The most effective way to prevent violence is to invest in building a resilient culture of peace. Peace education waters the seeds for a culture of peace to flourish.
The pilot school project on “Peace Education - A Lab for a Living Culture of Peace” builds on the idea that peace is our responsibility and our opportunity. It provides and co-creates together with the students Tools for Peace, as a set of 21st Century life-skills to deal with conflicts in a creative and communicative way and to engage in co-creating and sustaining a vibrant culture of peace.
A crucial challenge in schools is to address topics of violence, hate speech, bullying and disruptive images which children and youth are increasingly confronted at younger ages through social media and within school settings that are not always neutral spaces.
While digital literacy slowly but increasingly finds its way into school curricula, the focus on peace and emotional literacy is yet often underrepresented and hardly dealt with as part of regular school activities.
The objective of the project is to bridge this gap by together with the young students introducing, identifying and collaboratively designing innovative Tools that lead to deeper knowledge, understanding, leading to the development of a set of skills that enable them to deal constructively with inner and outer conflicts as well as proactively engaging in the co-creation of a vibrant culture of peace.
By creating a learning environment where conflict, relationships, values, attitudes and emotions are explored, the project facilitates the students’ journey of discovery into their own identity, other people, and the world around them.Some of the proposed Tools for Peace include age-appropriate methods for cultivating inner peace, nonviolent communication, deep listening, imagining and formulating their own vision of peace, as well as recognizing, managing and articulating their own emotions and feelings.
Collaboratively, students co-develop tools for peace by and for students to work and be with conflict effectively in non-violent and creative ways.
While experienced facilitators of the Berghof Foundation will provide answers to peace, conflict and war-related questions of the young students through an online and live video-session during the program, the children and youth will also develop their own answers to how to deal with conflict and become young everyday peacebuilders.
This peer-learning methodology increases their ownership of the skills and competencies and in-turn strengthens self-esteem. In addition to the Toolkit, which will be published as Handbook in print and digital forms, small video clips will be produced, in which the students will present and explain the “For Peace Tools” to each other.Short video clips will also be produced with the educators and teachers that support the pedagogical methodologies and engage in creating a teaching guide by teachers and for teachers to integrate peace education in their schools. The material developed by the students and teachers during the project week will be professionally edited and made available to other schools, teachers, children and youth by its online publication under the free and creative commons license on the For Peace website.
This first pilot project takes place in summer in a Bavarian school with students of 4th grade and with the proactive collaboration of the school-teachers, director, and the Berghof Foundation.