PEACE Education – full title “Peace Education as a Tool for Effective Conflict Management in Secondary Schools” is a 24-month project launched in November 2021 and funded by the Erasmus+ programme through KA220-SCH – Cooperation partnerships in school education.
The project focuses on 4 countries: France, Turkey, Portugal and Slovenia, and aims to create an inclusive learning environment and to reduce violence by providing the necessary skills and knowledge to teachers and other educators to integrate Peace Education into their respective teaching experiences, providing students with the appropriate vocabulary, opportunities for practice and peaceful problem solving-skills.
Objectives
Provide teachers and students with a conceptual understanding of peace education
Make students become critical learners and reflective peace practitioners
Acquire a holistic and critical understanding of the theory and practice of peace education
Gain an appreciation of the foundations of just and peaceful societies
Search for and identify the best ways to teach peace
Encourage positive action and non-violent conflict resolution in society
Model, experience and practice peaceful classrooms and healthy group dynamics
Enhance students’ intellectual flexibility, creativity & problem-solving capacities
Peace education is the process of acquiring the values, the knowledge and developing the attitudes, skills, and behaviors to live in harmony with oneself, with others, and with the natural environment. In other words, peace education is the deliberate attempt to educate children and adults in the dynamics of conflict and the promotion of peacemaking skills in homes, schools, work organizations and communities throughout the world, using all the channels and instruments of socialization (Gumut, 2007).
Expected outputs and results
In order to achieve the above mentioned objectives, the project aims at developing 3 main exclusive and innovative outputs, all of them directly dedicated to teachers, school staff and youth workers who are the primary target and direct beneficiaries of the project:
A Handbook
to understand the current state and needs of peace education in schools
An online course
for teachers to acquire peace education tools to implement in their classrooms
An online platform
for teachers to share and exchange experiences and materials on training students on peace education
Over the long term, the project intends to increase the capacities of teachers in addressing peace with their students, and the valorization of learners. By providing the outputs to teachers and allowing them to individually and collectively reflect and exchange on their practices, the project aims increase their motivation, which is likely to affect more generally the middle and secondary schools their work at and support innovation of the entire school institutions involved. Furthermore at a local level the acquisition of methodological elements, operational tools and the knowledge of a new reality will help to support the path of redefining and improving the training system for conflict management. The skills acquired by the teachers will help improving services quality provided by the institutions and therefore responding more efficiently to learners’ needs.
The final impact intended by the project is to strengthen the students’ problem solving skills, tolerance, flexibility and creativity in dealing with conflict, making them more conducive to a more inclusive and peaceful society.
