Building Relationships: A Crucial Foundation for Peace Learning Image An important first step toward peace is to build healthy and inclusive community relationships: a safe-enough environment for nurturing peace learning, peacemaking and peacebuilding. In classroom community building activities, students learn to build healthy and inclusive relationships, creating resilience in the group. Participants also practice self-expression and dialogue, capabilities that will later help them to express themselves about conflict episodes and justice concerns. The classroom teachers in our study shared some favorite ways of doing community-building in their classrooms. Several teachers guide their students to name and discuss the meaning of some shared values that they should practice in their daily activities with each other, such as justice, solidarity, equality, respect, fairness, honesty, responsibility, legality, and freedom, and why and how they are important. One teacher teaches her students some key phrases (principles) about what it means to communicate respectfully across their differences, facilitates class discussion about these, and encourages students to practice with peers. I see you, not look through you I hear you I respect your right to think and feel as you do Students, in small-group teams, write phrases and make drawings to represent cherished values, which are then posted in the classroom. Conscious multiple ability teamwork activities is a strategy that would help students to see and identify multiple abilities and include their peers to understand it.In Mexico, teachers emphasized having students discuss and reflect on what collaborative team work is, and on the value of diversity in a team. For instance: “In teams, students participate in a series of 4 activities that exercise different abilities (creativity, physical, memory, leadership) and that need collaboration to be completed. After the first 2, students debrief on the teamwork to improve it for the next 2 activities. After the activities are over, discuss about what would have happened if every student had the same skills and abilities.” These kinds of collaborative activities enable students to delve into various aspects of abilities and assist them in finding different strategies to collaborate with peers of multiple abilities. Each Monday or Friday, in a class community circle, students take turns sharing about themselves, for instance things they did on the weekend or activities they appreciated (or suggest changing) in class that week. Another community building activity that enhances expressive language is a “check-in” round every morning. It takes 20-30 minutes and enhances both language and community building (for instance it involves the use of adjectives, vocabulary enrichment, e.g. what is a synonym for that word of how one is feeling? Later students could use some of the vocabulary learned during the check-in round in writing reading responses.