CRE Global Blog
Reporting on Peace Education Conference in Kenya
Posted by Gary Shaw on March 15, 09
In December 2008, I travelled to the Kenyan capital of Nairobi to attend a four day Conference on Peace Education in Eastern and Central Africa: The state of the art, lessons and possibilities. The aim of the conference was to create a forum where participants could share, learn and discuss the current status of peace education and its application in East and Central Africa.
The conference was organized by the Nairobi Peace Initiative (NPI), a regional secretariat of the Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict (GPPAC) in collaboration with the GPPAC International Secretariat, The Global Campaign for Peace Education and Kenya’s Ministry of Education. The conference addressed the important role of education in peace-building.
A major focus of the conference was on garnering regional and international linkages that could be used to improve national approaches through partnering and information sharing.
The conference was divided into two parts. The first two days provided an opportunity to examine the ‘art’ of peace education and the lessons and issues emerging from its implementation particularly in East and Central African countries; Burundi, Congo-Brazzaville, Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Gabon, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda. The second two days were dedicated to peace education in Kenya.
I attended the conference as arepresentative of the GPPAC Working Party on Peace Education and presented a workshop on the second day of the conference.
GPPAC was established by the UN in 2003 as civil society led world-wide network to build international consensus on peace-building and contribute to the prevention of armed conflict. Other Working Party members from the Philippines, Ukraine, Palestine, Columbia, Serbia, Spain, Ghana, Japan, Sri Lanka and Montenegro also attended. The group included GPPAC General Secretary, Paul Van Tongeren. Peace education is a GPPAC priority and complements the work of a global network of educators committed to investing in future generations through the development of skills, understanding and values needed for participation in peaceful communities.
The Conference was a significant event grappling with profound and challenging regional and local issues. Despite the magnitude of the task, particularly in relation to building peace in countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan there was strong sense of optimism and commitment. Obviously the challenge is to translate the ideas and enthusiasm into practice.
Political, social and economic factors will, as they always have, influence implementation of peace education initiatives. In Kenya the next steps involve providing immediate relief to ease the stress and causes of violence as well as implementation of prevention strategies. Education is one part of a broader solution for creating peaceful communities and national unity.
Experience from around the globe indicated that peace building is not easy work. This challenge was magnified most recently in post-apartheid South Africa with the xenophobic murders of Zimbabwean refugees. Recent post-election violence and school strikes in Kenya reminded people how fragile peace is and galvanized a strong collaboration between the Ministry for Education and Civil Society Organisation partners. As one delegate reminded us, ‘Don’t take peace for granted! It is hard to get back once it’s gone’.
There are however many things that can be done in schools. The Kenyan Government’s commitment, endorsed by the Minister, the Permanent Secretary, senior officials and demonstrated in productive collaboration with CSO’s, goes a long way towards creating the conditions in which schools can contribute to the ideals of civil society. Investments in extra curricula activities such as sport and music festivals or creating opportunities for student voice will be important. An emphasis on student centered learning can make a difference.
I think that an optimal learning environment is engaging and challenging, where theory and practice promote relevance and authenticity and one in which educators and students feel safe and valued. Whilst this may be considered an ideal I believe it is in such environments that quality learning and productive relationships flourish. Schools that work this way are worth striving for and provide places where young people can rehearse active citizenship, conflict resolution and peaceful relationships.
I understand this was the first time that Kenya had hosted a conference on peace education. The global network expands opportunities and shares the load. My heartfelt congratulations go to the organizers. This was an exceptional event, rich with the challenges and possibilities of education. I wish everybody well in their efforts and that the productive collaboration continues.
Gary Shaw - .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
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In my workshop – ‘Peace education as values education’ I described the values-based approach currently being used in Australian schools and suggested three lessons that I believe are relevant to peace education more broadly. These were:
Effective schools see themselves as learning communities and the values and vision of the school, that is, what is seen as important, desirable and treasured, are reached through consultation and collective agreement (School as a lighthouse in the community).
School communities should be places where pro-social values are modeled so that teachers and students can experience peaceful interactions and rehearse good citizenship (School as a model environment).
A focus on values-based education, particularly where students are placed at the centre, can contribute to improvements in the quality of the teaching and learning environment, student behaviour and academic outcomes. Such environments support the formation of a healthy and peaceful school (Student centered learning).
Peace education is fundamentally a process for engaging people in developing awareness of the causes of conflicts and ways to resolve these in daily life.
In East and Central Africa peace education is an avenue by which individuals and communities can be taught and persuaded to shun a culture of violence and conflict and adopt values, attitudes and behaviour of a culture of peace. These new attitudes will then see peaceful conflict resolution practised at the intra communal level and regionally across countries (NPI, 2008).
While there is a pressing need to respond to conflict and violence in the African context through education, the implementation of peace education curricula has proven challenging, particularly where it has been used in a reactionary way or to ‘dampen’ conflict (NPI, 2008). The delegate from Tanzania reported the difficulty of implementing programs in the face of unsustainable peace agreements, teacher strikes and human rights abuses such as discrimination and murder of albinos.
