The Day Peace Found a Classroom
- Manuela Mot
- 6 hours ago
- 5 min read
I was a little late and was afraid that I was going to miss it. It was one of those days when your mind flies thousands of miles away, when almost everything is blurred and nothing feels possible, when the news makes you gloomy and conversations seem to be narrowing rather than opening. After Uber made me wait almost 15 minutes to confirm my ride, another 10 minutes for the car to arrive, and another 15 minute-ride with a chatty driver, I finally arrived at the Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution at GMU. When I entered quietly the venue, I found myself walking into a room with educators, students, professors and researchers who were carefully paying attention at the presentation that was showing on the four screens in the hall. It was session on the Necessity of Peace Curriculum in K-12 Education, moderated by Rose Cardarelli, CEO and founder of Education for All Coalition and our member of RCWG, 7620 District Governor Nominee. The session was part of the Peace Week at Carter School that brought together peacebuilders, students, professors and practitioners to investigate innovative and evidence-based approaches to peacebuilding to align with the pursuit of just and effective institutions.
“Where does peace start?" Well, everywhere – “At home, in the family, in the community…and at school”, came the response from Rose. Through an interdisciplinary team whose expertise comprises education, language development, sociology and social justice, Education for All Coalition developed a peace curriculum, moving from intention to something practical and tangible. Not a philosophy for peace, nor some ambitious plan in the making, but a curriculum. It is a comprehensive peace education plan covering primary, secondary, and high school students (K12) - a teachers' manual, flexible to live inside a forty-minute advisory period or a commemorative day on the UN calendar and structured enough to grow with a child from kindergarten through twelfth grade. The curriculum was designed with inclusivity in mind as to be applicable across diverse educational contexts, including formal U.S. classrooms, international and cross-cultural settings, informal learning environments, and contexts involving displaced or marginalized children or from refugee camps where they have seen things that no child should see. The peace plan is already being successfully piloted in several schools in New York state, and its ideas take root in real classrooms with real children and taught by real teachers.
The peace plan couldn’t be more timely. With many ongoing wars and conflicts around the world and others looming, this is the reality we live in, and such curriculum is only responding to this harsh reality. It is an honest response to what the real world is about and who we are in our contemporary society. Polarization is not a future threat, but a present condition and hatred, anger, rage, hostility, lack of understanding and empathy have been normalized. As often we reach for interventions after the fire has already started, peace scholarship argue that you must build the firebreak long before the sparks arrive. And that’s what peace education is all about. Not just a response, but prevention. In these turbulent times, peace has become one of the most urgent things we can choose to teach. Children are exposed to this fractured world, and that they are taught in classrooms about empathy, disagreement, and coexistence will shape the kind of adults they become, and ultimately, the kind of societies they build. The message was simple and straightforward, and everybody in the room understood it clearly.
While I was listening to the presentation, my mind flew back 15 years ago when I was a Rotary Peace Fellow at the Duke-UNC Rotary Center and had my class on negotiation, mediation and international conflict management. We had to present a case study on how to mediate an international conflict, and I picked the 2009-2010 gas transit and price dispute between Ukraine and Russia which led to severe energy shortage that impacted several countries in Europe, with millions of Europeans facing heating scarcity during a freezing winter. As I was learning details about the K12 peace curriculum, I couldn’t stop but think “Hmm…..perhaps it would have been useful at the time to have some basic knowledge of peace from my school years, it would have made me be more creative in approaching my case study”.
Learning about peace from a young age has positive impact on both students and teachers. For children, it improves their wellbeing, development, and outcomes, and increases their knowledge and ability to adapt and, eventually, turning them into conscious global citizens. For teachers, it prepared them to teach children’s skills to learn more effectively and make classroom more interesting and manageable. But perhaps the most important aspect is that it helps children learn how to manage their emotions and identify their strengths and weaknesses.
At the Q&A session, Matthew Schneider, who is one of the creators of the peace plan and a teacher using the curriculum, spoke about the feedback from the students regarding this class. “Students are extremely interested in peace and are eager to learn more about this topic. They actively engage in discussions, sharing how they apply the knowledge they learn in class in their families and communities”, Matthew said. Many participants showed interest in how this peace plan could be scaled up. A curriculum piloted in a handful of schools is a beginning, but awareness is what turns a beginning into a movement. Introducing such peace classes in places facing war or in fragility contexts where children suffer because of the realities of conflict, is even more important precisely to have them learn about peace and understanding. Education for All Alliance has already thought about it, and the next step is to pilot the curriculum in war and conflict affected areas, such as the Middle East or Ukraine.
I left the session with many thoughts going on in my mind. I was thinking about the child who learns, before she learns to read, that their feelings deserve a name and that other people's feelings deserve attention. About the youth who discover before casting their first vote, that their convictions can be held firmly without silencing the convictions of others. All these cumulative effects of intentional, developmentally trained moments contribute to shaping the adult that enters a community and a world that desperately needs people capable of listening and supporting, building rather than destroying. To all this, peace is not secondary, nor symbolic, but fundamental.
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“Building Understanding, and Sustaining Peace: An Interdisciplinary Curriculum Plan” by Education for All Alliance
Designed by
Dr. Lucijan Jovic, Ed.D.
Michael Castiglia, M.S., Ed.D.
Matthew Schneider, M.A.
Dr. Rose Cardarelli, Ed.D.
