MODELING MEDIATION PROCESSES IN EDUCATION

Abstract

The complexity of the educational system lies in the blending of the three forms of education: formal, informal and nonformal, that involve stakeholders with different interests and manifestations. The main actors are the "learner" and the "teacher", but the aquisition of learning outcomes is influenced by several external factors, that are described in the paper. A brief survey of the Romanian education systems depicts the issues that can generate conflicts. Conflits in the educational environment can generate a wide range of situations, sometimes with severe effects. It is important to identify both the mechanisms of conflict generation and the best problem solving method. The conflicts are classified according to various criteria, and a database for conflict patterns is developed. Like in other conflict situations, to solve conflicts in education, in their different phases, stakeholders can call on mediation processes, that offer sustainable results and are easily accepted by the parties in conflict. The paper proposes an ontology model of educational processes highlighting potential causes of conflicts, and their interference with the mediation process. The educational processes are modeled in form of workflows. A set of states are defined for each class of persons. Conflicts are also described by a set of parameters, their values being changed through the interaction of stakeholders, in different phases of the workflows. This model underlies an application that monitors both conflicts, and the results of the mediation process applied to these conflicts and issues warnings (alerts) if conditions that can lead to conflict are identified, based on stored patterns.