Abstract
While the challenges of improving young people's citizenship skills seem to lie in the hands of schools, studying alternative ways of teaching conflict resolution could benefit current educational systems. Judicial committees – a democratic approach to conflict resolution – like those practiced in free schools – schools where students and teachers are largely entitled to similar rights and obligations – represent such an alternative. The present inquiry is an ethnographic case study that draws upon complexity thinking. It aims at understanding students' experiences during free school judicial committees. It argues that, in a school where students enjoy a significant amount of freedom, students interacted in many ways. This gave rise to some conflicts. To tackle them, students followed various procedures inherent to judicial committees. During these activities, students mostly experienced a combination of feelings while engaging in conflict resolution processes and modifying their conflict resolution skills. The study ends by arguing that conventional schools can draw upon the principles associated to judicial committees to further how they teach conflict resolution.