ICCCR Past Education Initiatives
New York City Board of Education and Teachers College Faculty Training
In 1989, ICCCR Staff Instructors were hired by the New York City Board of Education for a two-year project to train a mediation and also a negotiation specialist in every high school in New York City. Following this initiative, principals and assistant principals in every high school were also trained in conflict resolution. During the 1989-1991 academic years, faculty at Teachers College were also offered a series of workshops and seminars to enable them to infuse conflict resolution into their classes. The ICCCR’s Instructors also began to provide services to school systems nationally and internationally and to organizations such as UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund).
United Nations Consultation and Training
In 1995, the ICCCR began providing training and consultation services to the United Nations Secretariat, offering collaborative negotiation, mediation, and cross-cultural training and consultation to all levels of management and employees at the UN Headquarters and at all UN Field Duty Stations worldwide. We revised the three programs we developed for the United Nations: Collaborative Negotiation, Collaborative Negotiation Follow Up and Mediation. These updated programs reflect current research, theory and practice in the field. In addition to this work at the UN, since 1998 we have co-sponsored and co-taught a course with the UN Studies Program and the Conflict Resolution Program of the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) on “Preventative Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution: UN Cases” which has as its students several UN Ambassadors and Desk Officers.
Working Conflict and Diversity
In 1997, as part of its national agenda, the National Institute on Dispute Resolution (NIDR), (which later merged with other organizations to form the Association for Conflict Resolution, ACR), attempted to bridge the fields of diversity training and conflict resolution training, which heretofore had been largely separate but parallel movements in this country. In response to this, and in collaboration with interested students and faculty from SIPA, the ICCCR organized a group of local experts from both fields with the objective of surveying “best practices” in education around conflict and diversity. This culminated in the design of a new course that ICCCR currently offers, which integrated content and process in these areas. The FLOM Foundation funded this initiative.
New York City Board of Education Training
Later in 1999, our proposal to the New York City Board of Education to provide a menu of training workshops to their school districts was also approved. This was a relatively large project which included research and evaluation. We developed an instrument to be used as both a development and feedback tool in the trainings, as a pre/post evaluation.
Conference on Designing Pedagogy from The Handbook of Conflict Resolution: Theory and Practice
In the spring of 2000, the ICCCR co-organized and participated in a conference at The University of Massachusetts-Boston sponsored by the Hewlett Foundation’s Theory-to-Practice Project that brought together 90 top educator/practitioners of conflict resolution to develop pedagogy based on the chapters of our edited Handbook of Conflict Resolution: Theory and Practice (2000).
