Standards for Peace Education
Dear Colleagues in Peace Education,
This message alerts you to resources that you may find useful for teaching about peace and fostering its development through formal and informal education.
The first resource is the book Chicken Soup for the Soul: Stories for a Better World. This book has 101 true short stories about peace processes that have been used. Readers can learn from the many ways peace has happened in different regions and cultures how they might use nonviolence and several other ways of transforming conflict. There is a web site for learning more about this book at: http://chickensoup.peacestories.info/
The second resource is a set of Standards for Peace Education, which I am pasting below.
These standards were designed to support and advance peace education in primary and secondary levels of schooling as well as in teacher training. Some of you have seen these standards in earlier drafts before they were expanded with suggestions for their improvement. What is now needed is information about where and how they can be used to advance peace education.
Your response to these standards for peace education is greatly needed. Please complete the survey questions that are listed below here and included with the standards. Feel free to pass on this call for feedback on the standards from other practitioners of peace education. As an incentive to complete the survey about the standards for peace education, you are offered a free copy of the Chicken Soup book listed above. I can only afford to do this for the first 5 respondents to the survey. If you are one of them, I will let you know and ask for your postal mail address.
Survey on Peace Education Standards
1. Who might use these standards for peace education?
2. What ways might the standards for peace education be useful?
3. Describe your role(s) in peace education and how you can use these standards.
4. Are there any other guidelines for social education that these standards would compliment; enhance their depth or breadth? Describe those resources and where they can be found; a complete reference is most helpful.
5. What organizations might be interested in seeing, and possibly using, these standards for peace education?
6. What suggestions do you have for the content, distribution or use of these standards for peace education?
Standards for Peace Education
Recommended Standards for Students
Students of peace education exhibit the following developmentally appropriate knowledge, skills and dispositions:
Knowledge
Self-awareness
Evidence: Personal and cultural values, emotional tendencies, peace capabilities.
Contextual Awareness
Evidence: Knowledge of history and current needs of people in the community.
History of Peace Accomplishments
Evidence: Accomplishments of, people, organizations and societies.
Non-violent Service
Evidence: Peace-service options in conscription, government and non-governmental agencies.
Conflicts
Evidence: Awareness of local and global conflicts that are roots of violence.
Pro-active Communication
Evidence: Identify positively transformative communication techniques.
Methods of Non-violent Conflict Resolution
Evidence: Description of appropriate methods for different situations.
Democratic Processes
Evidence: Identification of democratic methods for addressing conflict.
Environmental Stewardship
Evidence: Explain rationale for ecological care of the physical environment.
Consumerism
Evidence: Explain reasons for socially and environmentally responsible consumerism.
Skills
Self-concept Expression
Evidence: Express a balanced self-concept using affirmation for valuing as well as critique for self-improvement.
Analysis of Communication
Evidence: Identify techniques including representation, bias, balance, multiple perspectives and active listening skills.
Communication Enactment
Evidence: Use multiple-perspective, cross-cultural and compassionate discourse.
Empathy
Evidence: Show understanding of and concern for the suffering of others, whether it was caused by one-self or someone in one’s own identity group.
Inclusion
Evidence: Choose to include in personal and group activities people with diverse social, intellectual and physical characteristics.
Cooperation
Evidence: Demonstrate ability to cooperate with others who have different goals.
Analysis of Violence Sources
Evidence: Identify disrespect, discrimination, deprivation, power imbalance and destruction; thereby recognizing intrapersonal, interpersonal and structural causes.
Perspective Diversity
Evidence: Learn from and explain three or more perspectives in conflict analysis.
Legitimize Others
Evidence: Validate the point of view, narrative and aspirations of an adversary; one with a different goal.
Collective and Individual Responsibility
Evidence: Acknowledge and explain own group or self-contribution to conflict.
Positive Recognition
Evidence: Acknowledge all efforts and accomplishments of disputants in a conflict.
Envision Peace
Evidence: Develop and express visions of a peaceful presence and future.
Commitment
Evidence: Commit to work for a peaceful presence and future through nonviolent conflict transformation and resolution.
Adaptation
Evidence: Practice peace development according to the cultural contexts where they are needed.
Environmental Stewardship
Evidence: Participate in ecological care of the physical environment.
Consumerism
Evidence: Identify or participate in socially and environmentally responsible consumerism.
Dispositions
Acceptance
Evidence: Display acceptance of oneself and of human diversity.
Mutuality
Evidence: Show identification with all humanity while recognizing distinct needs of
different groups.
Respect
Evidence: Exhibit positive regard for others, regardless of their differences from oneself.
Concern
Evidence: Demonstrate a conscience that monitors activities for protection of life and its environment.
Empathy
Evidence: Show compassion for those who suffer and have needs to fulfill.
Service
Evidence: Demonstrate an interest in providing assistance to anyone, including people with diverse characteristics, when it is needed.
Optimism
Evidence: Show belief that peace can happen as an outcome of conflict.
Involvement
Evidence: Realize personal and collective responsibility to bring about change by peaceful means where it is needed.
Courage
Evidence: Show willingness to disrupt or stop antecedents of, as well as existing, violence.
Commitment
Evidence: Demonstrate desire to work for a peaceful presence and future.
Recommended Standards for Teachers
In addition to educating students with the recommended peace-education standards for students, teachers of primary and secondary levels of schooling demonstrate the following skills:
1. Integrate positive contact with, as well as information about, diverse cultures in the local region and afar to overcome ignorance, misinformation and stereotypes.
