Interfaith dialogue at peace museums in Kenya

This paper makes a case for further studies on the contribution of peace museums to interfaith dialogue debate. Based on our experiences as museum curators, teachers and peace researchers and a review of published materials, we argue that there is a lacuna in the study on the contribution of peace museums to the interfaith dialogue debate. The development of community peace museums in Kenya,, in predominantly Christian communities, and the use of traditional religio-cultural artefacts in peace education and peace building is a case of interfaith dialogue worth documenting. With religious conflict threatening to tear the fabric of society apart, the question of interfaith dialogue is now paramount in the search for sustainable peace and development.     

Con-/divergences between postcolonial and critical peace education: towards pedagogies of decolonization in peace education

This paper focuses on the limitations of the Eurocentric modernist framework that undergirds Freirean theory and critical pedagogy in relation to critical peace education, highlighting in particular the contributions of post-colonial and decolonial thinking. The paper posits that critical approaches to peace education need to consider these limitations in pushing critical peace education to engage more postcolonial and decolonial thinking. A renewal of critical peace education that integrates the critiques of both decolonial and postcolonial perspectives will provide productive possibilities for revitalizing the transformative orientation within critical peace education and decolonizing the work of research and pedagogical praxis in peace education. This means to evoke discourses and practices that move away from the dominant categories of Eurocentric thought and engage explicitly with the ways in which understandings and pedagogies of peace education are implicated in modernity and coloniality.     

Transpersonal consciousness in elicitive teaching

ABSTRACT

In this article I explore the role of transpersonal consciousness in Peace Education. Following the framework of transrational peace philosophy, I discuss the dynamics between the spiritual and policitary layers and their relevance in preparing for elicitive teaching, curriculum design, and developing pedagogical approaches. I use my personal experiences in elicitive peace education to elucidate opportunities for the practical application of transpersonal consciousness in the classroom. This article concludes that in Peace Education, engaging with the transpersonal layer supports deeper transformations within and beyond the classroom that includes shifting of personal awareness and deepening of perspectives, as well as the capacity for the group to become a resource for learning.     

The everyday peace project: an innovative approach to peace pedagogy

A critical task for peace pedagogy is to challenge views of peace as primarily responses to declared war. Crisis-based politics tend to focus on exceptional situations and fail to capture the entire spectrum of violence. Premised on the idea that peace cannot be understood in isolation of larger structural problems, this paper proposes the concept of ‘everyday peace’ as a framework for peace education. Drawing from a pedagogical initiative, we examine how students engage with the concept of everyday peace and present our findings in three related domains: (1) definition of everyday peace, (2) application of everyday peace principles and (3) role of collaboration in everyday peace approaches. Our analysis underscored two important themes in participants’ definitions of everyday peace: (1) peace as a value-based praxis and (2) individual-level and systemic components of everyday peace. Applying these principles to a violent event in the local community, participant responses emphasized compassion, cultures of peace and the need to draw reflexive, meaningful connections between local and global contexts. The participants also outlined the synergistic role of collaboration in everyday peacebuilding. We discuss our findings in relation to extant research and consider implications of an everyday peace framework for holistic peace education.     

Museums for peace: agents and instruments of peace education

Although museums for peace claim peace education to be a primary mission, their definitions of ‘peace’ and their aims and practices for peace education vary widely. In this article, we draw from the field of critical museology and the knowledge construction perspective to understand the role of museums for peace in the service of peace education. From the constructivist viewpoint, the museums’ narratives are not objective or historical truths. Rather they are the museum designers’ constructed interpretations of the events, people, and places that are memorialized. The museums’ exhibits, narratives, and programs reflect a wide range of definitions of peace including some which conflict and contradict each other. The variations in defining peace contribute to differences in how the museums view and exercise their role in educating for peace. From this analysis, we observe how contemporary museums for peace can play a significant role in peace education by raising awareness about multiple definitions of peace and by enabling audiences to reflect on, discuss and participate in deliberated paths toward personal peace and cultures of peace.     

