Negotiation Pedagogy as Democratic Praxis

What we teach in the negotiation classroom depends upon how we teach it. This is hardly a new idea to negotiation education; this insight was spelled out by some of the field’s pioneers decades ago (Patton 2000). Negotiation courses since then have placed simulations and other exercises at their heart, taught by instructors who “motivate by attraction instead of coercion; demonstrate competence, confidence, congruence, and openness; and combat evidence collecting and other departures from clear reasoning by confronting them and advocating inquiry” (Patton 2000: 40). The field of contemporary negotiation education has long been distinguished by its close attention to matters of pedagogy.

More broadly, the study of negotiation challenges conventional academic distinctions between thinking and doing. The field is a big tent that encompasses theoretical analyses of negotiation concepts, empirical studies of negotiation practice, case studies of real‐world negotiations, tool kits to put theoretical concepts into action, and more. Negotiation remains deeply engaged with the world of practice as do few other academic fields; negotiation scholars have gone farther than most in challenging the distinctions between theory and practice or between experience and analysis. Negotiation also remains a fundamentally interdisciplinary field of study, with some scholars residing in conflict resolution programs and others residing in law schools, business schools, urban planning schools, psychology or economics departments, and the like. The diverse disciplinary traditions that inform negotiation enrich its body of scholarship while permitting scholars and practitioners to situate themselves amidst a wide array of methodological stances. The study of negotiation is pluralistic to its core.

The academic negotiation community’s concern with pedagogy directly follows from these basic commitments. Just as the content that we teach is predicated upon the intrinsic unity of theory and practice, our pedagogical theories and practices in designing courses and in leading classroom discussions give life to that content by providing our students with rich and varied experiences that lend themselves to rigorous analysis. How we teach is inseparable from what we teach; the very idea of reducing negotiation education to “content delivery” is antithetical to the interactive and learner‐centric model that characterizes our pedagogy (Watters 2012). While there are important differences in how individual negotiation educators design their courses, a commitment to rigorous pedagogy remains a sine qua non.

Notwithstanding these deep and long‐standing commitments to engaged negotiation pedagogy, there are several reasons why this is a particularly important moment to reflect critically on how we teach negotiation. First, the format of higher education is at a turning point. The sudden transition to online education across the United States and around the world in light of the Covid‐19 pandemic affects negotiation courses no less than any other. Some negotiation courses were already being conducted online, in whole or in part, before the pandemic, and it seems likely that higher education in the years to come will involve a greater use of online platforms as a general matter. Whatever the format, our courses can benefit from returning to first principles as we redesign negotiation courses while keeping effective pedagogy in mind. Second, notwithstanding the temporary restrictions on movement and in‐person gatherings during the Covid‐19 pandemic, the reality of globalization will not be undone over the long term. We teach in classrooms and conference rooms around the world, our students come from every country on earth, and our theories are gradually becoming attuned (however imperfectly) to the diversity of the cultures, legal systems, and markets in which negotiators must operate today. Reflecting on our pedagogy provides an opportunity to think deeply about negotiation education as a cultural practice, allowing us to make informed choices about what values we want our negotiation courses to convey and what values and perspectives students in a diverse classroom bring to the material. Third, the popular conception of negotiation with which we must contend today has been strongly shaped by the recent presidency of Donald Trump, who proclaims himself to be one of the world’s great negotiators. Does this affect how our students approach the subject matter that we teach, perhaps due to a greater interest in claiming value rather than creating value, a cynicism about the role of ethics in negotiation, or otherwise? Is our pedagogy responsive to what students need from negotiation courses in this moment? A focus on pedagogy can help us clarify for ourselves what the political meanings of our classes are, and that can enable us to design courses that give life to our most ambitious goals. Understanding negotiation education as necessarily conveying political meaning may seem out of place in a field that presents its content as having general applicability and that values neutrality. But it is precisely because of negotiation’s seeming neutrality that the political dimensions of negotiation pedagogy need to be brought to light—and urgently so in this moment.

