Peace Education for, with, and by Young People
In this blog, Otilia Meden reflects on some of the research which she has recently added to our Visualising Peace Library.
Peace Education for, with, and by Young People
Otilia Meden, November 2023
In this blog, I share how the field of peace education offers a promising path toward peace in our world. My interest in peace education has evolved from my initial research into inner peace, self-care, and mindfulness inside and outside classroom settings. It is evident that peace education embraces these aspects, but also expands beyond by considering the connections between inner, local, and global peace (Gee, Brooks, and Cartwright 2022). In 2004, peace education was formally represented as an academic field in Journal of Peace Education (Ogunnusi 2020, 20). Today, peace education serves as the umbrella term for promoting peace in schools, covering a broad range of topics such as conflict resolution, environmental care, indigenous peoples, gender equality, anti-discrimination and racism, social justice, and human rights (Global Campaign for Peace Education 2023).
Peace education is not a fixed and definable size, but rather it represents a dynamic field that is ever evolving. Further insights from the literature and from our conversations with peace educators, teachers, and young people underline that the term peace must be expansive to include different perspectives and contexts within which peace is taught. While the literature in this Library challenges how we name and frame peace in society, it remains clear that the dominant narratives refer to peace as the absence of conflict (Ogunnusi 2020). In further example, Dr Alice König and I attended a workshop in October 2023 with schoolteachers from across Scotland. In these conversations, it was clear that teachers indeed address topics related to peace within the curriculum. However, it was also clear that most teachers did not refer to it as peace education. It is interesting to investigate further why that is.
Recent trends in peacebuilding, and by extension peace education, focus on the youth as active agents for fostering peace (Spalding et al. 2021). Here, it is relevant to draw further connection between youth peacebuilding and peace education as two complementary approaches to and for peace. I have learned that a difficulty with implementing peace education is usually one that lies within the institutional structures, such as funding for curriculum development and teacher training. Additionally, a challenge for youth peace builders is that they are excluded from formal spaces like political or governmental institutions that address peace (ibid.). Therefore, it appears that the political realms of power overlook the potential of young people as catalysts for building peace in schools and wider society.
If this is to change, a crucial question is how to ensure that young people are represented and recognised in formal peace processes. This leads to another important aspect of paying attention to how and where they already practice peace. Such perspectives guide my further research and engagement with peace education like, e.g., the teaching resources that we develop as a research team. A fellow researcher, Lia Da Giau, and I are working on co-developing resources with children and young people in school ages to take their voices seriously on matters of peace. To do so, we believe that we must understand their existing knowledge about peace, but also ask them: What does peace look like? How can we imagine a more peaceful world? How can we cultivate more peace in our world?
Despite my two years of involvement in the project, these questions still puzzle me. As our combined research continues to expand though, I become more and more certain that some of the answers originate within oneself. As various items in this Library highlight, the human mind is powerful and how we experience the world is intertwined with how we feel within ourselves. Crucially, this position is a privileged one to have in a world where many people live in war-stricken areas or conflictual homes or in otherwise unsafe conditions. Therefore, I do not intend to state that externalities do not matter. I write from a position of having lived most of my life in Denmark and now in Scotland, and my experiences are not definitive in these or any other contexts.
However, as extensive research suggests, our inner worlds can and indeed do shape our experiences of the outer world. I cannot understate that this is a fortunate position that speaks in dialogue with studies about particularly young people’s struggles with mental well-being in Denmark and the UK (Gee, Brooks, and Cartwright 2022). Taking such data seriously leads me to ask; how can we build peace in society if we do not first cultivate peace within ourselves? These observations are not new in my research, but they remain essential. They explain why I look particularly into how young people understand the connections between inner, local, and global peace in their everyday lives.
In this semester, these questions have led me to add two reports and one PhD thesis into our Visualising Peace Libraryabout young people, peacebuilding, and peace education. Drawing insights from different disciplines, I am interested in how the dimensions of inner, local, and global peace are taught in schools to young people. From here, I am even more intrigued by how these connections can be taught in (more) meaningful ways for young people. This pushes us as researchers to dismantle our existing resources, to go back, and to ask young people what peace means to them, and how they want to learn more about it. Particularly, together with the need to include young people’s perspectives, I have learned from my research that it is worth noting the gendered dimensions to peace in classrooms. This is something that would build upon former fellow researcher Maddie McCall’s work. Another important take-away from these new items is how to understand peace education operates outside a Western societal context (which has been my focus so far). In brief, while my research has led me to raise more questions than provide answers, they guide me and fellow researchers to support the ever-evolving field of peace education as a promising path toward peace in our world.