De-radicalizing Pakistani society: the receptivity of youth to a liberal religious worldview

The reported rise in radicalism among youth in Pakistan since 9/11/2001 has been attributed to religious education in madrasas and schools. However, education in Pakistan is only part of the historical and contemporary forces that contribute to the prevailing exclusivist religio-political discourse. Although most policy papers have recommended a secularization of public education, such efforts by the Pakistani Government have been counterproductive. These efforts by the Pakistani Government to reshape education, with massive funding from international donors, have faced strong opposition and there are signs of psychological reactance as evidenced by even greater levels of religious radicalism among Pakistani youth. The current study suggests a viable alternative for reshaping education in Pakistan. A nationwide survey of educated urban youth (N = 386) conducted by the first author, revealed that when considering radical religious, Western secular and liberal religious ideas, Pakistani youth were overwhelmingly supportive of a liberal religious approach to education that highlights an inclusive Islam emphasizing freedom and compassion. Findings have implications for Government reforms, peace education initiatives and long-term conflict transformation in Pakistan.     

Border cosmopolitanism in critical peace education

This paper intends to contribute to recent developments in the theory of critical peace education. The role of cosmopolitanism in critical peace education is examined, particularly in relation to universal moral inclusion, secularism and universalism. It is then recommended that critical peace education draw from post-universalist and dialogical approaches to cosmopolitanism. Walter Mignolo’s border cosmopolitanism is suggested as a decolonising framework for critical peace education. This would entail the theory of critical peace education orienting itself towards the aim of reconsidering cosmopolitanism from the perspective of coloniality. Connections are drawn between border cosmopolitanism and Paulo Freire’s problem-posing education. The result is a vision for critical peace education to empower participants through centring personal and lived experience in critical deconstructions of cosmopolitan discourses.     

Endorsing empowerment? A critical comparative study of peace education in Jamaica and Peru

Is empowering peace education primarily about providing individuals with skills to respond to violence they experience and capabilities to enhance their own lives? Or is inspiring social transformation to alter forms of injustice that contribute to violence an equally valid and important dimension of an empowering peace education program? This article draws upon the authors’ experiences researching peace education programs implemented by local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in two different contexts: Jamaica and Peru. The basis for comparison is grounded in the discourse key actors in these NGOs utilized in reference to their respective educational initiatives, explicitly emphasizing empowerment for marginalized groups. Using critical qualitative techniques and troubling the idea of ‘empowerment,’ the authors analyze the discourse of empowerment to look beyond explicit truth claims and unveil tacit assumptions regarding the purpose and desired outcomes for the beneficiaries of their respective programs. The authors interrogate what definitions of empowerment – social and/or individual – the program stakeholders envision as well as how they believe such empowerment comes about. The study’s findings contribute to the need to critically unpack the commonly uncritical use of the term ‘empowerment’ as necessarily directed toward addressing social inequalities and altering unjust power relations.     

Education for a culture of peace: the culture of peace news network as a case study

The Culture of Peace News Network, an internet news service, is analyzed in the framework of a general approach to education for a culture of peace. Its format reflects the eight program areas for a culture of peace as adopted by the UN General Assembly. Among its other operating principles are universality of news with all cultures and regions of the world given equal priority, requirement that reflection be accompanied by action and that news should be positive and open to debate, that ‘slow news’ is as important as ‘fast news,’ and that readers should participate by writing as well as reading. The Network has yet to achieve its goal of forcing commercial media to consider actions for a culture of peace as newsworthy, but it is suggested that this will depend on the growth of the global movement for a culture of peace which remains rather small at the present time.     

Teachers’ nascent praxes of care: potentially decolonizing approaches to school violence in Trinidad

Zero tolerance, punitive, and more negative peace-oriented approaches dominate school violence interventions, despite research indicating that comprehensive approaches are more sustainable. In this article, I use data from a longitudinal case study at a Trinidadian secondary school to focus on the role of teachers and their impact on school violence; I show that institutional constraints are not fully deterministic, as teachers sometimes deploy their agency to efficacious ends. In combining Noddings’ postulations on care and Freire’s notions of praxis as a symbiosis of reflection and action, I explicate the nascent praxes of care of six teachers at this school, as they strive for more positive peace-oriented approaches to school violence. I characterize these praxes as nascent because they are not fully interrogative of the structural violence of the entire system. However, I do argue that these nascent praxes possess decolonizing and transgressive potentiality in the face of a logic of coloniality that reinforces hierarchy, exclusion, and marginalization in the Trinidadian educational system. I conclude by contending that these nascent praxes must be scaled-up to more mature, radical praxes, including the cultivation of a systemic praxis of care; in other words, a deeper and broader postcolonial peace education.     

