Working Paper 94-8 February 1994(1)
By Liz Loescher
Executive Director, The Conflict Center
(1) This paper is an edited transcript of a talk given by Liz Loescher for the Intractable Conflict/Constructive Confrontation Project on November 6, 1993. Funding for this Project was provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the University of Colorado. All ideas presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Consortium, the University, or Hewlett Foundation. For more information, contact the Conflict Resolution Consortium, Campus Box 327, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado 80309- 0327. Phone: (303) 492-1635, e-mail: crc@cubldr.colorado.edu.
© 1994. Conflict Resolution Consortium. Do not reprint without permission.
I work at the Conflict Center, which is a non-profit organization that teaches interpersonal conflict management skills. I am not convinced that there are intractable conflicts. But, I am quite convinced that there are intractable people. As a practitioner for almost 18 years, I've worked with a lot of folks and a lot of conflicts. I've seen horrible conflicts resolved, and I've seen insignificant conflicts just hang on forever. So I am convinced that a critical piece in this conflict puzzle is the relational piece.
I come from a different perspective than the other speakers. I am not primarily a mediator, although we do some mediation for people who have access to no other mediation services, i.e., persons living in poverty, and we do mediations that come out of the groups that we are working with. Our task is primarily prevention; we help people build conflict management skills. We use the term conflict management because we believe that management is the skill part and that all of us use such skills to manage conflict every day--from insignificant little hassles to major conflicts in our lives. Occasionally, we get stuck and that's when we use the term "resolution." This involves more formal mediation, negotiation, and facilitation processes, with external "professional" help.
In our school project we try to teach conflict management skills to every person in the school setting. We start with the staff, which includes all faculty, cafeteria personnel, custodial personnel, and administrative personnel. We teach all of them interpersonal conflict and anger management skills. Our belief is that you can't teach kids what you don't know and practice yourself.
They then teach their students the skills with our published curriculum, Peacemaking Made Practical and The Conflict Center's School Curriculum. Our program lasts an entire year. It starts with a three-week immersion, where every child is taught a lesson every day. The program then goes to what we call "maintenance," where the teachers are teaching very young children three times a week, and older children twice a week for the rest of the year. We also offer "pieces-parts" for schools that don't do the whole program, such as staff in- service for adult skill building or curriculum.
One of our more popular programs involves working with kids that are making inappropriate choices, who are confined to in-school suspension or involved in other disciplinary measures. This means we work with the discipline problem and the kids that the school has identified as their difficult kids. We talk about winning and losing with these kids. We clearly identify that we perceive that they are pretty much losers in school. That's real news for many of these kids. They have not had people say those things to them. So they are often a little bit offended and taken aback by this statement. We then tell them that winning and losing involves their daily choices. We have had some very exciting conversations in the course of these processes and some very exciting behavioral changes.
In doing our school-phobic parent course, we have found that there is a connection in some school settings between parents that had a lot of negative school experiences and children that are the kids who regularly "get in trouble." We then gather those folks together. It's less painful to get the parents to come if a group of parents who are also having difficulties with their children all come together. This has been a popular part of our process.
The results of our school program are fascinating, at least to us, because we are concerned about outcomes. I want to make very sure that we are doing programs that are really making a difference. Life is too short for any other kind. The results of the program vary dramatically. We now absolutely know that behavioral change results--we measure office referrals and physical fights. These are directly related to how often and how well teachers teach the curriculum. But, there is no magic pill. The reduction is related to how well and how often they teach it. We've had reductions in conflicts, comparing one year to the previous year, of up to 87 percent fewer physical fights and up to 78 percent fewer office referrals. This is very dramatic. Other times it is less so. But we've never had a school that didn't have any reductions, if they taught and applied the curriculum.
The reduction in conflict is not related to whether there is enormous violence in the community or not. Even the level of the teachers doesn't make any difference, other than their willingness to teach these skills. It is very discouraging when we find over and over again that people are looking for what we call the "vaccination theory" of conflict management--the one-time approach. People think that you can teach skills once and they'll be maintained, instead of understanding that they constantly have to build skills.
In a nutshell, that is our school program. We see it is as building bridges. I like so much what Kon was saying about the connections between all the different constituencies. In many schools the parents are seen as the enemy of the staff, or at least quite suspect. Kids are sometimes seen as the difficult people in education. We have to have better communication and better problem solving on all levels. It's exciting to be able to do some of that in our work.
We also work in the community. We do parenting education and we do conflict and anger management courses. We have developed these with a peacemaking bias that assumes that peace is always better than war, whether it is interpersonal or international, so we teach skills using that assumption. In our interpersonal skills training we strongly emphasize violence prevention. Last week I met with a group of parents in one of the Park Hill public schools where there is great concern about violence. I don't know if you follow the Denver news much, but on Halloween night there was another tragic shooting. There have been many shooting deaths in Park Hill recently and parents are deeply concerned. So, their interest in discussing violence and nonviolence is high. Ten or twelve years ago, if you tried to talk to kids or parents about nonviolence it was tricky at best. I had to dance pretty quickly to keep their attention; it was a real "yawn" for them. But, things have changed dramatically in the last few years. Today when we are working with youth at risk we always start our session by asking, "How many of you have buried a close friend or relative due to violence?" We always get anywhere between 75 and 100 percent saying they have. Years ago we used to think, "Well, yes in the inner-city you'd expect that kind of thing." Two weeks ago, however, I asked that question at a large high school in one of the most affluent districts in Colorado and 100 percent responded "yes" to that question. Our kids are dying. So, kids are very eager to talk about nonviolence. They are very eager to find strategies that will work.
We think it is critical today that adults start talking to kids about the issues of violence and nonviolence, too. Many years ago there was a longitudinal study that was done on children which asked questions about their image of the future. The survey found an astounding percentage, somewhere in the upper 80 percentile, of children that said that they did not believe there would be a future because of nuclear disaster. Out of that came a dialogue about nuclear war and many other activities that helped children address their fears. These activities were important for kids' mental health. Today, I think it is absolutely essential that we do the same kind of thing for violence and nonviolence. We need to give kids some sense that they can do something about violence.
I want to tell a quick story about an incident that occurred last spring. I was invited to facilitate a discussion among twelve elementary school children about violence. Six were from a school that had a conflict and anger management program; six were from a school that did not. We asked the kids if they knew about the problem of violence. They all did. They were real clear about what violence was and what it wasn't. We asked, "Do you know about guns?" "Yep." "Do you know about drugs?" "Yes." The answers were all the same until we got to the questions about what they could do about it. The kids that had been in a year-long conflict management program said, "We know what to do about it. We have to start working on our own put-downs, we have to use our mediators when we get real stuck." They had, click, click, click, all these things that they were doing. The other kids did not have a clue. They felt there was nothing they could do; there was really a victim mentality. One little girl said, "It's really bad because my mom said that maybe we will get a gun and then we'll have our gun, just like they have their guns."
There's a sense of hopelessness. I keep pleading for ways to empower people. None of us know all the answers to the problem of violence in our society, but if we build our own skills, if we choose nonviolence in our institutions, in our offices, in our communities, and especially in our schools and families, where kids learn what conflict is and how to handle it nonviolently in a group setting, we can make a significant difference.