Thursday, November 19th 2009

By selma al-samarrai

This past weekend, students, professors and members of various education and social justice organizations from across the globe came together for the eighth annual Peace Education Conference. From Nov. 13 to 15, the third floor of the student center was hosting an event with new ideas aimed towards reducing violence, both at home and abroad, through education. The conference, hosted by the Canadian Centres for Teaching Peace (CCTP) and the McMaster Centre for Peace Studies, had a very specific focus this year, to begin discussion around the new School Peace Program.

Although most of the conference participants were educators and representatives from social justice groups, the organizers were pleased to see a number of McMaster students in attendance.

The CCTP is a national umbrella organization whose goal is to see the creation of local peace centres and peace cafés – such as the Hamilton Centre for Teaching Peace and the Bread and Roses Café – across Canada. They are also eager to integrate a framework for teaching peace into the standard school curriculum, in order to build a movement for world peace from the “ground up.”

According to Robert Stewart, director of the CCTP, education is the path towards peace. “Peace education is learning the attitudes, skills and behaviours of how to live together more successfully,” said Stewart, “It’s not just a class here and a class there. It’s [changing] the culture within schools.” When the culture within schools moves from one of violence to one of peace, the ground-up approach to building peace in our world begins. Steward pointed out that “once you start learning about it and modeling it, you share it with other people.” In this way, he maintained, educating one person in peace is a means of educating the world.

In the midst of a number of workshops and panel discussions, two aspects of the Conference stood apart from the rest. The first was a series of discussions surrounding the launch of the CCTP School Peace Program. Anne-Marie Collette is the mind behind the program. In 2003, her passions for children and for peace education came together in an opportunity to teach a second grade class of children with disabilities. In the year that she taught them, Collette expressed her understanding of the purpose of education, “making a connection at the heart level and allowing the kids to flourish and become who they are intended to be.”

This understanding of education inspired her to create a framework which could be expanded by individual schools into a comprehensive, peace-encouraging curriculum. The discussion paper, which resulted from her research, was the focal point of Friday’s discussion. Participants were able to read, discuss, dissect and modify her proposals. At the close of the day, discussion turned towards ways in which the framework could be promoted to “the ministries of education, to the school boards, to the teacher’s colleges, to the parental communities, [and] to community leaders.”

The second highlighted event was a lecture, given by retired Wisconsin professor Dr. Ian Harris, on “Overcoming Violence through Education – Exploring Masculinity, Violence and Peace.” Before receiving his doctorate, Harris was a teacher in the inner city of Philadelphia. It was this experience that motivated his future work, “The students I taught in Philadelphia were so traumatized by violence in their lives…. [they] weren’t stupid, but they couldn’t focus on their lessons because mom got beaten up last night or dad didn’t get a job or a friend had gotten shot – urban violence was dragging them down.” Harris wanted to help. He wanted to give them the skills they needed to address these issues in a non-violent manner. When he became a professor at the University of Wisconsin, the desire led to the creation of a course on peace education.

His desire for peace also led him into the realm of male violence. When the feminists pointed out, in the 1980s, that men created most violence, Harris asked himself, “Why?” After 10 years of looking at cultural messages, institutional violence, and emotional abuse, Harris concluded, “the key factor in male violence … is wounding. Men are wounded in a variety of ways … and a sense of rage grows up inside them.” Harris hopes that by revealing the many complex factors that influence masculine violence, he might create an understanding that will pave the way towards greater peace.

When asked why students should pay attention to peace education, Stewart, Collette and Harris converged on the importance of conflict-resolution skills in every-day life. According to Harris, conflict resolution is just as important as learning how to read and write: “we have what we call the four Rs: reading, ‘righting, ‘rithmetic and resolution.” Collette makes it clear that “no man is an island – we are all connected.” If we are going to live together successfully, we need a way to solve our differences in a non-violent manner. Harris reminded students that “life is full of conflict… the key is determining how you resolve that conflict.”

Tags: education, McMaster, peace, peace education conference, students, violence, women