Historical memory education for peace and justice: definition of a field

This article proposes a new of field of research in social sciences education: Historical Memory Education (HME). Despite the large amount of educational experiences following the end of violent conflicts and totalitarian regimes during the twentieth century, historical memory has not been recognized as a field in educational research. From a review of research and experiences worldwide, the authors identify a new field in education research that cannot be reduced to peace education, bullying prevention, or history education, but that takes elements from all these fields, as well as from local pedagogical experiences, to face the challenge of healing the wounds of longstanding violent conflicts. This article organizes prior research in a comprehensive framework that describes the levels, pedagogical principles, and spaces of HME.     

‘Pedagogies of resistance’ and critical peace education praxis

This paper explores ‘pedagogies of resistance’ – or critical and democratic educational models utilized by social movements – and how global examples of engaged educational praxis may inform peace education. The central inquiry of this article is ‘How can educational projects that resist larger social, political and economic inequalities offer understandings about how we learn, teach, and act for peace in diverse settings?’ Drawing upon literature from various fields, ideas and insights are offered about how the field of peace education can better respond to multiple and diverse realities, particularly those facing marginalized communities. The article provides an overview of key tenets of peace education and ideas central to ‘critical peace education;’ offers a framing of ‘pedagogies of resistance;’ and, lastly, details what directions emerge by putting these two educational forms in conversation.     

Nonviolence as teacher education: a qualitative study in challenges and possibilities

This paper explores the challenges and possibilities of teaching nonviolence in teacher education. Using qualitative teacher research, this paper discusses teacher education students’ responses to the notion of nonviolence and how to create beneficial pedagogical conditions for students to learn nonviolence and its meanings for education. The data were collected from three graduate classes that, to different degrees, addressed the role of nonviolence in education. Three shifts in students’ understanding of nonviolence as a result of their learning are identified: the shift from a narrow to a broad understanding, the shift from a passive view to a proactive view, and the shift from looking outside to looking inside and engaging in emotional work. The pedagogical conditions that facilitated these shifts are also discussed, including strategies for engaging students’ inner work, creating experiential relationships with the other, and transforming classroom relational dynamics. This study also suggests the need not to approach violence and nonviolence as binary but to approach nonviolence as a daily practice to continuously unlearn violence and promote nonviolent relationships. Implications of this study for teacher education are discussed last.     

Greek-Cypriot teachers’ perceptions of religious education and its contribution to peace: perspectives of (in)compatibility in a divided society

This paper explores the ways in which a group of primary school teachers in Cyprus interprets religious education and its contribution to peace. In particular, this phenomenological exploratory study: first, examines how teachers perceive religious education and whether this conceptualization is considered to be (in)compatible with peace in the context of a conflict-affected society; and, second, shows some of the tensions that exist in the aims of religious education between the desire to encourage mutual understanding and exposure to religious pluralism, on the one hand, and the political demands for entrenching ethnic cleavages, on the other. Although these tensions are largely contextual, they nevertheless raise two important issues that are worthwhile to consider for religious education and peace in conflict-affected societies: first, the ‘naturalization’ of religion and religious instruction, on the one hand, vs. the recognition that some models of religious instruction (i.e. confessional teaching) might actually limit the space within which teachers can make contributions to peace, on the other; and, second, the tension between the different models of religious education within a conflict-affected society and particularly which model would strategically and politically serve best the purposes of peace in the short- and long-term.     

Toward a critical peace education for sustainability

This article proposes the need for peace education as a field to embrace critical power analysis of place in efforts toward social and environmental sustainability. Rather than status quo reproduction, a critical peace education for sustainability should both elucidate and transform the power dynamics inherent in structural violence and cultural violence. The inherent rights of people, plants, and ecosystems to live with dignity and to prosper are proposed. Practically speaking, the article offers perspectives from a critical pedagogy of place and an earth connections curriculum unit as vehicles for transformative education.     

Shining light into dark shadows of violence and learned helplessness: peace education in South Korean schools

The paper illustrates how a culture of violence is perpetuated and reproduced in South Korea through schooling and argues that peace education could help transform a culture of violence to a culture of peace. Critical ethnographic methods and a framework of peace education were applied to a sample of secondary schools in South Korea to argue that a disturbing culture of violence and learned helplessness were present; this comprises themes of direct and indirect violence through iljin (a group of students who are considered key perpetrators of school violence); a colonized false ideology and resistance to social justice. More positively, findings are also used to generate possibilities for pedagogical change based on peace education – an approach that proves useful both as an analytical frame for examining peace-violence relations in education and society and as an essential pedagogy for progressing towards peace in South Korean schools.     

