The staff finally tabled the issue and why we needed to "negotiate" an outcome with regards to the students having to do another subject. Once they did this we as the students decided to fire away and ask questions to the staff to see where and what they actually thought of the situation.
"What sort of difficulties does the situation at hand pose for the staff members concerned?".
The students asked this open question to begin to understand what the teachers actually thought of the situation. We, the students wanted to ask this question to see if there was any issues the staff had that were similar to our issues.
Once this was discussed I asked the staff."I can understand your concerns regarding the issue but what would you do if you were a student?".
I asked this question to further drill into what the staff were thinking and whether they were actually prepared to negotiate a win win outcome and to see whether we had any or some interests.
We as students then answered questions from the staff that they had prepared to ascertain the student's interests.
The result of a lot of open questions coming from the staff and students we were able to list the key issues and we then begun to identify what was that needed to be resolved.
We worked through the issues one by one allowing for some issues to be further discussed for a resolution, such as "If the students are prepared to study on a Saturday morning, will the staff be able to teach every Saturday morning?".
We all agreed that we would benefit from doing the extra subject and both the staff and students did agree that an extra semester to be done the following year was not the way to go given that it was going to be a huge financial constraint on the students.
I felt at this stage of proceedings that the staff did fully understand the position of the students and yes we, as the students did understand the staff's position as well.
The staff did attempt to resolve our differences, which led us to a bargaining discussion; this of course allowed us to solve the problem.
