Transformative Practice: Cases and Challenges

Transformative mediation is practiced in many arenas of conflict intervention including:  divorce and child custody disputes, civil contract disputes, neighbor  and community conflicts, conflicts withinin schools and healthcare organizations, elder and family disputes, as well as  multi-party, public conflicts.   The  panel is comprised of mediators from diverse mediation practices who have been working with the transformative approach to conflict intervention for many years and have gained significant insights about the transformative process and its outcomes.  The panel will focus on what it means for a mediator  to "proactively follow" the parties in a dispute and will discuss the challenges of working with a model of mediation that assumes that conflict is a crisis in the parties' interaction.  The discussion will be centered in case examples that illustrate important principles of the transformative intervention work.