John Peter Weldon has been named an Adjunct Professor of Mediation at Hofstra University’s School of Law, Hempstead, Long Island, the cradle of transformative mediation under the leadership of Distinguished Professor Robert A. Baruch Bush, co-author of The Promise of Mediation and co-founder of the Institute for the Study of Conflit Transformation.

Professors Miller, Bush, and Weldon

During the week of January 2-6, 2012, John Peter, together with Professors Baruch Bush et Jody Miller, co-taught the  intensive 40 hour training Mediation Principles and Practice, offered twice-yearly to 2nd and 3rd year Law students as well as to beginning and experienced mediators from outside the university. John Peter was very impressed with the ease with which this dynamic group of mainly “Y” Generation students took to the highly participatory nature of the transformative approach to conflict.

John Peter has been teaching Mediating Complaints of Workplace Bullying from a Transformative Perspective, a 3-day training limited to 12 participants, several times a year since 2009 through the Continuing Legal Education Service of the Quebec Bar. In 2010, he was authorized to translate the Institute’ s Mediation Principles and Practice course manual into French, which he has now integrated into his own trainings in Quebec and in France. Mr. Weldon’s next course in Montreal will be offered to both lawyers and non-lawyers alike  from October 17-19, 2012.

Six months after the Transformative Mediation training given by Robert A. Baruch Bush and John Peter Weldon at the Quebec Bar in Montreal, fifty predominantly French-speaking professionals have joined together in the Reseau pour une approche transformative du conflit.

This dynamic new network has rapidly attracted not just lawyer-mediators, but also labor arbitrators and conciliators, HR directors and consultants, management and union representatives, workplace bullying investigators, collaborative lawyers, law professors, an ombuds, a retired judge, and the vice-dean of a medical school, all of whom have received basic training in transformative mediation and have chosen to nurture and develop a transformative dimension to their practice.

An approach quite unlike any other, transformative mediation is still relatively unknown in French-speaking Quebec. Interventionist but non-directive, self-structuring, and based on self-determination and self-regulation, the transformative model was adopted in 1998 by the US Postal Service, the United States’ second largest employer. Their goal? Creating a healthier and safer climate in a workplace traumatized by over 30 separate gun-related lethal incidents and weighed down by a backlog of over 14,000 workplace discrimination complaints. The very positive results of the REDRESS Program’s first ten years of application have been fully documented by lead researcher Lisa Bingham and her research team at Indiana University. (more…)

In this short YouTube interview, Hofstra University Law Professor R. A. Baruch Bush, co-founder of transformative mediation, discusses how a postal worker and his supervisor reached clarity and mutual understanding through a free and open-ended conversation facilitated by a transformative mediator. Click HERE to watch the interview.

John Peter Weldon’s interview on transformative mediation in cases of workplace harassment which originally appeared in the September 2010 issue of le Journal du Barreau du Quebec has been translated by Louise Phipps Senft and posted on Baltimore Mediation’s very informative and thought-provoking blogsite. Thank you, Louise, for the excellent quality of the translation and for making it available to your many readers. You can read the article by clicking here.

John Peter Weldon is the first mediator in Quebec to receive accreditation as a Certified Transformative Mediator™ from the Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation (ISCT), based at Hofstra University in New York. The ISCT was founded in 1999 to study and promote understanding of conflict and intervention processes from the transformative perspective. The Institute supports and provides a forum for the work of scholars and practitioners in the conflict intervention field, inspired by Robert A. Baruch Bush and Joseph P. Folger, co-authors of The Promise of Mediation.

Certification is based on a mediator’s successful completion of the Summative Assessment Process developed by the Institute. This process evaluates not what the candidate claims to be doing in mediation, but what he or she is in fact doing, as revealed by a video taken during an actual or simulated mediation session.
(more…)

I had the recent privilege to attend a one-week intensive training course with Baruch Bush, law professor at the Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation at Hofstra University in New York and co-author of The Promise of Mediation, a book which has had a huge impact on the theory and practice of mediation since a first edition was published in 1994. I had discovered the book shortly after it came out, and it was my source of inspiration when I decided last year to prepare and give a course on Mediating Complaints of Workplace Harassment at the Quebec Bar (incidentally, all the courses available at the Bar are open to the general public, not just lawyers).

(more…)

Gramercy Mansion near Baltimore, Maryland, where I recently took a training session with Louise Phipps Senft, author of this text.

When people turn to a mediator for help, it is often helpful for the mediator to remember that conflict often takes a personal toll on people. People caught in difficult and long lasting conflict have often lost some self-confidence, clarity, openness to new approaches, and inner strength.

Often people coming to mediation have been in a difficult or hostile setting where they have argued, spoken to deaf ears, felt insecure or confused, or have themselves listened, not to hear, but to frame a self serving response, all of which leads to frustration and escalation. It is this experience that takes a toll on the people perhaps as great as the conflict itself. (more…)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Introduction

Unlike the mediation of business transactions which call for negotiating the needs and interests of parties to civil or commercial disputes, complaints of workplace harassment are not so much problems to be diagnosed and solved as relationships to be understood and repaired. (more…)

Apologies in Mediation: Transaction or Transformation? A thought-provoking talk on a timely topic at the Institut de médiation et d’arbitrage du Québec on October 28, 2009. For more information, please click on the following link.

Airdance - Flying on Home

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

See you soon!