Hello, and welcome to the TRACK4 website!

My name is Natasha, I am founder and director of TRACK4.

Here is some information about my background, TRACK4, and the evolution of my educational thought and practice.

My background and education

I received my Ph.D. in modern European history at New York University in 2001, and for many years taught courses on European history and philosophy of education at Barnard College/Columbia University in New York City.

In 2003, I shifted my focus to conflict studies, and taught classes on conflict, genocide and human rights at the New School’s Graduate Program in International Affairs (GPIA).

In 2006, for my work on Integrative Conflict Negotiation Simulations at the GPIA, I received The New School Distinguished Teaching Award.

In 2008 I became an accredited mediator, with a degree from Regent’s College in London.

I am author of “Educational Philosophy in the French Enlightenment: From Nature to Second Nature” and "Inside the Box: Using Integrative Simulations to Teach Conflict, Negotiation and Mediation". Some of my articles on Palestine-Israel can be accessed on this website.  

In 2015 I received the Peter Becker Prize for Peace and Conflict Research, for my book Inside the Box and work with negotiation simulations.

I have co-written (with Neil Caplan) an educational module entitled “The Struggle for Palestine, 1936” about the early origins of the Palestine-Israel conflict. This is not a published work but is used as part of Barnard College’s Reacting to the Past series. 

The Founding of TRACK4

I began developing TRACK4 in the autumn of 2004 at the Graduate Program in International Affairs (GPIA) of The New School University. I first learned about and was trained in extended simulation “games” by Barnard College historian Mark Carnes, who has developed Reacting to the Past, an innovative and highly successful pedagogical method that consists of a series of multi-week historical simulation games.

I drew on the Reacting to the Past method but adapted the method, teaching full semester long ‘real-time’ simulations dealing with current conflicts. My goal was to offer students an immersive, direct experience of negotiation and mediation, with all its unpredictability; deep insight into the perspectives and lived experience of various parties to a conflict; and to challenge the boundaries of conventional learning by eliminating the artificial separation between intellectual and emotional learning, thinking and doing, perception and analysis.

In the past ten years, I have further adapted and developed TRACK4 simulations to offer 2-day trainings for activists, mediators or mediators-in-training, policy makers and government officials, diplomats, activists, organizations and communities directly involved in conflict. 

I also offer training-the-trainer courses for those who wish to learn how to design and run simulations. 

TRACK4 simulations are run worldwide and can be adapted to various organizations and groups. Contact us to find out more or learn what former participants have said about us.

How did I get here?

My formative experience as a teacher occurred just after graduating from college, in the two extraordinary years I taught high school in a small school in Jersey City. I had enjoyed my own schooling, so it was only when I stood in front of a classroom as a teacher that I realized how difficult it was to help young people navigate a system that in so many ways limits and controls them, physically, emotionally and intellectually. I began to think more about the nature of learning itself, and was drawn to study how educational ideas and practices have evolved over time.

As a graduate student in European history at NYU, I taught undergraduate courses in history and simultaneously took a deep dive into the history of educational philosophy. I realized that for hundreds of years, across many cultures and continents, educational thinkers and practitioners had been arguing that schools are fundamentally misaligned with children's bodies, minds, or spirits. Radical pedagogies are often presented as new (often re-invented with each generation!) and emerging from problems associated with modernity. But in fact critiques of schooling are almost as old as school itself. I wrote about some of these educational ideas in my book on Educational Philosophy in the French Enlightenment. 

As a college professor, I loved my experience with university students and continued to explore different way to approach the learning process. But I was surprised to find that in academia pedagogy seemed largely absent.

I don’t mean that academics don’t care about teaching – many care a great deal, and they expand the minds and experiences of their students in a wide variety of ways. But a large part of the educational process relies on developing in students a loosely defined concept called “critical thinking.” And while critical thinking is a necessary intellectual skill, I found that it often led students became great critics – students who have acquired a toolset of razor sharp critiques to expose various forms of power and exploitation, but not with a inclination to problem solving, and not always able to engage in what I call critical self-reflection or critical self-awareness: an ability to recognize their own part within the dynamics of the conflicts they study, and to understand the limits of their own analytic powers and paradigms. 

(For a broader discussion of critical thinking versus critical self-awareness, see the section “A more Critical Approach to Critical Thinking on page 88-93 of my book “Inside the Box”, which can be downloaded at the site).

What surprised me even more was the enormous gap between the WHAT and the HOW of university education. Professors often brought radical ideas to their classrooms and yet often their methods remained extremely conventional. Despite exciting initiatives by individual professors or programs, the model of the lecture/seminar was still predominant based on a view of learning that is sedentary and often passive, and assumes a separation between rational/objective/analytic an emotional/subjective/experiential. 