This essay urges a fresh reconsideration of negotiation pedagogy through the lens of John Dewey’s theories of pedagogy, experience, and democracy. Dewey’s influence is already widely recognized in the field, both for his own contributions to educational theory and for the contributions of those who have followed in his footsteps (such as Donald Schön and Chris Argyris). In the United States, Dewey remains the foremost theorist of education (particularly of experiential education) of the past hundred years. His calls to center learning in active engagements with problems and in reflections upon personal experiences are so uncontroversial among espoused negotiation pedagogies that it may seem wholly unnecessary to engage with his writings—aren’t we all already putting his ideas into practice? Even so, engaging with Dewey’s writing on these points remains helpful for keeping our attention focused on why experiences are essential for our pedagogy and how to ground our courses on solid theoretical foundations in this moment. As Dewey reminds us, even traditional teaching formats (such as lectures) are “experiential” insofar as our students experience their education and draw certain lessons from those experiences and from the relationship between content and format. Without proper care, the implicit lessons students learn from their experiences can undermine the explicit lessons that we intend to convey.

Crucially, Dewey’s theories of education are inextricably connected to his radical vision of democracy. Building negotiation education on his theoretical foundations is therefore not only a way to keep meaningful experience at the center of negotiation education, but also a way to make negotiation pedagogy a form of instruction in the values of democratic culture itself. It does so by requiring learners to take responsibility for their own education and for that of their peers, by collapsing the hierarchy of the classroom through the elevation of peer feedback and group discussion, by enhancing students’ agency to define their own goals rather than having goals imposed upon them by external authorities, and by eliminating the fiction that the classroom serves as mere preparation for life rather than as an active site of politics. This teaching note argues that the negotiation classroom has the potential to be a setting for an education in democratic culture, rather than a place to learn discrete skills or theories in isolation.

It may be objected that the negotiation classroom is no place for political lessons—that it is and should be about training students to use a set of discrete skills informed by certain theoretical principles. This objection incorrectly assumes that a classroom can be free of political lessons; on the contrary, the insight of the pioneers of negotiation pedagogy is that the classroom is always already a political space in which the myriad relationships among teachers and students are part of a political education that is taking place—whether we acknowledge it or not.

This essay is based upon my experiences teaching negotiation since 2017 (including one semester in which I had the opportunity to serve as a pedagogical interlocutor for other instructors) and my perspective as a historian who has studied professional education in the twentieth century and for whom Dewey has long been a vital reference point. The views here are my own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of those with whom I have taught. My experiences teaching negotiation pale in comparison with those of many readers of this journal, and my experiences include a healthy mix of both successes and failures. This essay is not intended to be a how‐to guide with actionable lessons from someone who has figured it all out. It is offered both in the spirit of one negotiation instructor’s reflection upon his teaching to date and as a provocation to explicitly ground negotiation education as an exercise of Dewey’s radical democratic vision to meet the needs of our moment.

The starting point for Dewey is that students experience the classroom. They attend lectures, read assigned texts, and work on assignments alone or in teams, and the learning that takes place comes from the interaction of each specific student—each with their own background and interests and psychology—with the formal curriculum and with the informal setting of the classroom, including the relationships between teacher and students and among the students themselves. Consequently, it is essential to design the classroom so that the informal social experiences are congruent with the formal curricular content, in order for students to experience the content in action and to learn a consistent and mutually reinforcing set of lessons.

Genuine learning goes beyond merely having a set of experiences, however carefully thought through. Rather, learning occurs when students process their experiences—by reflecting upon them in order to generate hypotheses for further testing, to engage meaningfully with the experiences of classmates who may be differently situated, and to connect past experiences to future opportunities. Student reflection should occur in dialogue with the teacher, who has theoretical schemas at the ready that may be useful to the student in his or her reflective process. Feedback from the instructor can help students cultivate the skills of reflecting on action and of reflecting in action (Schön 1983). Reflection offers students opportunities to generate meaning from their past and current experiences and to prepare for future experiences.

These general principles should already be familiar to negotiation instructors. Experiential education (in the form of simulations and other exercises) already constitutes a core component of most negotiation courses, which are built around providing opportunities for students to do negotiations rather than just analyze them abstractly. At the same time, the concept of designing classrooms and pedagogy that are congruent with the content of negotiation theory is widely recognized in the field. Negotiation teachers may achieve this goal through many means, including utilizing the “five core concerns” of Fisher and Shapiro’s Beyond Reason when managing the classroom (Fisher and Shapiro 2005), decentering themselves from being a “sage on the stage,” and grounding peer feedback in lessons on interpersonal communication (Stone and Heen 2014). Reflection through writing journals or producing videos, with comments from instructors and/or peers, is also a staple of most negotiation classrooms (Moffitt and Peppet 2003). Negotiation pedagogy has been particularly influenced by the work of Argyris and Schön, such as their concepts of single‐loop learning, in which learning consists of modifying actions and strategies in response to experiences, and double‐loop learning, in which learning consists of interrogating governing mindsets and assumptions as well as the actions and strategies that follow from them. These concepts are operationalized in their “Model I” behavior, in which double‐loop learning is inhibited, and “Model II” behavior, in which double‐loop learning is enhanced (Argyris, Putnam, and Smith 1985). The literature contains a robust engagement with studies of experience and action.

