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.
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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).

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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…)

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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

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See you soon!