Welcome

This Peacebuilding Citizenship Teaching Resource is based upon multi-year research on peacebuilding citizenship experiences and education in Canadian, Mexican and Bangladeshi schools. In a few schools in high-poverty, high-violence areas of major cities in each country, teachers and students (grades 5-9) each participated in a series of small-group workshops. Participating young people, in several small focus group workshops in each school, responded to a set of images about various kinds of conflict, violence, and injustice situations, to share their own experiences and perspectives on these conflicts and on what they thought people could do to handle and de-escalate those situations. The students also mentioned relevant lessons they had experienced (or wished for) in school, and offered anonymous recommendations for teachers. Teachers, meanwhile, described the relevant classroom activities and lessons they had taught, and compared these with the students’ learning desires and needs. This resource distills these teachers’ and young people’s wisdom of experience.

In all three countries, many students expressed their wish that teachers would help them to learn about, discuss, and work with conflicts more extensively and in more depth than they had experienced. They were aware and concerned about many kinds of conflicts, including both interpersonal and larger scale violent situations and injustice problems. They said that young people like themselves are ready for—and need—opportunities to learn in school about these problems, more extensively and in-depth than they had received thus far: why social conflicts happen, why they often escalate into violence, the perspectives of the various people involved, and ways to solve conflicts and replace violence with durable peace.

This Peacebuilding Citizenship Teaching Resource is dedicated to this goal. Education can help students, teachers, and communities to understand how conflicts work, why conflicts sometimes generate violence, and how people’s actions may contribute to resolving problems and generating durable peace. This resource shows how peacebuilding citizenship education can be infused into the daily content and process of classroom teaching.

Students participating in the Peacebuilding Citizenship Education research, in all three countries, appreciated the moments when their teachers had offered peacekeeping security, or acknowledged and discussed conflicts relevant to their personal, community and world experience. They understood that aggressive responses to conflicts often cause harm and can escalate (meaning, get bigger and/or worse). For example, some elementary students mentioned that – “Lots of kids get bullied and it can ruin their lives in many, many ways. They said,“teachers could be more involved with the things happening, as they ignore it and they walk past it as if it didn’t happen. They could be more involved in handling problems proactively, then facilitating discussions” (ON2A). Some intermediate students described a lesson they had experienced about the impacts of violence, and the relationship between perpetration of violence and prior mistreatment. However, these young people expressed their need to more thoroughly study examples and causes of violence, and especially what they could do, themselves, to better handle conflicts (GTO4).

In all three countries, the young people explained that they did not want only to know what people ‘should’ do, or to invent their own solutions: they wanted to receive in-depth substantive instruction, opportunities to express themselves about conflicts, and guided practice of options for making and building peace: “to learn about things that we could actually DO to stop a small conflict from getting really big, like maybe the entire school punching each other” (ON3). This is the inspiration for this teaching resource.