2 Accommodate cultural norms of students including their diverse learning styles.
3. Engage in cross-cultural communication with multicultural school participants, including families, thereby modeling acceptance, accommodation and celebration of diversity through pluralism.
4. Demonstrate positive regard for all students, regardless of their misbehaviors, to convey unconditional care and respect for them as valuable people.
5. Use compassionate and equitable communication in dialogic facilitation of classroom management.
6. Train students through modeling of dispositions and skills that develop peace.
7. Listen to families’ ideas of how peace can be developed in the classroom and school and then collaborate with them in the facilitation of their suggestions.
8. Use strategies that support peaceful interaction with the self and all people, including restorative practices in post-conflict situations.
9. Model action for peace development on and beyond the campus, thereby demonstrating a community norm of social justice.
10. Cultivate and support the student’s responsibility for their own peaceful-problem solving while you stay aware of, and responsive to, their needs.
11. Integrate across multiple subject areas information about past, present and future situations for peace development.
12. Create and support venues for expressing current and future peace development.
13. Show appreciation for all student achievements in, and aspirations for, peace.
14. Attend to and teach ecological care of the physical environment, including sustainable use of its resources.
15. Teach about socially and environmentally responsible consumerism and the conflicts which result from exploitation of producers and laborers.
16. Teach about power relations in current events as well as history to help students recognize sources of structural violence.
17. Teach students to critically evaluate sources, perspectives and evidence provided in information they have access to while teaching them to recognize the types of information they do not have, but need, to develop clear understanding of spoken and written presentations.
18. Enable students’ discussions of controversy and unresolved problems locally and globally, thereby cultivating their intellectual and communicative skills for comprehending and analyzing conflicts.
Recommended Standards for Teacher Educators
Teacher educators use goals of peace development, identify competencies for student dispositions, knowledge and skills to accomplish during their instruction throughout courses, field experiences and internships in teacher-training programs.
1. Include peace education standards in course syllabi to clarify instructional goals.
2. Provide opportunities for pre-service teachers to identify, then examine, their awareness, views and biases.
3. Legitimize diverse viewpoints and enable students to express their own to develop their civil courage and public voices.
4. Build teachers-in-training’s self-respect along with positive regard for diverse others as they develop their peace-building knowledge, skills and dispositions.
5. Study, model and teach alternative positions before taking a stance on an issue.
6. Facilitate and use lateral, creative and critical thinking processes.
7. Teach how to obtain information about, and then analyze, power relations that are evident in local to global interactions, including analysis of international relations as outcomes of economic systems and political domination, such as capitalism and imperialism.
8. Teach about how social structures and institutions perpetuate systemic violence and societal conflicts such as poverty, racism, sexism and homophobia.
9. Make oppression evident to students, and denounce it.
10. Teach about multiple aspects of democratic citizenship including social, environmental, economic and political responsibilities for participation in a democracy.
11. Make clear the distinction between democracy and capitalism.
12. Illustrate how consumption practices and international policies affect human relations and the environment.
13. Develop the capacity to learn about and facilitate pro-active responses to controversial conflicts.
14. Develop tolerance for uncertainty with open processes, thereby allowing students to explore multiple ways of approaching tasks and conflict resolution.
15. Encourage students to create action projects in response to community, national and global conflicts.
16. Provide examples of and model proactive responses to conflict (e.g. be able to understand/legitimate other points of view with which you don’t agree; decallage, uncertainty.
17. Persistently address the unresolved learning issues of teacher candidates.
18. Extend support for teacher development, within and beyond initial credential training, through individual as well as group reflection and research.
19. Document, evaluate and professionally share the successes and challenges of peace-focused teacher education.
20. Revise teacher-training approaches in response to examination of their outcomes.
Recommended Standards for School Administrators
School administrators practice the following peacemaking skills:
1. Model dispositions and skills that develop peace
2. Engage in cross-cultural communication with multicultural school participants, including families, thereby modeling acceptance, accommodation and celebration of diversity through pluralism.
3. Demonstratively value and recognize cooperation and mutual support of all school participants.
4. Use peaceful interaction with oneself and all people at the school, thereby reducing tension for the school participants.
5. Enact non-hegemonic leadership in which supremacy over, and domination of, others is not used to manage the conflicts at a school.
6. Use congenial and equitable problem solving; theory Y.
7. Cultivate and support student, family and school staff responsibility for their own peaceful-problem solving while staying aware of, and responsive to, their needs.
8. Express appreciation for all student achievements in and aspirations for peace.
9. Extend support for teacher development, within and beyond initial credential training, through individual as well as group reflection and research.
10. Encourage the use of the school as a site for community collaboration between parents, students and all school staff.
11. Provide opportunities for peace education instruction of, and involvement by, families and other school partners including the school as a place for citizenship enactment.
12. Include peace maintenance and development as criteria for inclusion in evaluation of all school personnel.
13. Support initiatives in peace-oriented education by school members including use and disposal of materials at school as well as curriculum and instruction.
14. Recognize by documenting peace-oriented outcomes of education when evaluating faculty and other school staff.
Copyright 2005 of Candice C. Carter
Thank you for your work in peace education!
I look forward to receiving your completed survey at ccarter@unf.edu!
Highest regards,
Candice C. Carter, Ph.D.
University of North Florida
College of Education and Human Services
4567 St. Johns Bluff Road
Jacksonville, FL 32224-2676
Phone: 1 904 620-1881
Fax: 1 904 620-1025
www.peacemaker.st
"Establishing lasting peace is the work of education;
all politics can do is keep us out of war."
-- Maria Montessori
