Mediation #1

Happy Monday, everyone! I want to start out the week with a report on my first two mediation training sessions, which happened this past weekend. Our group includes about 14 people, and is made up of Bluffton students, a handful of staff members and several people from the community. This mix is great, because people in different campus roles and stages of life bring unique perspectives to the process of mediation, and are taking the training for a variety of reasons, including as part of their class requirements, to gain knowledge in mediation for application in the workplace and within families and just to know more about what mediation means. Prior to the first training session, we all took an online "Friendly Style Profile" to help place us in different personality catagories. When we arrived at the opening session Friday evening, each of our nametags included a color and numbers to identify us with a certain set of strengths and weaknesses relating to conflict. Throughout the session we used these numbers to further discover how we approach and treat conflict in our lives. I found this interesting, because almost everything included in my personality catagory was true of my style of interaction, beliefs about conflict and strengths/weaknesses in working with others. I hadn't expected our initial work to be as introspective as it was, but I definitely appreciated learning more about myself as the basis for understanding others in the role of eventual mediator!
Our second session started putting some of the practices of mediation into action through role playing situations. Several of us took on the roles of the people involved in conflict, while several others assumed the roles of the mediators. Let me just tell you...mediation is NOT an easy thing to do! By definition, mediation is a decision-making process. As a facilitator of this process, the mediator's job is not to create a solution and present it to the people in conflict, but to act as a witness to the process, presenting questions that help those struggling with conflict to reach their own solution. When this weekends training was complete, I realized that I'll have to have a lot more practice and observation of mediation before I will be comfortable leading that process.
Our homework assignment this week is to read a short book by Howard Zehr:
I have already read one of Howard's other books called "Changing Lenses: A New Focus for Crime and Justice" in my Law, Justice and Society class at Bluffton. I remember enjoying the new ideas Zehr presented relating to how we approach the concept of "justice" and new ways to think about how we can transform it into a process of restoration.
More updates to come after this coming weekend.
-Andrea