References
“Making Noise and Getting Things Done: Youth Inclusion and Advocacy for Peace: Lessons from Afghanistan, South Sudan and Myanmar”
Spalding, Savannah, Odgers-Jewell, Casey-Jade, Payne, Hayley, Mollica, Caitlin, & Berents, Helen. 2021. Available from: https://hmberents.com/youth-advocacy-for-inclusive-peace/
This report is a conjoined research project about youth’s inclusion in peacebuilding processes in Afghanistan, South Sudan, and Myanmar. Initially, the authors outline the United Nations’ Youth, Peace, and Security Agenda, established in 2015, as an important step toward including young people into formal peace processes across the world. Yet, the progress toward implementing youth-inclusive strategies remain largely conceptual. The findings in the research evidence the need for international stakeholders to meaningfully support and fund youth peacebuilders. In brief, the research is conducted by interviewing youth peacebuilders from Afghanistan, South Sudan, and Myanmar that convey how a main obstacle in their pursuits for peace is that they are excluded from formal peace processes within governmental and political institutions. Due to such exclusion, young people largely seek out ways to build peace in informal ways in their local communities. An essential insight from this report is how to connect the formal and informal ways of building peace for young people. In addition to this, the authors highlight five key messages/recommendations to the international community and other stakeholders at the end of the report. The recommendations are drawn from the youth peacebuilders’ experiences of how to amplify and empower youth voices in building and sustaining peace in societies. This report contributes to our Library of Peace by taking the perspectives of young people seriously in peacebuilding as well as in wider knowledge production.
“Peace at the Heart: A Relational Approach to Education in British Schools”
Gee, David, Brooks, Ellis, and Cartwright, Isabel. 2022. Quakers in Britain.
This report explains the need to teach peace in schools to actively support young people to learn not only academically but also to develop as persons in the social environments. The authors emphasise the need to teach peace as not merely the absence of violence but as the presence of relationships that work well. This sentence is fundamental as the report addresses how to cultivate peaceful relationship(s) with oneself, others, and the wider world. For this, they outline four pillars of peace in schools; (1) individual wellbeing (peace with myself); (2) convivial peer relations (peace between us); (3) inclusive school community (peace among us); (4) the integrity of society and the earth (peace in the world). By referring to this framework, the authors provide practical ways for schools, teachers, and pupils to cultivate peace within and beyond classroom settings.
Furthermore, the authors draw on extensive research from various academic fields to assert the positive impacts throughout one’s life when learning how to relate well to oneself and others. Thus, to redeem some of the harms that are experienced in and outside school settings, like discrimination, bullying, and/or poor mental health, they underline the need to teach peace from an early age. Essentially, the report argues for a holistic approach that must be implemented/taken seriously by the school to teach peace in a sustainable and open-minded way. This report connects to other work from Quakers and peace education in our Library of Peace. In further relevance to our wider work, it provides insight into what peace education is and how our research can support the peacebuilding work done in schools.
“Young People, Situated Learning, and Peace Praxis at The Margins of Everyday Life”
Michael Ogunnusi. 2020. Doctoral Thesis. De Montfort University.
This thesis provides a thorough study of how we approach young people and peace. To start with, it reviews how peace is generally depicted as the absence of violence or as ‘deficit peace’ within the literature. From here, it expands on the history of the field of peace education and how Critical Peace Education (CPE) came about. CPE advocates for educators and researchers to pay close attention to the local realities of the context within which and for whom peace is taught. Building on CPE as the theoretical framework, the study examines how young people from inner-city schools in England actively share their ideas and solutions for peace, both in and outside of the research.
This study offers many insights that inform our wider research into what peace education means. A crucial insight is that any concept of peace is incomplete without context, suggesting that all (the young) people have different understandings of what peace is at different times in their lives. Another crucial point is that school settings are often conceived as places that stifle rather than promote peace due to academic and social pressure. In addition to this, the study concentrates on everyday life as the settings within which we should learn how to cultivate peace. This social pedagogy of validating young peoples’ everyday lives lead the study to address peace on many levels that are important to the young people, ranging from inner to global peace. A final insight for us is to continue questioning and reconsidering what is known about how young people understand peace, and their knowledge of peace, to critically engage with the dominance of the narrative of ‘deficit peace’. Thus, for our Library of Peace, this study suggests future directions of further research like the gendered dimensions of peace education and to extend beyond Western societal contexts.