In my view, nothing can be truly radical if the HOW is not as innovative as the WHAT. As a result, I tried to stretch the boundaries of the classroom, based on my understanding of what we are continually learning about how human beings learn. You can find out more about this in my book Inside the Box: Using Integrative Simulations to Teach Conflict, Negotiation and Mediation.

My desire to unite the WHY and the HOW led me to investigate Reacting to the Past, where students learn about “big ideas” by taking on character roles and communicating, collaborating and competing to attain their objectives. 

When I adapted the method and devised my own series of TRACK4 ‘real time’ conflict and negotiation simulations for my graduate students at The New School, I was able to apply many of the ideas and approaches that I believed in as an educator. 

For example:

• The modules break down the artificial barriers between intellectual and emotional learning, theory and practice, analysis and observation.

• The design of the simulations (where participants often take on roles that do not match their areas of knowledge or personal beliefs) allow participants to break taboos and discuss very hot topics without sanitizing conflicts, without engaging in ‘both-side-ism’ or trying to find artificial balance.

• Academic and personal learning are naturally intertwined, and as a result the space is extremely conducive to individual growth. Through slow and deep engagement in their individual roles, participation in group dynamics and input from facilitators and coaches, participants learned a great deal about themselves and their presumed strengths and weaknesses. They were able to take test modified ideas and approaches in real time. 

• The process is extremely collaborative and creates a great deal of group solidarity because we are focusing on issues that are very difficult, serious and meaningful, but in a format that is extremely dynamic and engaging. 

• Watching how compelling the experiential and ‘play’ process tended to be for participants of such different ages (from 18 to 65) and backgrounds, and despite the often deeply disturbing nature of the issues we were dealing with, I came to believe that the ponderous and often solemn way in which university students are taught to approach many subjects isn’t always conducive to learning. I found not only is that there no contradiction between enjoyable and rigorous learning but on the contrary, the former tends to provoke the latter. This is something educational thinkers have been pointing out for centuries, and yet their insights remain unheeded.

• We push beyond the walls of the classroom by creating a revolving door of learning between participants and members of the community: people who are directly involved in the conflict come to coach participants on various issues or problems. In this way we allow for the content and perspectives (many of which are extremely sensitive) to come not only from one professor but people who represented the actual parties or were area specialists.

• We offer a form of “practice” or “professional development” to students. By taking on the roles of negotiators, mediators and people involved in conflict on a high level, they get to experience (not just read about) first-hand some of what happens behind the scenes in real negotiations (or impasses where negotiations cannot take place). In particular, they experience how the conflict is affected by global powers, geopolitical concerns, the needs, beliefs and lived experiences of conflictual constituents on the grounds. 

In 2007, I left academia and founded TRACK4 as an alternative educational organization. Through TRACK4 I was able to run simulation modules in a two-day format for activists, mediators, journalists, diplomats, and anyone involved in or interested in learning about a particular conflict. Our focus has been on the Palestine-Israel conflict.

In some cases, my team and I ran modules with organizations that were already dealing with conflicts in various regions and wanted to learn more about one particular issue or about negotiation or mediation. Some programs were run with mid-career professionals through graduate programs. In other cases, we ran modules in quiet spaces behind the scenes with people directly involved in the Palestine-Israel conflict. 

More recently, I’ve become interested in offering simulation modules to youth and community members who wish to devise plans or projects around issues and challenges affecting their worlds. 

Self-Directed Education

This last point aligns with my passion for self-directed education, an approach to learning that believes young people (especially in their K-12 years) need to be offered more trust, more time to pursue their own passions, more creative, experiential and embodied learning, more time for unsupervised play and social engagement, and more opportunities to take risks and engage directly with the world around them. 

SDE also considers that being progressive as educators does not simply mean expanding the classroom experience. It also means asking why young people are in classrooms to begin with: why and how have we come to believe it is natural to have children in institutions for the whole of their childhoods, removed from their communities and the myriad educators hidden within, from the natural world and from experiential and embodied learning, insisting they learn only with one part of their being (the intellectual mind) at the expense of the rest (their hands, bodies and emotions). 

Further, proponents of SDE often ask why young people read and learn so much in schools about subjects such as freedom, democracy, social justice, ecology, democracy, and yet they are not allowed to practice freedom, engage in democratic processes, participate in social justice initiatives, or have an immersive and continual experience of the natural world?

Proponents of SDE believe young people as well as college students can participate much more actively in their world: by following their own passions, working with and being mentored by a variety of people in their communities, planning and implementing projects that are of concern to them, and doing so in a way that is self-designed, collaborative and creative.