I am posting KC4: Coordinated Management of Meaning, which Robyn Penman wrote and first published in English in 2014, which Mohammed Guamguami has now translated into Arabic.

As always, all Key Concepts are available as free PDFs; just click on the thumbnail to download. Lists of Key Concepts organized chronologically by publication date and number, alphabetically by concept, and by languages into which they have been translated, are available, as is a page of acknowledgments with the names of all authors, translators, and reviewers.

Penman, R. (2021). Coordinated Management of Meaning [Arabic]. (M. Guamguami, Trans). Key Concepts in Intercultural Dialogue, 4. Available from: https://centerforinterculturaldialogue.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/kc4-cmm_arabic.pdf

If you are interested in translating one of the Key Concepts, please contact me for approval first because dozens are currently in process. As always, if there is a concept you think should be written up as one of the Key Concepts, whether in English or any other language, propose it. If you are new to CID, please provide a brief resume. This opportunity is open to masters students and above, on the assumption that some familiarity with academic conventions generally, and discussion of intercultural dialogue specifically, are useful.

Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz, Director
Center for Intercultural Dialogue

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Key Concept #4: Coordinated Management of Meaning Translated into French

Penman, R. (2021). La gestion coordonnée du sens. (M. Guamguami, Trans). Key Concepts in Intercultural Dialogue, 4. Available from: https://centerforinterculturaldialogue.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/kc4-cmm_french.pdf

Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz, Director
Center for Intercultural Dialogue

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Key Concept #4: Coordinated Management of Meaning Translated into Persian

Penman, R. (2016). Coordinated Management of Meaning [Persian]. (R. Hajianfard, Trans). Key Concepts in Intercultural Dialogue, 4. Available from:
https://centerforinterculturaldialogue.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/kc4-cmm_persian-revised.pdf

Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz, Director
Center for Intercultural Dialogue

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Robyn Penman Profile

Robyn Penman (PhD, University of Melbourne) is an independent communication scholar and consultant to government on communication and social policy matters.

Robyn Penman She was a Founding Director of the Communication Research Institute of Australia (1987-2000) and an Adjunct Professor in Communication at the University of Canberra (1999-2005). Robyn is a past President (1985-6) and Life Member of the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association, has served on the International Communication Association board (2002-3) and is a Visiting Senior Member, Linacre College, Oxford (1987). She was also the Associate Editor of the Australian Journal of Communication (1984-2003) and has served on the editorial boards of Communication Theory and Human Communication Research. She is currently a board member of the CMM Institute, Co-Director of the Cosmopolis2045 project, and General Editor of CMMi Press.

Robyn has devoted her scholarly career to the development of a practical-theoretic approach to understanding communicating as a relational practice. She has been equally as focused on asking questions about what makes for good communicating, especially in the public, civic sphere, and how this understanding can be used to make better social worlds. She is the author of five books—Communication Process and Relationships, Not the Marrying Kind (with Yvonne Stolk), Reconstructing Communicating: Looking to a Future, Making Better Social Worlds (with Arthur Jensen) and Justice in the Making: Relating, Participating, Communicating—along with many book chapters and journal articles.

Robyn welcomes contact via email.

Work for CID:

Robyn Penman has written KC4: Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM), KC8: Public Dialogue, KC15: Cultural Pluralism, KC29: Dialogue Civility, and KC37: Dialogic Listening. She has also written two guest posts, Feeling Felt: The Heart of the Dialogic Moment? and Dialogue in the Interests of Justice. And she provided a book review of The coordinated management of meaning: A festschrift in honor of W. Barnett Pearce. Finally, she served as initial graphic design consultant for CID, establishing the format for Key Concepts in Intercultural Dialogue.

Key Concepts in Intercultural Dialogue #4: CMM by Robyn Penman

The next issue of Key Concepts in intercultural Dialogue is now available. This is KC4: Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM) by Robyn Penman. As always, all Key Concepts are available as free PDFs; just click on the thumbnail to download. Lists organized chronologically by publication date and number, alphabetically by concept in English, and by languages into which they have been translated, are available, as is a page of acknowledgments with the names of all authors, translators, and reviewers.

