Argument-Based Negotiation and Conflict Resolution through Enactive Role Play in Second Life

This paper proposes the use of an immersive virtual environment, Second Life, for enactive role play to help students recognize and solve conflicts through argument-based negotiation. An important core of the epistemology of negotiation is that stakeholders in a dispute have legitimate conflicting interests, and the goal of negotiation is to reconcile those interests in an equitable manner given the constraints of the situation. In this study, students role-play as lead negotiators for parties in a dispute concerning a fictitious island which seeks to join the community of regional and international democracies after decades of totalitarian government. The discourse corpora of five student groups across two enactment sessions were analyzed using an adapted collaborative argumentation framework. We present the results of a two-step analysis approach that involves an initial single dialectical move analysis and a sequential analysis for pertinent moves and patterns within the virtual interaction. We discuss how these dialectical and sequential moves impact upon students’ acceptance or non-acceptance of a conflict resolution. We conclude with a discussion on related pedagogical implications.