Teaching Awards 2007

A moderating influence

Because of his success in teaching students how to help others solve their own conflicts, Joseph Folger is one of this year’s Lindback Award winners.

Folger

(Photo by Ryan S. Brandenberg / Temple University)

If Joseph Folger has a specialty, it’s helping people get on the same page.

Folger, a professor in the psychological studies in education section of the College of Education, has taught everyone from undergraduate students to United States Postal Service workers how to get on the same page through conflict resolution and mediation.

In his “Adult and Organizational Development” classes, Folger uses a hands-on style to teach students how to use the Transformative Mediation method to resolve conflicts. Through this method, a mediator guides disputing parties to a resolution without taking the lead.

The hands-on part helps students “get it,” said Rob Tietze, executive director of the Center for Intergenerational Learning’s Experience Corps program and a former student of Folger’s.

“He lets you get in there and play with it,” he said. “[Folger] gets you excited about it because he really has a passion for it.

He’s a really great teacher.”

Folger is also a winner of the Lindback Award for Teaching Excellence this year. This regional teaching award was established in 1961 by the Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Foundation.

When the College of Education was considering nominees for the Lindback Award, Folger stood out, said C. Kent McGuire, dean of the College of Education. Folger spent a year as a special assistant to McGuire for graduate programs, and the dean praised him for his insights.

“I’m happy he’s been selected,” McGuire said. “He’s a very engaging teacher. He’s good at linking theory and practice.”

Folger has written books on the subject of Transformative Mediation, which have already been translated into Spanish and Portuguese and soon will be translated into Russian.

These international translations will come in handy for a new set of trainees that the Institute for the Study of Conflict Resolution is about to take on. The non-profit group is about to start training a group in Transformative Mediation that will be mediating some dangerous conflicts, Folger said. Once trained, they will be working with the United Nations to address disputes in places such as Iraq, Nepal and the Sudan, he said.

“They’re going to try to rebuild ethnic connections,” Folger said.

Folger began learning the theory and practice of conflict resolution and mediation as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsinfollowing his undergraduate degree in communication from Northwestern University.

While a student there, he decided to do some volunteer work at Wisconsin’s Center for Conflict Resolution, Folger said. It was there that he discovered his calling, he said.

“I found it so interesting,” Folger said. “I started to align my interest to this and tailored my doctoral program to it. [Conflict resolution and mediation] is geared toward helping people. It’s geared toward the real world.”

That interest has led him to teach conflict resolution not only in college, but for a host of organizations including the Superior Court of Burlington County (N.J.); the Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution, a top-rated dispute institution at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif.; and the Institute for the Study of Conflict Resolution, a consortium that includes Temple, Hofstra University School of Law, the University of North Dakota and James Madison University. He also was named the Peacebuilder of the Year in 2006 by the Dispute Resolution Association.

After stints at the University of Michigan and Cleveland State University, Folger came to Temple in 1986. He served as chair and associate professor of the Department of Rhetoric and Communication, as a professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and as associate dean for research and graduate studies in the School of Communications and Theater before coming to the College of Education in 2002.

But what’s kept him at Temple for 21 years are the student body and the City of Brotherly Love, Folger says.

“As soon as I moved to Philadelphia, I knew I would stay,” Folger said. “I’ve always loved teaching here. The students here aren’t like students at other places. Because many of them work, they work really hard and apply themselves.”

By Denise Clay