MACM

Part III and Part IV of four questions posed to Dr. Schneider after he presented at MACM's Annual Conference in 2007.

MACM: One past speaker at MACM indicated mediation is no longer a growing field and it might be resourceful for us to think in terms of Conflict-Resolution rather than mediation. What is your response to this statement?

Carl Schneider:  I know you have had Bernie Mayer present before me.  I fully embrace Bernie’s invitation to frame our field more widely.  Mediation is, indeed, one tool.  It may be the most rewarding in our tool-box.  But I agree with Bernie that if we are to have relevance to the larger conflicts in our day, we need to be thinking about the variety of tools in the tool-kit, and be more ready to work collaboratively with other conflict resolvers, including advocates and activists.

Part II of four questions posed to Dr. Schneider after he presented at MACM's Annual Conference in 2007.

MACM:  At MACM’s conference this year you presented a victim-offender mediation film clip. What can a domestic mediator learn from this?

Carl Schneider: Witnessing the victim-offender experience helps me to trust that mediation can work even in very difficult situations.  The victim-offender video showed a victim, Gary Geiger, and an offender, Wayne Blanchard, able to heal a decade-old unresolved injury through a face-to-face conversation supported by a third party witness, a mediator. If it is possible to heal wounds in which one party has almost killed another, then we should be looking for opportunities to bring healing in family situations where there may also be great injury and hurt, but personal rather than physical.

Part I of four questions posed to Dr. Schneider after he presented at MACM's Annual Conference in 2007.

MACM: What changes in the field of domestic mediation have you observed in the past five years?

Carl Schneider: Perhaps the biggest change in this field is the rise of Collaborative Law (CL) and Collaborative Divorce.  Attorneys have embraced CL as an approach that allows them to avoid the worst practices of adversarial law, and enables them to use their training and skills in a way that feels clearly more useful to their clients. But this new practice challenges the hegemony that mediation has had as the primary alternative form of dispute resolution in the domestic area.