Penman, R. (2014). Coordinated management of meaning. Key Concepts in Intercultural Dialogue, 4. Available from:
https://centerforinterculturaldialogue.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/key-concept-cmm.pdf

The Center for Intercultural Dialogue is publishing a series of short briefs describing Key Concepts in intercultural Dialogue. The logic is that different people, working in different countries and disciplines, use different vocabulary to describe their interests, yet these terms overlap. Our goal is to provide some of the assumptions and history attached to each concept for those unfamiliar with it. As there are other concepts you would like to see included, send an email to the series editor, Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz. If there are concepts you would like to prepare, provide a brief explanation of why you think the concept is central to the study of intercultural dialogue, and why you are the obvious person to write up that concept.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Transformative Power of Dialogue

Review of:
Stephen W. Littlejohn & Sheila McNamee (Eds.). (2014). The coordinated management of meaning: A festschrift in honor of W. Barnett Pearce. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

by Robyn Penman

In 1980, Barnett Pearce and his colleague, Vern Cronen, published Communication, Action and Meaning, a seminal work introducing scholars to the theory of the coordinated management of meaning (CMM). Over the ensuing decades, CMM theory has continued to grow, reaching a wider and wider audience as the practical and theoretical relevance of Barnett’s work became increasingly acknowledged.

In recognition of Barnett’s outstanding scholarship, a conference, entitled the Transformative Power of Dialogue, was held in his honour in January 2011. The essays in this book collection emerged from that conference. I am one of the contributors to this volume and, as such, this review is more of a commendation than any conventional critical review.

The book opens with an essay written by Barnett shortly before his death, reflecting on what it could take for personal and social revolution to be brought about. As he put it, he has “bet my professional life” on following the risky, high stake path that this evolution “could be promoted by explicit attention to what we are making together in the forms of communication in which we engage” (p. 44).

Barnett’s bet has reaped its rewards, not the least of which is the extent to which he has inspired, encouraged and collaborated with an extraordinary range of scholars and practitioners, a sample of which is contained in the current volume. The very breadth, scholarship and wide-ranging practical import captured in the 15 essays bear witness to the rich offerings to be found in CMM and its broader communication perspective.

For those interested in intercultural dialogue, the central importance placed on dialogue in Barnett’s work, and in the essays in this volume, makes the book especially pertinent. One part of this volume is specifically devoted to the theme of dialogue. The topics include the role of systemic questioning (Victoria Chen), moral conflict and managing difference (Stephen Littlejohn), framing and conflict transformation (Linda Putnam), and generative community dialogue (Stanley Deetz).

Dialogue also emerges as a powerful theme throughout the other parts in the book. For example, I (Penman) consider the core relationship between dialogue and presence and what this means for understanding participation in mediated life. John Lannamann explores the key role of dialogue and its practice in cosmopolitan communication in making better social worlds. And Kim Pearce sums up the volume by talking about the pathway to personal and social evolution in terms of the “life of dialogue…that holds in tension, and compassion, the various stories, actions and people who loves us, or don’t, who are like us. . . . , or aren’t and who may challenge us to the core to remain civil and open” (p. 328).

For anyone interested in dialogue and its role in making better social worlds, this book should be a rewarding read.

CMM certificate

Beginning in the summer of 2013, Fitchburg State University in association with the CMM Institute, will offer a Certificate of Advanced Graduate Study in Interdisciplinary Studies: Coordinated Management of Meaning through a combination of distance learning and real-time workshops and seminars. This is a 36 credit program for post-master’s level students. Students will complete 10 courses for a total of 30 credits and then complete a 6 credit thesis that would demonstrate the ability to apply CMM to real-world challenges. The faculty selected for this program are among the leading researchers in the field of CMM research and application. This certificate will be delivered through a combination of distance/online learning (synchronous and asynchronous) and on-campus workshops and seminars.

Career Opportunities
The Coordinated Management of Meaning CAGS program is a post-master’s academic certificate designed for candidates seeking to enhance their professional knowledge and skills. Graduates of this program may elect to go onto existing doctoral level programs that would support CMM as a research methodology.

“CMM has a rich past and has become one of the most important social science theories. More than an interpretive theory, it serves as a practical theory with applicability in many arenas. Students of this program will develop the capacity to help individuals and organizations understand and enhance their communication and action in ways that allow people to form better relationships and ultimately offer solutions to a number of human issues.”
–Dr. John Chetro-Szivos, Graduate Program Chair

HOW TO APPLY
Apply online or request a print application

WHAT NEXT?
Contact Admissions Office: (978)665-3144, admissions AT fitchburgstate.edu

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