Straight Off the Deep End in Adventure Learning

Abstract

In October 2009, more than 50 of the world's leading negotiation scholars gathered in Istanbul, Turkey for the second in a series of three international conferences designed to critically examine what is taught in contemporary negotiation courses and how we teach them, with special emphasis on how best to "translate" teaching methodology to succeed with diverse, global audiences. In organizing the Istanbul conference, we took particular note of a consistent strain of criticism of the artificiality of a classroom environment, which became a running theme of many of our authors in the project's first year, captured in the previously published RETHINKING NEGOTIATION TEACHING: INNOVATIONS FOR CONTEXT AND CULTURE (DRI Press 2010). It would be hard to imagine a better environment for trying something new and different outside the classroom environment than Istanbul, and we tried to do honor to one of the world's greatest trading cities in our design for the conference. In brief, as described in this book chapter, we dispatched small teams of scholars into the city's famous bazaars, for one exercise in studying how negotiation might be taught more actively, and dispatched teams into the city's less touristy neighborhoods on another occasion, with instructions that required each team to negotiate internally. The resulting rich collection of scholarship is gathered in VENTURING BEYOND THE CLASSROOM: VOLUME 2 IN THE RETHINKING NEGOTIATION TEACHING SERIES.

Keywords: negotiation, pedagogy, adventure learning, multi-cultural, multi-disciplinary