Types of Conflict and Conflict Handling in an Academic Seminar

The academic seminar is a communicative and cultural institution of long standing. Today, its ideal purpose is often said to be the promotion of free and critical inquiry, in relation to a selected topic, in an academic scientific setting. Ideally, it should supplement the finding, teaching and learning of facts by providing teachers and students an opportunity to participate in a systematically critical discussion. Etymologically, the term ́seminar ́ comes from Latin semen (seed) and seminarium (school of plants). Historically, the seminar has connections with the Platonic academy, its dialogues and the Aristotelian idea of a dialectic discussion (cf. Clark 1989). Together with the lecture, the debate and the disputation, the seminar is one of the favored types of communicative activity in a university setting. Terms related to the word seminar occur in most European languages and since these terms have been used for a long time, they have sometimes taken on a slightly different sense from the one described above. Thus, for example, in Germany the term "seminar" can be used for a university department and in Swedish the term "seminarium" has, besides the meaning given above, also been used to denote training colleges for teachers ("småskoleseminarium") or for priests ("prästseminarium"). Here, I will, however, be concerned only with a seminar in the sense indicated above.