Bringing Peace Into the Classroom

If you have had any experience with middle schoolers, or if you remember back to your own middle school days, you know that kids can be ruthless. As a teacher, I cannot count the number of times I have heard some variation of the following phrase: “Well, he pushed me first, so I had to get him back.”

The timing of my first experience with the Institute for Sustainable Peace could not have been more perfect as I prepared to embark on my first year teaching at a middle school on the outskirts of Houston. I was invited to attend ISP’s first conference for young leaders in Colorado, and I had no idea how much I would learn about peacemaking during those two weeks. What’s more, I had only a slight idea of how relevant this knowledge would become as I stepped into the battlefields of 6th and 8th grade social studies classrooms.

During our time in Colorado, I experienced a unity I never thought possible with such a diverse group of people. Few of us had known each other before. We had life experiences ranging from Lost Boys from Sudan to well-off white Americans, and these experiences all shaped our world-perspectives. What slowly unified us over the week, though, was our common passion for making the world a better place. By the end of the week, we were able to sit together at tables and generate actual, probable steps and solutions we could each apply in our lives in order to promote sustainable peace in each of our communities.

As I sat and listened to the various accomplished speakers the Institute had brought to Colorado for the conference, it wasn’t long before I became aware of my surprising lack of conflict resolution skills. And I realized that even the conflict resolution skills I learned growing up do not complete the picture of what is necessary to promote sustainable peace. I needed my time in Colorado with ISP to get the whole picture. It has now become my hope and goal to begin to incorporate these skills into the curriculum that I teach. I went into education for many reasons, not the least of which was with the goal to educate and re-educate students about the world around them.

At the conference, my eyes were re-opened to the idea of perspective. I was reminded that all conflicts center around some sort of differing perspective on an issue. I tried to make my students aware of this concept in a simple exercise where they would pair up and each describe the same picture without their partner looking at it.  From this exercise, the students could begin to understand that we all look at things differently, and this affects our interpretation of events in the world. I gave them the bold example of the 9/11 terrorists. We discussed that while what happened is inexcusable, and the people responsible should still pay the consequences, if we just stereotype all Middle Easterners as “terrorists” without looking at the world from their perspective, we have no hope of doing any more than escalating the conflict between the “West” and the “East.”  We have to understand people’s perspectives to understand their motivations. 

There are many things that I will continue to do in my classroom to instill a community-minded mentality in my students, and there are many things that I did this year that I want to change or fix next year. The students need to hear the message of peace connected to everything we learn about. The most exciting thing, however, is that just as a fire was set ablaze in me in Colorado last Summer, hopefully, there’s now a small flame that just needs to be kindled in 130 more of my students.