By Angelika Dawson

WHEN you travel halfway around the world to talk about your work, you expect to find some differences in the way you and those doing similar work function.

But when Catherine Bargen traveled to Ukraine to meet with those involved in restorative justice work there, she was struck more by the similarities.

Bargen is currently working on her MA in conflict transformation. She works with Community Justice Initiatives in Langley as a trainer and practitioner of restorative justice in criminal and school settings.

She was recently part of a trip sponsored by Mennonite Central Committee Canada’s Peace Ministries program.

She and another educator from Ontario met with MCC’s partners in Odessa: the Odessa Regional Mediation Group (ORMG). ORMG partners with schools providing restorative peer mediation training, exactly the kind of work Bargen has been involved with in Langley.

“We had the opportunity to meet with staff at a local school, including a principal, teachers, psychologists and students,” she says. “We were consistently amazed to hear how similar their approaches to mediation and peacemaking were in their schools as in our own Canadian schools.”

This was confirmed as they watched students perform a role-play of a conflict.

“We could have pasted our Canadian students right on top of them, it was exactly the kind of role-playing model we see in Canada,” she said. “Without much communication between schools in Ukraine and Canada, they developed an approach that’s almost identical to what we are doing in Langley, B.C.”

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Catherine Bargen (in the black shirt) with Ukrainian students. Photo: Brian Enns.

Restorative peer mediation focuses on the relationship between those in conflict as much as on the solution. Bargen describes it as an opportunity for those involved to reflect back on the situation in order to gain a better understanding of it, to address harm done and to figure out a healthy way to relate in their school context.

One difference Bargen took note of was the context out of which teachers and administrative staff were working.

“These people are working in a post-Soviet context, which was an extremely authoritarian environment,” she says. “The fact that they are coming out from under that, to see peer mediation as an effective way to resolve conflict – my admiration for them just increased 10-fold.”

The opportunity to be an encouragement to staff there was one of the highlights of the experience for her, and Bargen hopes educators here are also encouraged by what is happening in Ukraine.

“Reminding people that they’re part of a bigger, global movement is important,” she says. “We have to educate our students in these practices and find new ways to think about discipline. That others around the world are seeing the importance and the success of this is encouraging.”

January 2008