Thank you very much, everyone, for the day so far and thanks to the elbow for the invitation to be here.
Andre invited me to come and talk for 15 minutes about peace education, which is a very daunting task, even when it came through in the email.
And then I got the programme and saw that John Paul literati would be introducing the day,
and he wrote a book Ebtekar Kerala Pass in 1984, which raises a number of the tensions that I'm going to discuss today.
And I think that's an interesting point that we're still discussing many things that have
been in the literature since John Paul wrote that book since Paolo Ferri wrote before him.
Since Antonio Brown, she wrote before him,
So many of the tensions that I'm going to raise in this presentation are things that those of you interested in education
and many every met all of us who've been through some form of education have probably encountered and thought about.
So that's an interesting reflection for us, I guess, around the ways in which we're still talking about and not moving past some of these tensions.
So thinking about how to fill this 15 minutes in this daunting task,
I thought I would really reflect upon this question about who builds peace and these and the
prompting that the conference has asked us to do around relationships at international,
national, regional and local levels. So starting with the international, there's a really strong conviction,
and this is just epitomised by the quote that we see here from former secretary
general Kofi Annan that education has a crucial role to play in building peace.
There's an assumption and a conviction and a certainty, in fact, that education does build peace.
And we hear this time and time again, despite the fact that there's not necessarily convincing evidence of that.
This is the case, particularly looking at formal education, and we mentioned the Ukraine situation earlier,
and there's enormously high levels of education in both Russia and Ukraine formal education.
So this conviction that going through some form of formal education will necessarily be peacebuilding.
It's one that we need to be critical of, I think.
Nonetheless, there's been huge effort, particularly this century, to generate resources for and build evidence around this conviction.
And we've talked a lot about peacebuilding actors at the conference so far.
There's also been a lot of work in education from development and humanitarian actors.
So I'll try to briefly outline the contours of this conviction at international level.
So in the international development sector, education has long been seen as central from both economic understandings of of development,
and that education builds human capital and from human rights understandings of development in that education is innate and enabling right.
That helps us to then access other rights via becoming educated people and conflict within international
development understandings is understood as development in reverse to borrow a World Bank term,
and therefore its restoration is seen as an important peace dividend in the reconstruction after conflict again to use World Bank language.
Since the turn of the century, the excuse me,
protracted nature of conflict and ensuing displacement has required humanitarian actors also to expand their remits into education.
So education is now considered a fourth pillar of humanitarian response alongside food and water, health and shelter.
And this means that humanitarian actors are now involved in providing education, as well as providing other forms of humanitarian assistance.
So we see that education squarely a part of international response to conflict by both development and humanitarian actors.
Development actors have concentrated on expanding access to education and improving its quality,
including within the Sustainable Development Goals agenda,
where Target four point seven explicitly includes the provision of education to build a culture of peace and non-violence,
which is a first for these education and school related agendas to explicitly include peace education within the goal targets.
Humanitarian actors, like I said, have become provide education providers, delivering education in refugee and displacement situations,
and also increasingly developing strategies for longer term responses, including the integration of displaced learners international systems.
Now critics, including those concerned with peace and peace education.
I'm looking at Hillary, who sat here and her colleagues are here.
Another daunting part of my responsibility, given the expertise in the room.
But critics concerned with peace education have argued that these development approaches
have promoted and expanded a universalised approach to education that's more
concerned with getting children's bums on the seats and instrumental learning outcomes
than with relevant and culturally sustained forms of learning and humanitarian.
The introduction of humanitarian actors into the education field adds additional challenges because they've raised the
challenges for them of introducing education work and working with what they describe as a political thing which education,
of course, inevitably is. But humanitarian actors find that working in education compromises their neutrality,
and therefore they can't discuss things like how historical narratives are taught.
In fact, it's easier to not teach history whatsoever in order to maintain this concern with humanitarian neutrality.
So in in general, there's questions around these ideas of neutrality and detachment from politics and humanitarian work.
But then trying to maintain that sort of false,
arguably commitment to neutrality and politicisation in the education sector raises additional challenges, especially for peace education.
And this means sorry. Now I've gone off my notes.
Where are we? So taken together,
we've got this universalism universalist approach to what education is and what it looks like and how
it's delivered and what the important things that learners should take from it are plus a commitment,
in some cases, to neutrality in its delivery. This means that discussions of peace beyond the most generalised understandings are often impossible
in education situations in international approaches to teaching about peace and conflict.
So this is evident, this kind of very toned down and neutral and content free,
almost understanding of peace is evident in lots of the internationally produced materials, and I thought a couple of examples up here.
So we see peace education when included in these kind of interventions, which it often isn't.
But when included, it tends to focus on human rights knowledge, on attitudinal change, on individual level skills.
And it's very conceptualised in terms of the locus of change on the individual learner as a detached autonomous person whose
attitudes will generate peace if those attitudes can be shaped in this universalist understanding of human rights education.
So we really see that individual learner in their psychology as the locus of change
and the place where peace is built without an attention to conflict analysis,
to contextual specificity or to structural change.
So that's a brief picture of this kind of level of international commitment, which is very strong and striking,
but has these tensions which, as I mentioned, have been highlighted for a long time.
When we move beyond commitments and convictions and goals at the international level,
however, it becomes clear how implicated education is with conflict and violence,
and therefore how important attention to conflict analysis,
structural change and contextual dynamics are to the processes and prospects of meaningful peace education.
So on this slide, we thought a smaller photo of a group of Palestinian students and their teacher,
and they're holding their lesson not in their school,
but at a checkpoint, because they were denied the possibility to pass the checkpoint on that particular day and get to their school.