Higher education and peacebuilding – a bridge between communities?

As the Syrian civil war enters its fifth year, with over four million refugees and no solution in the near future, the international community must better consider long-term planning in regards to the plight of refugees and services to support them, not just short-term emergency responses. Critically, higher education is all too often ignored when addressing refugee crises, pushed aside in favor of primary education, and effectively disempowering those best suited to eventually rebuild and reconstruct after war’s end. This paper examines the often less considered aspect of refugee access to higher education, using Duhok, located in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, as a case study, and hypothesizing that refugees’ inclusion in Duhok’s local higher education system can serve as an invaluable peacebuilding tool, bridging host and refugee communities, while empowering refugees to promote peacebuilding and development. We chose to focus on higher education because we agree with the idea espoused by Watenpaugh, Fricke, and Siegel that ‘university graduates … include Syria’s brightest and most ambitious young people … the human capital that will be critical to the rebuilding of Syrian society after the conflict has ended’. This study investigates Duhok area residents’ perceptions of the Syrian refugee crisis and the refugee population, refugees’ attitudes toward the host community and higher education, and personal views regarding intergroup relationships and the role of higher education, drawing primarily on field research conducted in 2013. Approached as a qualitative study, field research was conducted by a two-person team, with members representing the University of Duhok and New York University, and with the aim of actively working with research participants in the hopes of generating policy-related and practical recommendations.     

Teachers’ perspectives on educating for peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina

What does it mean to educate for peace after witnessing one’s community being devastated by war? And what impact, if any, does educating for peace have amidst the complexity of post-war reconstruction? To explore these questions, a phenomenological study was conducted in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2012 with eight ethnically diverse educators who participated in a programme of Education for Peace (EFP) which began a decade earlier in the cities of Sarajevo, Mostar, Banja Luka and Zenica. Through semi-structured interviews, the study (1) explores meanings and experiences associated by participants with their role as post-conflict peace educators, (2) examines the extent and limits of their sense of peacebuilding agency and (3) elicits evaluations of the longer term impacts of educating for peace in the Bosnian context. The study finds that meanings associated with educating for peace are nuanced by educators’ personal histories of conflict, professional identities and the country’s wider socio-political dynamics. Benefits, risks and challenges stemming from peace education engagement are found in four domains (personal, social, educational and political). Conclusions recommend greater focus to the subjectivities of teachers in conflict-affected contexts as a key site for evaluating peacebuilding impact, for revising theories of change and improving planning and provision.     

Education for territorial peace in Colombia: what role for transrational peace?

ABSTRACT

In this article, we present the idea of a territorial peace and explore it in the context of Colombia. We locate our investigation in peace education, particularly in Colombia’s Catedra de Paz, and explore the adaptations and application of the iPEACES programme (originally the iPEACE programme, developed by one of the authors with Bevington in 2017) as a possible way of contributing to sustaining the plurality of many peaces in this and other contexts. We outline the Innsbruck school’s many peaces approach and Elicitive Conflict Mapping (ECM) framework in order to show how they contributed to developing the iPEACES programme – which is responsive to territorial peace in the Colombian context. We end by presenting limited findings from four surveys with teachers in Colombia who attended a taster day for the iPEACES programme in 2018. We discuss their contributions and perspectives, and the ways in which we feel the iPEACES programme might be taken up more widely in schools in Colombia and elsewhere.     

Peace education in Israel: an educational goal in the test of reality

Peace education is considered a necessary element in establishing the social conditions required for promoting peace-making between rival parties. As such, it constitutes one of Israel’s state education goals, and would therefore be expected to have a significant place in Israel’s educational policy in general and in response to peace moves that have occurred during the Arab–Israeli conflict since the 1970s in particular. This article reviews the educational policy actually applied by Israel’s state education over the years as reflected in formal educational programs and school textbooks, and suggests that although some significant changes have taken place over time, there has been and still is a significant gap between the stated goal and the practice of peace education in Israel. Reasons for this disparity and its implications are discussed and possible directions are proposed for coping with this educational challenge.