Birmingham, UK

Responding to Conflict (RTC) is offering the following course:

Transformative Mediation

Dates: May 26-30 2008

Location: Birmingham, UK

Course fee: £1,200

Number of days: 5

The Transformative Mediation course has been developed to help organisations, practitioners and mediators to enhance the quality of their work, to gain new perspectives into the conflict transformation field, and to develop new practices in mediation.

Transformative Mediation is the only course of its kind in the UK, specifically aimed at organisations and individuals with experience in the mediation process locally in family and community settings or for those interested in applying a transformative approach to their mediation work in activities such as peacebuilding and conflict sensitive programming.

Course Aims:

• The Transformative Mediation course will teach participants how to structure mediation in a way that is most likely to support the parties in gaining clarity and making their own decisions and in considering the perspectives of others it will also teach participants to understand conflict as a crisis in human interaction and recognise and exploit opportunities for empowerment and recognition shifts when they occur.
• The course is grounded in a relational worldview and will emphasize restoring effective communication and inter-party understanding much more than obtaining a settlement.

Courses Objectives:

The course will enable participants to apply a transformative approach in their practice and to:

• Explain the mediator's role and the objectives of mediation as being focused on supporting empowerment and recognition shifts.
• Leave responsibility for the outcomes with the parties.
• Not be judgmental about the parties' views and decisions.
• Take an optimistic view of the parties' competence and motives.
• Allow and be responsive to parties' expression of emotions.
• Allow for and explore parties' uncertainty.
• Remain focused on what is currently happening in the mediation setting.
• Be responsive to parties' statements about past events.
• Realise that conflict can be a long-term process and that mediation is one intervention in a longer sequence of conflict interactions.

Suitable for:

Mediators working in the community, national and international context who face conflict in their work, whether this be family, gangs, ethno political or international conflict and for staff of national, international and community based organisations, mediators, and practitioners working in peacebuilding and the conflict transformation field.

Further Information:

Please click here for further course information or to access the Responding to Conflict (RTC) website.

To Register:

Please click here to register online.