My life’s work is the practice, study and teaching of peacemaking. As I eagerly turned from one
story to the next in Eric Galton and Lela Love’s Stories Mediators Tell, I felt that I was a student
in a master class of mediation taught by thirty-one Hall of Fame conflict resolution professors.
Using Mediation Stories to Improve
the Teaching of Conflict Resolution
Due to confidentiality concerns, it is rare that conflict
resolution professionals are able to be a fly on the wall
to observe the work of our colleagues (an inexpensive
and highly effective way to learn that I describe in my
book Mediation Career Guide: A Strategic Approach to
Building a Successful Practice). This collection of experiences from some of the best mediators in the field
is the next best thing, a treasure trove of insights for
peacemakers regardless of their levels of experience.
As I discovered one lesson after another from the
fascinating and well-written stories in this volume, I
began to reflect on how a more frequent, strategic, and
institutional acceptance and use of mediation stories
could improve mediation training and skills at the table.
One of the many reasons why mediator stories make
such a contribution to the field of mediation is that it
reminds us of the power of helping with a personal
touch. I have found that mediation training participants are generally enthralled with practitioner stories,
which are easy to listen to, come from the practical
experience of the instructor, and frequently anchor a
student’s understanding, memory, and ultimately the
use of key teaching points.
TEACHING WITH STORIES
Until I read this book, I used only limited story-telling
in my training due a strategic preference to have my
classroom serve as a metaphor for the mediation room,
where the teacher plays the role of the mediator and
the students are the metaphorical mediation parties.
Telling “war stories” in a mediation usually isn’t helpful – mediation parties would rather talk about their
own situation and have the mediator listen, diagnose,
and find a solution for them. So I had made a conscious
choice to use training time to focus on material being
presented, address the questions and comments from
the participants, and weave those comments into the
teaching point, rather than commandeer class time by
telling practice stories regaling students with my feats
in the mediation room.
Since first reading Stories Mediators Tell, I have inten-
tionally injected more stories into my training, with great
success. My key teaching strategy in the presentation
of mediator stories is to have students read a selected
story aloud. Each student reads a paragraph or two and
then passes the book to the next student. I find that the
time that this process consumes is well justified by the
interest the story engenders; this is particularly so with
the “tangential” setup and background of the media-
tion within the story context that often sheds light on
the mediator strategies and interventions within the
mediation room. Instead of my describing the story or
even asking students to set up the facts of the story
from their pre-class assignment, the actual words
being read by different voices in a classroom of other
students produces an involvement and appreciation for
mediation craft that is quite different and deeper than
many other teaching strategies.
I compare this experience with a bare reading of brilliant books such as The Handbook of Conflict Resolution
by Deutsch and Coleman. The concepts in that book are
essential to producing a competent mediator’s thinking
and skill set. Yet when the concepts are applied to one
of the stories in Stories Mediators Tell, due to the emotional connection created by the storytelling, the story
telling concepts come to life and teaching concepts can
be more easily learned.
STORIES AND TRAINING STANDARDS
In exploring how mediator stories fit into current
mediation standards of practice, I surveyed standards
in a variety of settings: federal and state courts; mediator membership organizations (ACR, AFCC, ABA,
International Academy of Mediators); and state mediation funding organizational guidelines (e.g., California
Dispute Resolution Program Act). Most, if not all, mediation accreditation bodies require extensive simulated
role-plays as an essential facet of mediation training.
But I could not find written stories of mediators’ performance (and their reflections) to be included in any
mediation training criteria for any organization, except
those institutions that are dedicated to narrative mediation. I believe this is a gap that should be remedied.
The benefits of telling stories goes beyond teaching
about the choices that mediators make in practice. The
human aspects of the mediator stories provide a different type of frame from which to observe mediator
behavior—the depth and emotional context of hurt,
angst, concern, and fear that overcome parties are
challenges that can only be partially captured by the
social scientist researcher.
The field of mediation has long appreciated the
importance of mediators who walk in the shoes of
FORREST
S. MOSTEN
is Adjunct Professor at UCLA School
of Law where he
teaches mediation
and has been in
private practice as a
mediator since 1979.
The author of four
books and numerous
articles on mediation,
collaborative law,
legal access, and
building a peacemaking career, He served
as convener for the
1999 international
symposium, Training
Mediators for the
21st Century, and
was Guest Editor
for the Family Court
Review’s special issue featuring papers
from that conference. He trains mediators, collaborative
professionals, and
lawyers in conflict
resolution courses
ranging from basic to
master classes and
keynoting conferences throughout
the world. Woody is
a longtime popular
presenter at ACR
conferences and is
Past Chair of the
ACR Peacemaking
Museum Initiative. Woody can be
reached at www.
MostenMediation.
com. Parts of this
article are adapted
from his article
“Using Mediation
Stories to Improve
the Teaching Of
Conlict Resolution,”
Cardozo Law Review,
Vol. 34, No. 6 (2013).
by
