California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: March 31, 2001
Latest update: March 31, 2001
jeannecurran@habermas.org

This essay is based on postings on the Peace Education Commission (PEC) list:

• Request for three suggestions
• jeanne's list of three suggestions
• Ian Harris's list of three suggestions
• Marvin Berlowitz' list of three suggestions
• Discussion Questions

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On Sunday, March 31, 2001, Susan Fitzell posted on the PEC list:

If you were asked to recommend 3 concrete things that schools could start to implement tomorrow to create caring, peaceful communities, what would they be? I thought of this question today as I considered ways to get schools started on the path to peaceful communities that they can "see concretely".

I'm very bothered, to say the least,that my city is locking all their schools from the outside. I cannot get into my son's school without pressing a buzzer and speaking into a box. Yet, my understanding is that the city is dropping the safe school program as of this point in time. Locks are concrete, tangible, and visible. I have found in my experiences with speaking to hundreds of teachers, no matter the topic, they want concrete, tangible things they can do in the classroom tomorrow. I KNOW that creating caring communities takes MORE than that. However, if they allowed me 1 hour to show them 3 things schools can do to create peaceful, caring communities, which three things would I choose to tell them about?

Change school culture? How? Peace education curriculums/conflict resolution programs sit on shelves... they are needed; maybe they are one of the three things.

What would the other two be? I'm mulling this over. Does anyone have any ideas?

Susan

On Saturday, March 31, 2001, jeanne responded to the PEC list:

I could make some suggestions based on our community outreach through our university students. Many siblings and offspring are included in our families. We therefore try to provide practical suggestions for sharing our peacemaking with young family members and neighbors. Also, many of our students teach and work in correctional facilities. They use some of this material in those capacities.

1. I'd share links with teachers and parents on good Internet material for such activities, such as The Foozles. I'd also share sites not aimed at "teaching" per se, but that convey a climate of joy and caring, such as The Hampster Dance . Both of these sites are fun in and of themselves. And the Hampster Dance allows the child to drag and drop the hamsters into different formations. I usually illustrate by dragging them into a big layered circle where they can "joing hands" and dance with each other.

2. I'd extend the material from the sites into interactive activities. My college students love to draw and paint. We share such activity as a means of learning to free our imaginaries to discover peacemaking alternatives to major social problems that affect us. For example, the campus president's announcement that names would not be called at graduation. We painted to express our disappointment and the structurally violent exclusion of our voices. Oil pastels work well with older children, crayons with younger ones.

   With the foozles, I'd suggest they make masks to match the various foozles, and at older levels, they could do craft projects that let them glue on bouncing legs or bigger heads. The very young ones might enjoy coloring pictures of the Foozles. You get the idea.

3. While they're engaged in this activity we keep up a conversation on what it is we're trying to remind ourselves of: not to tease and bully. These kids can talk and listen and paint or draw at the same time - TV gave us that. And remember the Ryan research in education that showed that teachers are not the best evaluators of what's happening sociometrically in the classroom. Just when you think they are totally absorbed in drawing, they pop up with a comment that makes you realize they've been following the conversation. The activity permits them to think all this over without seeming to be involved in the discussion. That affords a social distance that makes the whole process less threatening. Remember lots more learning goes on informally in the interstitial moments between lessons than in the formal lesson.

   Also, through using some of these activities, college students have begun to recognize the adult patterns of teasing and bullying they had not been aware of before. This has helped us make our classroom less adversarial. And they carry this learning away with them into the community. One student wrote to say that he had never realized he was bullying his students in elementary school. Awareness of this process led him to resolve to no longer do so. Another student uses many of our activities in a correctional facility with young girls. It has helped make their facility more caring and supportive as the children learn to respect one another.

On Saturday, March 31, 2001, Ian Harris made the following suggestions on the PEC list:

Susan,

This is a good question, and, of course, the answer depends upon the age group of students. I am more familiar with high school students. I don't suppose for a second that my three suggestions would work with elementary school children.

1. I would get young people into dialogue groups where they could discuss their own experiences with violence.
2. I would insist that the history curriculum emphasize non-violent struggle.
3. I have the students go through some kind of "futures" program where they could picture their visions of the future and discuss how to get there. (Elise Boulding has developed a nice format for such a workshop.)

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On Saturday, March 31, 2001, Marvin Berlowitz posted on the PEC list:

I would like to make some policy suggestions:

1. Rules against all forms of "bullying" should be incorporated into school discipline codes.
2. We should lobby state Boards of Education to incorporate a conflict management core curriculum into the certification requirements for teacher education.
3. We should lobby against the proliferation of JROTC in the public schools.

Our Center in the College of Education at the University of Cincinnati will offer an on-line course entitled Theory & Practice of Conflict Resolution in Educational Settings to begin in the Autumn of 2001.

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Discussion Questions

1. On what level of the infrastructure do we need to begin efforts?

   jeanne's notes on one plausible response:

   My thinking on this is strongly affected by constitutive theory. Henry and Milovanovic. I believe that we always have "agency" to some degree. The effect of growing up in the midst of the existential movement in France as the French coped with Vichy supporters at the culmination of World War II. But I find myself translating that kind of agency onto all levels from young chiildren right through to adulthood. We can all work at achieving peace through the agency we are able to exercise at our place in the infrastructure. We are all constrained in our imaginaries by the dominant discourse in which we find ourselves. But we all have agency. So my approach to teaching peace is primarily at the level of interpersonal relationships. We can both teach through modeling behavior, and we can effectively create a climate of peace within our own environment.

   But we can also work towards peace by political engagement, by community efforts, and by going to trouble spots in the world to lend our expertise. Those levels are pretty much beyond the energies of an almost-retired teacher, who has about 200 students a semester. So I tend to focus on the interpersonal level in the classroom. I invite all of you to share your ideas on "praxis" at the various levels.