Hear everyone: the first Belarusian university mediation service opened in BSPU

Both experienced professionals and specially trained students will act as neutral mediators and extinguishers of conflicts. They have already completed three months of training and are ready to help resolve difficult issues.

The BSPU Mediation Service is the first such structure in Belarusian universities, says the initiator of the project Yulia Egorova, head of the Center for the Development of Pedagogical Education of the University. She has been studying this topic for more than 15 years and says that the mediator has a set of tools to effectively extinguish even the most complex conflicts. Before the opening of the service, the university conducted a large-scale study among 1,100 students - nine faculties and two institutes were involved. It turned out that 55 percent of conflicts in the student environment are personal disagreements, about 30 are educational disputes, most often about grades. Our university prepares future teachers, educators, psychologists and social teachers. Therefore, mediative competence is not a “pleasant addition” to the profession, but its core, as important as methodological literacy. A teacher who knows how to constructively resolve a conflict will be able to form the same culture in his students. Yulia Egorova (third from left) and students of the first stream of the BSPU mediation service.

The first stream of ten future mediators has already received three-month training from professional specialists. Now, absolutely any student or university employee can contact the mediation service for help. The process is built as simple as possible: the faculties have already distributed special business cards with QR codes, following which the applicant gets on the form and leaves his application. Then everything goes according to an understandable scenario: first, the mediator talks with each participant in the dispute separately. At this individual meeting, the specialist decides whether it is possible to resolve the conflict through mediation. If the parties are ready for dialogue, they are called for general talks, the interlocutor said:

- The organizers guarantee complete honesty, impartiality and confidentiality, even if disagreements arose between the ordinary student and the university management. If the participants in the situation do not trust internal intermediaries, the university will invite an independent expert, for example, from the Center for Mediation and Law.

Elizaveta Bartosz, a 2nd year student of the Faculty of Natural Sciences, already a certified mediator student, admits that she is morally ready to work even with difficult cases: – In the classes, we discussed real cases in detail: conflicts in the dormitory, disputes over assessments and misunderstanding between the head and the group. In every situation, our task was to steer the dialogue in a peaceful direction. This is incredibly exciting and will definitely be useful in the future profession. School is an environment where the interests of children, parents and administration constantly intersect, and the teacher must be able to maneuver between them.

azanovich@sb.by