“If I’d Wanted to Teach About Feelings, I Wouldn’t Have Become a Law Professor”
That’s the intriguing title of a new paper by Andrea Schneider, Melissa Nelken, and Jamil Nahaud. The title expresses the authors’ mock horror at the thought of “bringing feelings into the room when teaching negotiation.” They recognize that legal education is not exactly known for helping students to get in touch with their feelings: “learning ‘to think like a lawyer’ has traditionally favored cognition and ignored the powerful role of emotions in all human undertakings.” Yet, they are convinced that law students will benefit from studying emotions:
One of the goals of focusing on feelings in a negotiation class is to help students learn that they can be emotionally engaged with clients and, therefore, with their own work as lawyers without becoming identified with them. Lawyers who understand clients at an emotional level are better able to represent the client’s needs. And a lawyer who is sensitive to the emotional cues of his counterparts in a negotiation is better able to navigate the tricky waters of dispute resolution in a way that satisfies his client’s needs without riding roughshod over the other parties involved.
After laying out the benefits of covering emotions in a negotiation class, the authors then provide several practical examples of how negotiation teachers can effectively incorporate a study of feelings into the classroom experience.
This paper is just one of three new papers by Andrea on various aspects of teaching negotiation, all of which appear as chapters in Venturing Beyond the Classroom (Honeyman et al., eds. 2010). The abstracts and links for the other two appear after the jump.