If these are already part of the negotiation instructor’s repertoire, why bother returning to Dewey’s century‐old understanding of experience? Because Dewey’s vision of the essential unity of experience can remain a vital touchstone for negotiation teachers, as can his emphasis upon the experimental stance at the heart of learning. To put it in Argyris and Schön’s terms, there may be a tension between our espoused pedagogical theories of providing opportunities to students to think differently (critically, imaginatively) about negotiation on the basis of experience, on the one hand, and our tendencies toward pedagogical theories‐in‐use that contain an evangelical dimension of spreading the good word of interest‐based negotiation and collaborative problem‐solving within a didactic framework, on the other. We teach that there are often gaps between espoused theories and theories‐in‐use, and that people often tend toward the Model I behavior of focusing on control rather than the inquisitive and critical Model II behavior. Recognizing these tendencies in ourselves (and I very much include myself in this statement), Dewey’s theories stand as a beacon for what experiential learning might look like in radically decentering didacticism. In Democracy and Education, Dewey wrote that “the first stage of contact with any new material … must inevitably be of the trial and error sort. An individual must actually try … to do something with material in carrying out his own impulsive activity, and then note the interaction of his energy and that of the material employed. Hence the first approach to any subject in school, if thought is to be aroused and not words acquired, should be as unscholastic as possible” (Dewey 1916: 154). This is not a model of teaching theoretical concepts for subsequent application. Dewey’s challenge to us is to maintain the immediacy of experience without providing too much conceptual baggage in the first instance.

There is widespread recognition within the negotiation community that “[e]xplicit learning … should be rooted in learning by doing, in inventing from concrete experience, with the teacher organizing the experience and then serving as a resource and coach” (Patton 2000: 39). Notwithstanding such recognition, the structure of the classroom risks enacting Schön’s model of technical rationality—of “intelligent practice as an application of knowledge to instrumental decisions” (Schön 1983: 50)—in which we provide students with techniques of general application, context‐free means that they can use to accomplish given ends. Instead of teaching abstract principles and concrete practices that students can then straightforwardly apply and perform, a genuinely experiential model inverts this such that the consolidation of negotiation theory only works “when the symbol really symbolizes—when it stands for and sums up in shorthand actual experiences which the individual has already gone through” (Dewey 1981: 479). The theory’s relevance depends on its ability to distill meaning from the experience.

Beyond recognizing that theory has no significance without being grounded in experience, this approach also reflects an understanding that teaching decontextualized principles leaves the theory so simplified as to be devoid of meaning: “Those things which are … most valuable in the logic of actual inquiry and classification, drop out. The really thought‐provoking character is obscured, and the organizing function disappears … the [student] gets the advantage neither of the … logical formulation, nor of his own native competencies of apprehension and response” (Dewey 1981: 480). We are right to be concerned with making theory accessible to students, but we err in doing so by providing shortcuts to the theory. I have observed that students in my own and others’ classes have occasionally found the theory shallow, a mere restatement of “common sense”; this reflects the ways in which streamlining the theory for easy digestion robs students of the salutary effects of chewing on it and incorporating it into their lives. When theory serves to bring conceptual order to experience, it has a deeper significance and a more immediate payoff than when it is served up as ex ante principles for subsequent application. A rigorous understanding of the theory is essential for even the most practical‐minded students, and we do our students no favors by pre‐digesting it for them. The experience of making the theory one’s own remains crucial.