In South Africa peace education is incorporated into the reconciliation process. Keynote speaker, Dr Fanie Du Troit, Executive Director, Institute of Justice and Reconciliation (IJR), gave a frank overview of the challenges faced in the reconciliation processes in post-apartheid South Africa. Most pressing of these included the economic divide and grinding poverty faced by many citizens. In such an environment, ethnic tensions easily rise to the surface and were most recently expressed in xenophobic violence against Zimbabwean refugees. The IJR are currently implementing peace education programs in schools which are designed to help students develop a deeper understanding of their past so as to participate more proactively in the processes of healing and reconciliation in the future.
Dr Du Toit warned delegates that peace education was vulnerable if delivered in a climate of uncertainty or where economic or social conditions are pressing such as those described in the Northern Sudan where schools have no permanent buildings, no toilets, 120 students per class and employ the frequent use of corporal punishment. According to the representative from Sudan such conditions were ‘contrary to a culture of peace’. Clearly peace education is entwined with the social and economic conditions and dependent on community and government cooperation.
The West Africa Network for Peace-building (WANEP) has facilitated collaborative approaches in peace-building and conflict prevention since 1998. They have developed a peer mediation program, Active Non-Violence for students and teachers. It was this organization’s view that West African governments are increasingly recognizing the vital role of civil society organizations in governance and are beginning to build partnerships that have been useful in relation to peace education programs.
The Coalition of Peace in Africa (COPA) has been implementing an ongoing peace education project in Kenya since 2006 and has engaged in teacher training and student peace clubs in a number of districts over this time (COPA, 2008). Other peace education initiatives in Kenya include:
• a collaboration between Ministry of Education and Church World Service to initiate a School Safe Program in sixty schools
• UNICEF peace education programs
• the release of a Safety Standards Manual in July 2008 and
• the development of a primary and secondary school peace education curriculum to be released in early 2009 (MoE, 2008).
The interest in programs that promote peaceful ways of living post-conflict is not surprising but the notion of peace education, particularly in the curricula, is not widely accepted (NPI, 2008). According to delegates this is due in part to problems defining what peace education is and what it is meant to achieve. One view was that peace education is part of the broad suite of life skills that prepare young people for active citizenship. Another was that peace education helps deal with particular situations or events such as school strikes by teaching mediation skills or running cultural events to break down tension.
It may be fair to say that peace education is an umbrella term to describe the process by which educators support young people to cope with heightened personal and social risk, such as peer pressure, violence and bullying or youth alienation.
Most countries have national policies and education goals to ensure safe and peaceful schools. These may complement international conventions and protocols such as the UN Declaration of Human Rights. However the capacity of school systems to include peace education initiatives in policy and practice vary according to the traditions, infrastructure, funding and current concerns of the country. For countries that have experienced internal wars, human rights abuse or been neglected by government, peace education will have a different emphasis (Sinclair et al, 2008).
As an example, the Basque Plan of Action for Human Rights and Peace Education, 2008 was developed in response to a long period of violence and terrorism in Spain. The plan emphasizes co-responsibility to generate systematic, coordinated and sustainable programs including education in schools. This is very much focused on healing social fractures, particularly in relation to the victims of violence and human rights.
In Australia, peace education is rarely seen as a discrete area of study in school curricula. Generally, peace education and conflict resolution education is incorporated through a range of prevention and intervention initiatives. These include social skills development, relationship building, reduction of bullying, conflict management, violence prevention, peer mediation, restorative justice and citizenship education.
Australia is a country that has had a stable democracy of federated states for more than 100 years. It is a resource-rich country with a developed economy, built from an amalgam of cultures. There have been no civil wars, repressive governments or serious ethnic divisions. The colonisation and settlement of Australia by Europeans and the resulting impact on the Indigenous inhabitants however remains an internal tension and national focus of reconciliation.
The Australian government’s most recent national education policy has been located within a productivity agenda with a particular focus on social cohesion. Such an approach takes account of Australia’s place in a global context and one in which world economies, climate, conflict, resources and a growing population are connected and impact on us all. For example, Australia has been an ideal destination for displaced people following conflict. The latest wave of refugees from countries such as Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan, Iraq and Afghanistan come with experiences and backgrounds that can often make settlement and cultural adjustments difficult. A continuing educational investment in values, human rights and citizenship is fundamental to achieving social cohesion and peaceful communities in this context.
This notion of social cohesion and managing diversity is also a focus for some central and east African education authorities. One conference goal was to look at ways to mainstream peace education and develop a culture of peace in schools as a long-term social investment in young people.
Since the future of any nation depends on how responsible its young people are, inculcating a culture of peace in young generations will ensure that in the years to come Africa will have a core group of people in decision making positions who value diversity, social cohesion and community coexistence (p3, COPA, 2008).
George Wachira, Senior Research and Policy Advisor, NPI suggested that peace education was a way to build foundations for peace through the proactive and deliberate inculcation of values and skills that encourage non-violent, collaborative responses to conflict. In this sense peace education can be seen as a process of building cohesion and capacity within communities through the development of skills and understanding.
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