The Value of Mediation and Discovering the Green Narrative
Some student housing on campus
In the spring of my junior Year, I took advantage of a study abroad opportunity at Sveriges Lantbruksuniversitet (Swedish University of
Agricultural Sciences) in Uppsala Sweden, where I studied in their
Environmental Communications Department.
My arrival scene was quite cold, but I grew to love Sweden. I was especially impressed with all of the countries' environmental efforts - the bike riding, compost as part of the trash, the carbon footprint of food on menus at fast food places. I kept a blog about my time in Sweden and specifically environmentalism; it can be found here: http://blogs.cornell.edu/christinacopeland2009/
While I was in Sweden, I took a Graduate level class called "Stakeholder Facilitation in Project and Conflict Management." When I first got to Sweden, I was in an international class of about 50 students, 10 of which spoke fluent English. I had a hard time adjusting; I thought the class moved extremely slowly since everyone was not at the same skill-level in language. While the class focused on Alternative Dispute Resolution, facilitation and mediation, I felt that we were just learning basic rules on how to be polite. As time went on and I made friends with the other students and read some of the literature for the course, I started seeing things in a more positive light and began to believe that mediation could be a powerful tool.
The real turning point for me, after which I was a strong believer in mediation, occurred during a very important group project. I was in a group with two Swedish women, a Brazilian woman, a Turkish woman, and an Ethiopian man. We were assigned to write a report about the government of Borlänge, Sweden and their new KlimatSmart program, which was designed to engage it's citizens in living more sustainably. We also had to investigate how the Municipality of Borlänge communicates about the project to the public. Our aim was to identify and investigate the communicative tools in the KlimatSmart project used by the Borlänge Municipality to change public attitude and/or behavior regarding environmental issues such as Climate Change. We wanted to understand how the tools are being used in putting the project into action, and for what specific purposes are used.
My arrival scene was quite cold, but I grew to love Sweden. I was especially impressed with all of the countries' environmental efforts - the bike riding, compost as part of the trash, the carbon footprint of food on menus at fast food places. I kept a blog about my time in Sweden and specifically environmentalism; it can be found here: http://blogs.cornell.edu/christinacopeland2009/
While I was in Sweden, I took a Graduate level class called "Stakeholder Facilitation in Project and Conflict Management." When I first got to Sweden, I was in an international class of about 50 students, 10 of which spoke fluent English. I had a hard time adjusting; I thought the class moved extremely slowly since everyone was not at the same skill-level in language. While the class focused on Alternative Dispute Resolution, facilitation and mediation, I felt that we were just learning basic rules on how to be polite. As time went on and I made friends with the other students and read some of the literature for the course, I started seeing things in a more positive light and began to believe that mediation could be a powerful tool.
The real turning point for me, after which I was a strong believer in mediation, occurred during a very important group project. I was in a group with two Swedish women, a Brazilian woman, a Turkish woman, and an Ethiopian man. We were assigned to write a report about the government of Borlänge, Sweden and their new KlimatSmart program, which was designed to engage it's citizens in living more sustainably. We also had to investigate how the Municipality of Borlänge communicates about the project to the public. Our aim was to identify and investigate the communicative tools in the KlimatSmart project used by the Borlänge Municipality to change public attitude and/or behavior regarding environmental issues such as Climate Change. We wanted to understand how the tools are being used in putting the project into action, and for what specific purposes are used.
So our group went on a week long trip to Borlänge, taking
a three hour train there and staying in a hostel together. We had
interviews with various government officials, power companies, and
green consulting companies in the area. We also conducted an informal
survey of the public in a shopping mall, about their knowledge of
KlimatSmart. The most interesting aspect of our assignment to write this
research paper was that half the paper was supposed to be written about KlimatSmart in Borlänge, and the other half had to be entirely written about how our group worked together. This led to a lot of group reflection so that we'd have content to write about. There was a large miscommunication in our group before we performed the public survey, which led to hurt feelings afterwards. We had to actually use mediation to resolve the issue and be able to work together as a group; being involved in the experience and seeing it work before my eyes really made me a believer in mediation. I focus a lot on creative visual communication in the work I do, and this class and experience really fulfilled and furthered the other obvious verbal aspect of communication.