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Pamela Baxter, Peace Education Co-ordinator, UNHCR
The UNHCR Peace Education Programme was developed in 1997. It is now being implemented in twelve countries (nine in Africa) and has been externally evaluated in terms of impact and internally evaluated in terms of structure, materials and implementation. It was formally endorsed by the Interagency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE) in March 2001. There have been lessons learned and the materials have been upgraded and modified almost continually (and are currently undergoing a major upgrade).
Looking at the available programmes in peace education of the time, UNHCR/INEE took a very pragmatic approach to the development of a programme for peace education. It was a direct result of needs in the pilot communities. Refugees (the original recipients of the programme) have, by definition, fled from conflict and persecution but, as human beings, carry the seeds of potential conflict with them. As a result, refugee communities are usually not much more peaceful than the situation from which they left. My task was to create a package that would enable the refugees to live peacefully and constructively together. Most of the peace programmes at that time (1997) concentrated on awareness and public advocacy but this did not seem relevant in situations where there was a phenomenal amount of gratuitous violence, especially in the schools, and this was often labelled “culture” or blamed on the fact that child soldiers, now in school, only responded to “military discipline.”
So a programme of skills was developed. This came from asking the research groups what they thought was peace and what was conflict and then what they felt that they wanted their children to know about in order to be peaceful. This by itself took several sessions lasting two to three hours and was done through activities and discussions. Through working with a skills based approach, values and attitudes are also examined and constructive behaviours are identified and consolidated.
The development of the programme followed very closely the expressed needs of the communities for whom it was first developed. Interestingly, as the programme expanded to other countries and other cultures, it was found that these skills and the way of constructing the programme did not need to be radically altered. Part of the reason for this is that the programme was designed to draw upon the society and the culture where it was being implemented; the values are the values of the society (not the stated values of a group within the society). Another reason (I suspect) is the fact that the programme puts a lot of emphasis on the similarities between people and cultures, encouraging the participants to look for those things that are similar rather than different and so create links between and among groups.
Although the programme was originally supposed to be for children in formal schools, the groups in the communities asked for a programme for themselves. This had several benefits: the parents knew (and had psychological ownership of) the learning that their children were receiving; the children had the concepts reinforced in the community (which is fairly rare); the programme expanded (automatically) to include out-of-school youth and adults, and the facilitators (who taught the community or non-formal programme) could benefit from the teachers’ training and vice versa. This was the second major advantage of the programme – there was time (and the ability) to develop all the component parts of the programme [Power point slide] the training, teaching and facilitation components. While this would seem to be self-evident, it is amazing how many programmes are put into place without the teachers being trained at all. It is as if, because they are teachers, they should be able to teach anything (and Peace Education is considered a ‘soft subject’ anyway). Perhaps an advantage of this programme was an understanding that because the teachers were refugees, many of them had not been teachers in their previous life and so it was accepted that they were untrained or under-trained. In addition, the societies and their previous experiences meant that, generally, they taught in a very authoritarian manner, as they had few constructive classroom management techniques to call on. In addition, there is an old adage in teaching that teachers under stress (and the conditions in developing country schools mean that teachers are continuously under stress) teach as they were taught; not the way they were taught to teach. So the very authoritarian approach was reinforced. Hence the teacher training and facilitators’ training components were an automatic inclusion in the programme.
The public awareness component had two parts:
1. An awareness of peace as a positive and constructive way to live life. This was done through street dramas, songs and posters (no text).
2. An awareness of the programme itself (a sort of advertising). This created a very strong demand for the non-formal component of the programme and helped the psychological ownership of the programme by the community.
The staff training does not refer to the peace workers themselves – that is simply a component of effectively implementing the programme. The staff-training component refers to the staff of UNHCR and this was the least effective component. This was not because the staff was unwilling but because time, logistics and work demands mean that the staff does not have the free time necessary to complete the course. The course is 36 hours for the non-formal programme and because of the way it is structured it is not really possible to do a one-hour version (or even a three hour version). It is possible to give a “taste” of the programme – but not the programme itself.
