Teaching Family Mediation in Higher Education

This chapter will address the multi-disciplinary and disparate professional origins of family mediation through identifying mediation’s distinctive purpose within dispute resolution theory. This would start with looking at the spectrum of third party processes (which are primarily adjudicative in nature), understanding their boundaries and limitations. Emphasis would be on mediation being third party enabling/assistance of negotiations not third party decision making. This would then lead to exploration of the ethics of mediation because of this distinct purpose. This chapter will look at how and why third parties transform disputes and whether or how this is done in mediation. With reference to these boundaries and potentially professionally blinkered views of a dispute, academic study should look at the ethics of mediation within family disputes.
Any academic teaching would also include an understanding of negotiation skills and strategies for conflict management (including the impact of power imbalances common to family disputants on negotiation capacity), psychology of conflict (both generally and within the specific context of family breakdown). All this would be with reference to mediation boundaries and ethics.
Finally, academic teaching of family mediation should also include socio-economic and political analysis of the emergence of family mediation and the challenges that such issues place on the ethical practice of family mediation.