Furthermore, the focus on teaching means divorced from ends—of teaching negotiation as a set of value‐free propositions that may be applied to accomplish any desired goal—is inimical to Dewey’s metaphysics of experience. Learning and practicing a particular negotiation concept must be understood in connection with the particular ends that student‐negotiators aim to achieve. To attempt to separate a practice from its context—such as by maintaining a posture of using active listening skills at all times, without first asking what we hope to achieve in a given conversation or how we hope to relate to a given interlocutor, for example—undermines the principle of individualized attention that the practice requires. By grounding conceptual lessons in concrete experiences, we can teach our students that our practices are not a set of decontextualized techniques to be refined through single‐loop learning, but rather call for a shift in mindset through double‐loop learning and the freely chosen commitment to a task. This element of personal commitment may be better served by holding space for analyzing students’ real‐world experiences of setting goals and trying to achieve them through negotiation. Real experiences have a factual richness and require genuine commitment in ways that simulations and other exercises cannot recreate, and are likely to matter to students in ways that classroom exercises rarely do. Only as our students have the experience of taking responsibility for determining their goals, finding creative solutions and wrestling with the solutions found by their peers, reflecting on the challenges they faced and why they found the solutions they did, and performing the analytical work to understand the parameters of these practices, can they then meaningfully engage with abstract concepts as tools that they can bend to their own purposes, rather than seeing these abstractions as dogma.

Experiences in the classroom must matter to the lives of students. As our classrooms migrate online, there is no reason why negotiation pedagogy cannot remain rigorous and experiential in this format too—provided that it remains interactive and engaged. We already socialize, conduct business, and fall in love online; the boundaries between online and offline life are increasingly blurred. Courses that move fluidly between online and in‐person components—as compared with purely in‐person, technologically limited courses—would meet students where they are and provide educational experiences that are more consistent with the way that we live and communicate in the twenty‐first century.

There are political stakes to pedagogy as well, and Dewey, our foremost theorist of democracy, can help clarify the political opportunities inherent in negotiation pedagogy. For Dewey, democracy consists not only of electoral politics, but of a broad set of social arrangements through which individuals come together to determine the ends they seek and the means by which to achieve them: “A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience” (Dewey 1916: 87). Dewey believed that democratic life could be realized through mutual interaction and mutual understanding across the deep barriers that divide us:

In this particular moment, as negotiation and dispute resolution scholars and practitioners have turned their attention to the challenges posed by political polarization and long‐standing racial injustice, Dewey reminds us of the radical nature of actually seeking to reach across our deepest divisions, claiming that democracy had not yet been realized and required a fundamental restructuring of social arrangements (Dewey 2008). Key to Dewey’s democratic vision was the notion of education as the continued growth of individual capabilities, in community.

Education for democracy would help erode class distinctions by challenging the distinction between the “higher” forms of liberal education available to elite groups and the more practical forms of vocational and professional education that have been considered less intellectually respectable, a tension that plays out in negotiation’s contested place in the academy. Bringing liberal studies together with practical training would help individuals determine their own ends and execute on them, while also demonstrating that all members of society are responsible for both envisioning a better world and bringing it into being: “An education which should unify the disposition of the members of society would do much to unify society itself” (Dewey 1916: 260). As an action‐oriented practice that raises fundamental practical and theoretical questions of significance for economics, psychology, politics, and law, negotiation has the potential to teach students (in professional schools or in academic disciplines in the arts and sciences) to move dialectically between the worlds of practice and theory, of experience and analysis.

While the political dimension of Dewey’s thinking has not significantly influenced the mainstream of negotiation pedagogy, scholars have drawn connections between the field of negotiation and democratic theory. At its most basic level, negotiation theory engages with the fundamental interpersonal interactions that form the basis of democratic social life; it calls for individuals to empathize with their counterparts and learn about the situations of others without abandoning their own personal commitments. Negotiation theory recognizes that our social world involves both points of shared interests and deep conflicts about values and about the distribution of resources. Furthermore, recent trends in allied fields, such as dispute resolution, are actively exploring the possibilities of dialogue to foster meaningful engagements with others across our deepest divides. The discipline of negotiation draws upon traditional academic work (such as economics, ethics, psychology, organizational behavior, and international relations) and upon practical experiences in ways that, if taken seriously, have the potential to challenge the class‐based differentiation of the worlds of theory and practice within intellectual life (and the attendant academic caste distinctions between ladder faculty and others). The study of negotiation, particularly in light of its adjacent specialties, can play an important role in building a more democratic culture in which people can engage with others for the practical purposes of collaborating or working through disagreements, while also developing a deeper appreciation for the most profound theoretical questions facing our polity.

