Teaching Peace And Conflict

This insightful book guides instructors on how to introduce undergraduate and postgraduate students to the interdisciplinary work of Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS). Mindful that many students come to PACS with a desire to create positive social change, Susan F. Hirsch and Agnieszka Paczyńska highlight engaged learning as a key method to PACS pedagogy and emphasise the need to teach theory with an inclusive and decolonialist approach. The book offers both new and experienced instructors concrete advice regarding structuring assignments, designing classroom-based engaged learning activities and highlighting reflective practice and ethics.

This comprehensive volume on teaching peace and war demonstrates that our choice of pedagogy, or the way we structure a curriculum, must be attentive to context. Pedagogical strategies that work with one class may not work in another, whether over time or across space and different types of institutions, regardless of the field of study. This book offers insight on how to address these issues. The chapters contain valuable information on specific lessons learned and creative pedagogies developed, as well as exercises and tools that facilitate delivery in specific classrooms. The authors address a wide range of challenges related to broader questions on what teachers are trying to achieve when teaching about peace and war, including reflections on the teacher’s role as a facilitator of knowledge creation. This collection offers a valuable reference for scholars and instructors on structuring peace and war curricula in different global contexts and pedagogical strategies for a variety of classrooms. The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal Peace Review.

This book illustrates the multiple roles of textbooks as victim, transformer, and accomplice to conflict by introducing the Intersecting Roles of Education in Conflict (IREC) framework for use in the research, development, production, distribution, and dissemination of textbooks and learning materials. The framework illustrates these three potentially overlapping roles by mapping the complex educational contexts of conflict-affected societies and considering how textbooks, learning materials, and education systems more broadly may simultaneously operate within these various roles. Country case studies from Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East are used to analyze primary and secondary school textbook development, content, and application from a variety of approaches that articulate conflict as protracted and/or socio-political violence. The breadth of case studies shows how conflict discourse circulates in educational systems and materials in a wide range of contexts, indicating that the complexity of the relationship between textbooks and conflict is not unique to one culture, geographic region, or type of conflict.

In a world where post-conflict and postcolonial countries struggle to heal from the past and meet new challenges, peace education is often neglected and instrumentalized for political agendas. Drawing on case studies from Afghanistan, Bolivia, Burundi, Colombia, Myanmar, Nepal, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka, and Uruguay, this book shows that cultural and structural violence can, in turn, lead to direct violence. An effective program of peace education responds to these dynamics meeting our urgent problems and opening up new opportunities for peacebuilding. With this direction in mind, this book addresses the practices of peace education from around the world. The fundamental question answered here is: can peace be taught, especially where the scars of war and legacies of colonialism are entrenched in society? Peace education is foundational to a more equitable future where global citizens share a planet in justice, equity, with human security, and all the elements of sustainable, resilient peace. Foremost, it is an essential pillar for societies scarred by violence.

How Children Understand War and Peace If we had a better grasp on how children and adolescents develop ideas of war, conflict, and peace, would it be possible to consciously influence these concepts toward more peaceful orientations? Would it then be possible to integrate these psychological findings into educational programs throughout the world? How Children Understand War and Peace is a landmark book that examines these two vital questions and provides a solid framework on which to build answers. Written by an international panel of experts in the fields of developmental, social, and educational psychology, How Children Understand War and Peace presents a collection of the most current thoughts and insights into how children and adolescents develop an understanding of war, conflict, and peace. Based on research studies done in Australia, Canada, Finland, Holland, Israel, Portugal, Northern Ireland, Sweden, and the United States, this comprehensive volume presents evidence that perceptions of war and peace formed during childhood relate directly to adult perspectives on these critical issues. The contributors present persuasive evidence that our knowledge about how youngsters from around the globe develop and form worldviews can be used to create educational programs that teach children peace education, conflict management, and conflict resolution. How Children Understand War and Peace is an indispensable guide for psychologists, educators, and anyone concerned with building a solid foundation for a more peaceful world through knowledge and education. What Children Can Teach Us and What We Can Teach Children How Children Understand War and Peace offers an international perspective on how the concepts of war and peace develop in children and how, through overt teaching of conflict resolution and peacemaking skills in schools, a more peaceful world could be created. "I welcome this important new book. The editors and contributors have given us a new and valuable account of how young people understand the essential issues of war and peace. Not only is this a large step forward in the study of child and adolescent social cognition, but, in addition, the knowledge base in this book suggests ways to educate the younger generation toward more peaceful resolutions of dangerous social conflicts."—William Damon, professor and director, Stanford Center on Adolescence "The first comprehensive overview of current research on children's understanding of peace, conflict, and war, this book shows the richness of children's understanding in its sociocultural context. It challenges us to think deeply about the connections between human development, war, and peace and about how to educate for a culture of peace."—Michael G. Wessells, professor of psychology, Randolph-Macon College "This comprehensive book discusses research on how peace, conflict, and war are interpreted by youngsters from different cultures and how such knowledge can help educators contribute to building peace. Anyone interested in peace and conflict, child development, and education will find many useful insights and a wealth of diverse approaches for working with children in this important new book."—Åke Bjerstedt, professor emeritus of education, Lund University, Sweden "This landmark book will help open the way to advances in research on the development of children's conceptions of peace and on the practice of peace education." —Milton Schwebel, editor, Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology

This handbook encompasses a range of disciplines that underlie the field of peace education and provides the rationales for the ways it is actually carried out . The discipline is a composite of contributions from a variety of disciplines ranging from social psychology to philosophy and from communication to political science. That is, peace education is an applied subject which is practiced in differing ways, but must always be firmly based on a range of established empirical disciplines. The volume is structured around contributions from expert scholars in various fields that underpin peace education, plus contributions from experts in applying peace education in a range of settings, all complemented by chapters which deal with issues related to research and evaluation of peace education.

Positive Peace in Schools offers a fresh and challenging perspective on the question of conflict, violence and peace in schools. Drawing on the most up-to-date theory and research from the field of peace and conflict studies, this book provides readers with a strong understanding of the concept of positive peace, and how the dimensions of peace-keeping, peace-making and peace-building can be robustly applied in schools. This accessible book challenges educators everywhere to reconsider the nature of direct and indirect violence in schools, and the structural and cultural factors that sustain it. It engages with global traditions of harmony and balance that are often neglected in Western notions of liberal securitised peace, in order to suggest a model for schools that integrates inner and outer peace. The book also includes practical sections that outline restorative approaches to discipline, peer mediation, circle learning, and classroom activities to promote mindfulness, inclusion and wellbeing. Taken together, these provide a philosophy and a highly effective framework for building conflict literacy and a culture of peace in schools.