The skills are those you would expect in any programme. The difference is that this is skills based and then that the skills build upon each other and reinforce each other. For example, the skills needed for problem solving include the ability to handle emotions (yours and the other person’s), clear two-way communication, empathy (the ability to understand why the other person acts the way that they do), trust, assertiveness (not aggression or submission), an understanding of bias, stereotypes and discrimination, co-operation (the willingness to give a little in order to achieve a solution), as well as logic and the willingness to look for the best solution not just the first solution. All of these skills are taught in a structured manner leading to the section on problem solving. The skills are taught through games and activities, each one structured to achieve an end and each component building on the next.
The programme follows the structure that any curriculum follows and the teachers are trained so that they understand the curriculum principles as well as the basic psychological development of the child. The programme is constructive rather than instructive and a lot of the training of teachers and facilitators concentrates on that (the school lessons are mostly designed as “what happens when…” lessons so that the children and participants can see which behaviours lead to problems and conflict and which are constructive. Keep in mind that children (and many adults) do not realise the alternatives between destructive and constructive behaviour and in a refugee situation (or any situation of stress) the social mores usually govern our destructive behaviours break down as the social fabric is damaged or destroyed. Once children (and adults) learn the constructive behaviours they invariably use them – that has been the evidence of the impact of the programme in anecdotal feedback in most countries and through the external evaluation conducted of the pilot programme in 2001/02.
The key to the success of the programme (both the school and the community components) is having a sustained approach, in realising (for the school programme) that the programme must be built on a conceptual development framework (i.e. it must be structured) and that it is treated like a regular subject. One of the great fallacies is that Peace Education can be “inserted” into any other subject according to the situation. The acid test for this is to substitute “maths” for “Peace Education”. If a mathematical concept arises in another subject do you (as a teacher) reinforce the concept? [The answer should be “yes, of course”]. Would you, however, teach mathematics by simply waiting for concepts to arise? Probably not. But for some reason Peace Education (and other life skills programmes) seem to be relegated to the “if/sometimes” category. This is especially dangerous if we look at the issue of positively reinforcing negative behaviour. If Peace Education is taught only when the occasion arises then by definition we are waiting for negative (destructive) behaviour to occur. If then the child can alter the course of the lesson (because the teacher then switches to teaching Peace Education) not only is that subject lesson disrupted and the structure of Peace Education abandoned, but the child has tremendous power over the teacher and if this results in a lot of attention, then the child is very likely to repeat and expand on the negative behaviour in order to get the attention s/he craves. This has the net effect of reinforcing the negative behaviour, which is very unlikely to be peaceful behaviour.
These then are some of the challenges: to create a genuine curriculum structure, which is structured and sustained. Added to this is the school environment, which needs to be constructively peaceful in its philosophy. This means that authority needs to be tempered and balanced, not to be confused with power; that the children should have ownership over their own learning (not to be confused with a laissez faire approach to teaching); that the school takes its role as an institution of socialisation as well as it being a preparation for income-earning seriously and that the teachers take seriously the legal responsibility of being in loco parentis (in the place of the parent).
While I agree that there should be a diversity of approaches – I firmly believe that these need to be within the context of a curriculum structure. Diversity of approaches does not mean a series of single events (which unfortunately is often how it is interpreted). Peace Education is seen to be catchy and so every new area (or old areas redressed) is suddenly called peace education. This can only be harmful in the long term. Everything can be called peace education (who would have “war education”?) but a genuine peace education programme should take into account the skills and behaviours required for constructive living and build those into a programme. Whether this is for formal or non-formal education is immaterial – the objective is the same. The real diversity is in teaching the range of skills required in a manner that reaches the different learning styles of the students or participants and addresses the needs of the society in which they live.