The other photo is from a beautiful series by Colombian photographer Juan Manuel.
Excuse me, Juan Manuel Echevarria called Silencio, and it's one of a series of photographs of schools,
empty schools and communities displaced by armed conflict, and there's a whole series in their stunning photos.
So both of these examples, I think, are really evocative demonstrations of the ways that children and young people learn about conflict and peace,
not from those universalised descriptions of what human rights are,
but from their own encounters and lived experience with conflict and peace and the ways in
which violence enter their schools and their classrooms and their daily lived experience.
So through very direct forms of violence like we see in these slides and also through normalised forms
of structural and cultural violence that can shape the kinds of schools that they're able to access,
who they do and do not encounter in their classrooms.
It was really striking when we heard from Brandon earlier that it's still 93 percent of children, and I think it was ninety three, was it?
Yeah. Of students in Northern Ireland who are still learning in segregated schools, according to their faith groups.
So this a chance or not chance to encounter others in school is really important, I think.
And the kinds of knowledge and histories that are included and excluded from their curricula at school.
So just highlighting the ways in which schooling transmits both direct and indirect or structural cultural forms of
violence that young people learn about and encounter and either have tools or don't have tools to make sense of things,
at least in part to whether or not there some form of peace education that can offer those tools.
So a precooked to borrow a term from friend and anthropologist Jason Hart,
who's done a lot of work with Palestinian young people and who is the person who's giving me this photo.
He so, he says a pre-cooked approach to peace education curriculum is really unlikely to help children make
sense of these experiences or to provide them with a sense of their potential roles and explaining them.
And as Rula, a Palestinian girl who spoke to Jason about her experiences crossing checkpoints to get to school, said they talk about child rights.
They don't see our situation. So this leaves a critically oriented researcher interested in peace education pointing
to these tensions and challenges that have been pointed to for decades within a system,
and I think this has been an interesting theme throughout today as well, our roles within a system that we're connected to and also complicit with.
We've talked a lot about Connexions and relations and webs, but less about complicity within networks of geopolitics like Andre was pointing us to.
So I think there's interesting reflections for those of us who inhabit more international roles, maybe particularly there.
But yes, so the critical researcher is left pointing to tensions as calibrated as we already mentioned decades ago,
and calling for the kind of radical transformations of education systems that we've not regularly witnessed.
So I wonder sometimes, for example, if in Colombia there were an attention to structural change,
structural reform of an education system that has huge inequalities between urban and rural in terms of the outcomes of education
and the opportunities that are delivered and really great socioeconomic segregation in terms of private of public schooling.
What if that kind of transformation were one of the institutions of a peace process?
But these kind of radical transformations of whole education systems are not common.
So calling for those also offers a frustrated suggestion to the teacher who's trying to deliver
and make a difference and really committed to delivering peace education to their students.
So and to peace to practitioners who are committed to the potential of education to be to build peace,
which is certainly a real potential despite the challenges and tensions that we've raised.
So I've had this. Amazing opportunity recently to try to move beyond that paralysis of pointing out a lot of problems,
calling for radical change that is needed but hard to see happening,
to try to do something that I think echoes with some of what Jonathan was saying around transferring resources and
supporting educators who are starting from a point of analysis of those tensions and then trying to offer something that.
Develops peace, education and creative ways.
So this is a project with colleagues initially started with colleagues in Colombia, Cambodia, Pakistan and Uganda and now expanded to 18 countries.
That takes these tensions in peace education as a starting point, transfers resources in this case from the United Kingdom re what's it called?
Research Institutes Global Challenges Research Fund to educators and activists who are delivering peace education approaches that start from there.
Seeing the situation of their learners that Rouleau was talking about before the student that I quoted from Palestine.
So seeing the situation and then trying to develop some kind of approach to peace,
education and the project, it's called the Education, Justice and Memory Network.
We have the privilege of having two million pounds to work with on this project over four years, which again is not a long enough time frame.
But in research, funding world is also longer than we often have, and it includes working with colleagues here in the UK,
which I think is really important to say and was a real challenge for our funders who want one minutes.
That's perfect. I can do it.
You want this money to be transferred to places that have problems with conflict, which is not the United Kingdom in their opinion.
But we've managed to push back against that and work with colleagues in the UK who
are addressing the complete absence of peace education in our education system here.
Despite many divisions and inequalities and injustices, so we are working to develop creative approaches to peace education, as I said,
and they include a clear focus on understanding past violence and injustice experienced by learners and their forbearers,
and and exploring those legacies in the present.
And because I have one minute,
let me just really quickly highlight three things we're just beginning to try to think about how we synthesise this work.
But one important thing to say is that most not all, but many of the projects are not working formally in schools.
Some of them are conceptualising their work as directly about repairing the damage
that formal schools have done to the young people that they're working with.
Sad to say interestingly, well, they don't reject the the label of peace education entirely.
Peace is not one of the most frequent words that they use when describing their methodologies and goals.
So they talk about healing, repairing, redressing, decolonising, unravelling, remembering storytelling and co-creating, et cetera, et cetera.
And these are perhaps. Steps towards peace or perhaps priorities that are the most important at this moment for this work.
And finally, in the same way that universalised approaches fail to see the situations of violence
direct and indirect that shape learners understandings of peace and conflict.
They also fail to see the daily encounters with peace in the ways that young
people are building peace in their daily interactions and their relationships,
their feelings and their dreams. And so these projects are working to sustain those daily peace interactions, to amplify them and to learn.
So that's.