But these elements are only found around the edges of negotiation pedagogy. They can be brought closer to the center—and, indeed, they must be, if we wish to give life to the radical nature of the vision. A negotiation pedagogy explicitly directed toward strengthening democratic potentialities would emphasize our responsibilities as individuals and as a polity for selecting our own ends rather than having them imposed on us by others. It would emphasize understanding how those ends fit within the matrix of social life. It would center the diversity of backgrounds and perspectives within the classroom, understanding what interests and experiences and expectations are shared and what are not. It would not situate the classroom as preparation for the “real” work of negotiations to come, but rather would emphasize the possibilities of the present moment and the ways in which the actions taken in the classroom will reverberate beyond—the classroom becomes the site of active social change. In its treatment of the substance of negotiation theory, it would approach the material as a set of provocations for thought, as a set of ideas that “accepts life and experience in all its uncertainty, mystery, doubt, and half‐knowledge and turns that experience upon itself to deepen and intensify its own qualities—to imagination and art” (Dewey 1939: 34). In short, it is a vision in which there are no oracles—there is only the hard work of imagining possible futures, sharing and analyzing our differing desired futures, and identifying a path by which we can use principles of negotiation to bring the desired futures into being on the basis of our past experiences.

Making real the promise of democratic pedagogy requires a democratic vision of negotiation theory; how we teach must reflect what we teach. And so the teacher of negotiation faced with practical decisions about how to teach must take a stand on such “theoretical” questions as whether or not theories of negotiation follow deductively from the fundamentals of economic theory or psychology, whether or not negotiation principles can be meaningfully analyzed in the abstract without reference to specific substantive contexts, whether or not we aim to teach a set of techniques to be mastered or a tool kit to inspire continued creativity and innovation. There are real consequences to such theoretical commitments. For example, presenting integrative bargaining as a lesson in finding the set of Pareto efficient outcomes before settling upon one particular outcome can provide analytical clarity even as it privileges the seemingly objective question of maximizing value over the seemingly subjective distributional question—one of the key moves of neoliberal political economy (McCluskey 2003). Teaching negotiation principles as truths to be drilled and learned by rote entails different approaches than teaching negotiation principles as potentially helpful guidance for thinking about deal‐making, dispute resolution, and dialogue. There are real stakes to the pedagogy.

On the basis of this framing, it is probably obvious where I come out. My goal is to provide students with a set of questions to guide their thinking about negotiation scenarios and tools with which to generate new ideas. I view these tools as assuming particular forms that reflect the contexts in which they were generated rather than universal verities, and believe that understanding them as such gives us, as negotiators, license to refine and repurpose them to suit our changing needs. I believe it is nonsensical to evaluate the skillfulness of students’ negotiation practice without understanding the context of that practice, or to insist on particular negotiation “moves” without specific reference to particular situations. The work of solving practical problems in negotiation can spur abstract thought about how we live together, and thinking deeply about basic political questions can inform concrete negotiation practices. Negotiation education can help us all learn how to gain agency over our collective fate.

Negotiation pedagogy as an element of building a democratic culture remains consistent with more traditional goals of negotiation education. The commercial and deal‐making contexts of negotiation are included within this capacious vision—because, as negotiators, we are responsible for determining the ends to which we put these skills. We can choose whether or not to negotiate with the goal of capturing every last dollar, we can choose how to balance the interests of shareholders and other stakeholders, and so forth. A negotiation class can explore why students may have understood their tasks differently, as well as how they negotiated to achieve their chosen ends. The dispute resolution contexts of negotiation are also included within this vision—recognizing that, as negotiators, we operate within certain legal constraints that may be within our power to shape, and that, as professionals, we have concurrent commitments to our clients, to the profession, and to society. The exercise of negotiating a plea bargain, for example, occurs within a system that has predetermined much of the outcome of a given criminal case—but that may gradually be transformed through long‐term strategic action. There is room for students to engage in economic analysis as well as moral reasoning as they think about how to be effective and responsible negotiators. There is room to explore negotiation as competitive behavior as well as negotiation as cooperative behavior—both of these modalities are essential parts of our social lives.

