LEARNING TO ‘CUT THE BREAD EVENLY’– TEACHING CONFLICT MANAGEMENT AND NEGOTIATION STRATEGIES

The paper focuses on an approach to the teaching of a soft skills category, viz. conflict management and negotiation strategies, covering a range of bridge-building abilities, by means of a CLIL instructional pattern, meant to help technical university graduates to successfully perform as engineers in the sphere of business/industry in the ever changing world context of our century. A presentation of the proposed module is provided, together with the pedagogic rationale underlying designing/teaching it. The piloting stage main conclusions are included, with a view to initiating further optimization. Key-words: Language education, soft skills, CLIL, conflict management, negotiation strategies. Motto: ”You can’t shake hands with a clenched fist.” Indira Gandhi 1. Paper focus That research in education has an important role to play has become a wellknown fact in the contemporary period, as we live in a challenging type of society, distinctly dissimilar from the point of view of cultural differences, dominated by globalization and a permanent effort of people from various spheres of life to cope with the stirring-to-action phenomena, among which those in instructional processes at all levels do ask for prompt response and reshaping for the future. The focus on learning and the learner in education has been directed mainly on the development of an individual able to easily identify employment and perform successfully upon graduation from higher education. Therefore, it is, we maintain, the foreign language teacher’s role to contribute to endowing the generations to come with the repertory of relevant skills in the new work contexts, as well as to discover new innovative manners of doing so. Against such a background, the aim of this study is to plead for the possibility of English language teachers at university level to pass from the already consecrated General English and/or ESP courses towards an approach of the CLIL Diversité et Identité Culturelle en Europe 256 (Content and Language Integrated Learning) type, that should combine the linguistic input they can bring to the students with the content, more specifically by designing/teaching soft skills oriented materials. It is, in our opinion, prompted by our recent experience as practitioners, a quite feasible option in dealing with the demands of the present/future, particularly as regards the majority of the soft skills young engineers if we refer to the author’s educational context need, as these abilities are linked with aspects specific to the sphere of humanistic disciplines, having communication, as well as psychological and social features at the fore. Certainly, for such an enterprise to be successful, a network of professionals sharing experience and advancing new ideas in an arena of debate leading to optimization is mandatory. Consequently, this study should be seen as a proposal to use the CLIL approach to the teaching of soft skills and a voice advocating for an enlargement of the professional area of expertise of language teachers in the academe. 2. Essential theoretical framework Such an activity should rely on a survey of the literature, which has added numerous titles lately, on: the weighting of soft skills in general for engineering graduates, the ways in which they are taught, particularly by means of CLIL type courses, to finish with the approaches to teaching two soft skills components of significance, viz. conflict management and negotiation abilities. Thus, an attempt to define soft skills, in very broad lines, seen as those abilities which are different from, and at the same time complementary to, we should add, the directly technical/hard ones, would see them as being of equal status in ensuring a young graduate’s success in getting employment, maintaining it and performing successfully and efficiently at the workplace. The relationship between these two categories of abilities puts together the IQ (Intelligence Quotient) and the EQ (Emotional Intelligence Quotient) of the young adult, in their effort to integrate in an organization, be it technical or a business oriented one. Prevalence tends to go towards the soft ones, but, as most companies cannot afford investing in the enhancement of the soft skills repertoire of their employees, it results that the role of developing them goes to higher education, which is actually expected to provide the graduates’ qualitative standards able to meet the expectations/needs/requirements of the work market of today. Moreover, as shown by some authors (Sharatkumar, 2009), soft skills themselves have developed, integrating newer forms, alongside with the more traditional ones, such as communication, team work, problem-solving a.s.o. He lists ‘knowledge of interacting with trans-national cultures, business etiquette, Diversité et Identité Culturelle en Europe 257 expected and acceptable behavior in new geographies’ as some of the new abilities to be expected from the young graduates of the technical universities. There are numerous lists or even data bases, available from various sources, of the soft skills of interest for our undergraduates. For instance, one can find, on the site of a specialized organization in preparing software engineers for the new society (SECC, 2007), a number of musts included in the topics for the training of engineers: ‘project management, negotiation skills, communication skills’ etc. In fact, any comprehensive list of soft skills will place negotiation and conflict management among the main components (Prodcons Group, 2009 – as just one example). They also appear in the list of the so-called ‘critical employability skills’ (Hansen and Hansen, 2010), who include the ‘ability to… mitigate conflict with co-workers’ among first-rank priorities, which actually shows that their importance is considered major in the range of soft skills that are of primary significance for the professionals of engineering and/or business. An aspect that should not be neglected in the teaching of such soft skills, as shown by the literature (Rao, 2010) is that the focus with them tends to be placed on ‘attitude and behaviour’. Hence, a special attention is given to conflict management and negotiation skills. As today our globalized society is characterized by a high level of workforce mobility, it is necessary to include intercultural elements in designing appropriate soft skills oriented courses, as emphasized by the literature (Longatan, 2009), who refers to the manner in which the employee should take into account and harmonize the diverse cultural backgrounds and personal approaches to the cultural dimension. One manner of dealing with the teaching of soft skills that we envisage is via CLIL type courses, which have a double focus, linguistic and of content taught. The creator of the notion emphasizes the fact that it refers to an activity in which ‘a foreign language is used as a tool in the learning of a non-language subject’ (Marsh, 2002), which is confirmed by other authors (Md Yassin, 2009), who synthetically refers to CLIL as a ‘dual-focused educational approach’. It is an ‘innovative form of language-enhanced education’ (Frigols, 2007), and there are several good reasons in its favour (Content and Language Integrated Learning, 2006), i.e. it is taught in a language that is not the L1 of the learners, but a foreign one, most probably the one to be used at the workplace and/or internationally. It economically covers a twofold aim: to increase the soft skills repertory of the undergraduate and to develop their linguistic proficiency, thus demonstrating to the students what level of expectations the university and, later, the real society we should add have from them. As regards the issue of conflict management, seen as ’the process of limiting the negative aspects of conflict while increasing the positive aspects of Diversité et Identité Culturelle en Europe 258 conflict’ (Rahim, 2002, p. 208), according to the same author, the aim of teaching it is to ’enhance learning and group outcomes’, thus attaining effectiveness in organizational settings. An authoritative voice in the field, Rahim (op. cit.) makes certain important statements that may be useful in understanding the topic, that we briefly list in a non prioritized order: we cannot speak of one ’best approach’ to conflict managing; a positive approach to understanding the phenomenon in order to teach it appropriately would be to incorporate in a ’meta-model’ the already existing models, that should cover good practices from a range of models in terms of conflict styles and treatment; the focus goes therefore on five so-called ’management approaches: integrating, obliging, dominating, avoiding and compromising’, each of them being analyzed in terms of the human action components involved. We will remark that such items of the specialized literature on conflict management can be, and indeed they are, used within the proposed soft skills course in English as valuable input reading meant to introduce specific content to the trainees. It is equally important to sensitize the students as to the contents of the main concepts discussed in the module, more specifically when conflict resolution is taught, it should be seen as a phenomenon of reducing conflict and tension; accordingly, terms such as negotiation, mediation or arbitration will necessarily occur in association with the former. The literature on conflict management is quite vast, but there are certain recurrent themes that are of interest for our purpose here. Thus, five main steps are identified and described in the action of managing conflicts (Maccoby and Studder, 2011, p.50): anticipating, preventing, idnetifying, managing and resolving – their meanings are quite clear, and within the course there are various ways of getting the learners aware of them.