The Curriculum of the Law School (2000) of the Faculty of Law of the National University of Córdoba, has incorporated in the ninth semester, the subject Theory of Conflict and Decision. Conflict resolution methods.
2005 is the second year of its dictation.
It is not about training in Mediation, Negotiation, or Arbitration.
The objective is an academic proposal that provides future lawyers with a space for reflection and criticism on resolution resources, in a social and historical contingency that calls into question the traditional methods of approaching conflicts.
As teachers, we faced a triple challenge in the implementation of the project and collected a comforting result after its implementation.
The first challenge was related to the structuring of specific contents, within the essentially legal-based curriculum, with the time limit of one semester, with two weekly classes of four hours each. The nuclei of the Theories of conflict and decision, of power, of rationality, as well as the specific mechanisms of conflict resolution: negotiation, arbitration and mediation, generators of the impulse of cultural change and social peace.
The approach required from the beginning of all the professors of the Chair a strong commitment to the stated objectives, in order to achieve a critical and comparative knowledge, and transfer and application to cases of conflictive interaction in contemporary social and legal reality.
Teaching-learning was aimed at facilitating the construction of the theoretical context that supports the changes and transformations of legal thought and practice, with the articulations that meaningful learning requires, in order to provide the student with the knowledge and skills necessary to face, advise and solve the problems that the near future presents to them, - the subject corresponds to the fifth year of the degree -, in a legal world today, with a multidimensional characteristic.
The second challenge was to focus didactic strategies and techniques to make possible our mission, in respect for man and his fundamental rights, to his capacity for change and transformation as a member of civil society, democratic and pluralistic, in permanent and complex interdependence.
We appeal to non-traditional resources, role plays, observation of mediation procedures, investigation of real cases, collection of data and information, interviews, participation in public hearings, consensus building, etc. for the development of the stated objectives.
We promoted responsible participation in group interactions, respect for diverse ideas and conditions, and we sponsored integration and meeting differences.
The third challenge was to design an instrument for evaluating the teaching-learning task, which would reflect the foundations of the subject, which would make it possible to articulate with other learning, even with other disciplinary knowledge, and which would give rise to the expression of changes. of behavior and attitudes sought.
We had to overcome traditional methods of measurement, which as obstacles were presented to us at the step: repetition of preselected texts, transcription or writing of notes or concepts pre-written by others, empty expositions of significance for the exhibitor, etc.
The follow-up was permanent.
We seek to measure the changes that the pedagogical project of inquiry on the foundation of alternative methods to the judicial for the resolution of conflicts achieved in the student.
We try to evaluate, by means of non-traditional didactic resources, if the students managed to know, identify and assume as their own the objectives and contents of the subject, if they discovered the role that they should play in the exercise of the profession, if they developed competences typical of the Lawyer in the contemporary world, and after the mediations, the results were auspicious.
The students finished the course promoting the subject, or with a final exam, stating in anonymous surveys that we invite them to answer, that the subject had constituted a tool for personal and professional growth that opened up new and broader horizons for them.
Even so, at the end of the school year, we will turn our self-critical gaze on the path traveled, to ask ourselves new questions, reformulations and adjustments at the service of a permanent improvement of the university teaching-learning task that calls us.