This kind of commitment to democratic pedagogy also respects that students and teachers may have a diverse set of political beliefs, not all of which may be fully consistent with this kind of pluralistic and participatory democratic vision. What matters is that the classroom is a democratic space in which students come together as equal participants with the mission of understanding negotiation, a mission that is best achieved by a group with diverse backgrounds, values, and professional aspirations, reflecting the diversity of the broader community. A diversity of political attitudes in the classroom contributes to the value of this approach. That said, such a pedagogy is not neutral insofar as it privileges the democratic potentialities inherent in negotiation over alternatives (such as teaching negotiation as a practice of domination over others), but it does so through gentle persuasion: by inviting students to participate in the democratic life of the classroom and bring its lessons with them to the world beyond.

The vision of negotiation education outlined in this essay contributes to the practice of democracy by promoting social, commercial, and political interaction and mutual understanding across the lines of race, class, gender, religion, and the like. Some may favor a narrower view of negotiation pedagogy as teaching a set of discrete skills of neutral application. But the broader project is critically important in this moment, amidst stark political polarization, powerful movements advocating social responsibilities for businesses and challenging racial injustice and sexual harassment, and debates about the appropriate role of democratic accountability in the structure of our government. Negotiation instructors may well have different substantive views on these issues—which is all to the good, as our students do too. What we, as negotiation instructors, are called in this moment to do is to help our students strengthen their capabilities for engaging in the hard work of learning how to live and work together (at local, state, national, and global levels) to build a future amidst our differences. This is a broader challenge than teaching the tools of the trade, but the familiar practices of engaging in commerce, settling disputes, and having challenging conversations with family and neighbors are the granular elements out of which a democratic culture can be constructed. A democratic pedagogy strengthens students’ abilities to engage in the most challenging negotiations in ways that contribute to rebuilding broad‐based democratic life.

The prioritization of student agency and peer learning may be uncomfortable for students who are familiar with more top‐down classrooms; this discomfort indicates the urgency of pedagogy that helps students use their agency to take ownership of their learning, both individually and collectively. It may also be seen as an unwelcome (and hopelessly fuzzy and idealistic) distraction from more instrumental motivations for learning negotiation techniques; this concern indicates the urgency of pedagogy that encourages students to draw connections between the micro‐level of specific experiences in concrete negotiations and the macro‐level of the culture of our polity and the structures of the state and the market. Democratic pedagogy demands that students stretch themselves, and meeting this demand requires motivation.

The negotiation pedagogy outlined in this essay must confront motivations that are inconsistent with Dewey’s radically democratic vision. Alongside the prescriptive advice that we offer (how to negotiate using interest‐based principles, how to listen, etc.), we may also need to dedicate time to understanding all the reasons why “tough” negotiation is so widespread and why even trained negotiators can fall into that behavior. Such reasons include the very real tendencies to want to dominate others, the extent to which our actions are often driven by fear, and all the ways in which we fail to live up to our nobler aspirations—even when knowing rationally that cooperative, principled, and interest‐based practices can lead to better outcomes. Understanding at a deep level the persistence of fear (of loss, of uncertainty) and the persistent allure of domination (both of dominating and of being dominated) is a necessary precondition to sustaining the motivation to engage in democratic practices. Negotiation’s dark side beckons to us all, and, if we explore without judgment what exactly the sources of its appeal are (and how it, too, is a fundamental part of our psychology and our social condition), we can do better than simply preaching “just say no.”

A better understanding of the limitations of the negotiation tool kit can also help students situate these principles within a broader mental map, which in turn will enable them to identify what tools to use, and when to use them. Challenges to the main negotiation course story line should therefore be encouraged in order to deepen a critical understanding of what negotiation is and is not. We do ourselves and our students no favors by suggesting that the ambit of negotiation encompasses all interpersonal interactions. Negotiation is a necessary practice for the construction of democratic life, but it is not sufficient.

Ultimately, a negotiation course specifically designed to strengthen students’ capabilities for participating in democratic life would be based upon giving students responsibility for determining the aims they wish to achieve and reflecting on the reasons for their choices. Working through simulations and other classroom exercises would permit students to test their strategies, with structured discussion and reflection offering opportunities to generate meaning from these experiences and identify general principles. This would not be a method of learning basic principles and then applying them and refining them, but rather a method of continually thinking through negotiation scenarios and generating learning from the mess of experience through sustained reflection and critique. It would therefore embody the principles of double‐loop learning directly, rather than try to build double‐loop learning on top of what are essentially single‐loop lessons in skill application.

Such an approach not only can help students develop a greater understanding of what negotiation is and is not, but can also help them build greater self‐agency by learning how to put negotiation principles to work with diverse members of their community in the service of building a truly democratic society.