Steven Brion-Meisels
Director, Peace Games Institute
and founding member of the Center for Peaceable Schools and Communities (Lesley University)
“Where, after all, do human rights begin? In small places, close to home, so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world….Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere.” Eleanor Roosevelt
At a time when much of the world is destabilized by war or the prospect of it, peace education has local and global importance for all of us – especially for children, who are often the victims of interpersonal and institutional violence, and who carry with them our collective hopes for a world free from war. Broad public support for peace education requires effective evaluation that addresses the current demand for evidence-based data, but also communicates the complex, social and human heart of peacemaking. Like other human rights work, peace education begins in small places, close to home – and so must our efforts to evaluate it.
Challenges
Interpersonal violence grabs headlines, with its clear and often tragic consequences. The same is true in schools, where policies and interventions often focus on bullying, harassment, assault, weapons and homicide. Although equally damaging, institutional violence is often more hidden. (William Sloane Coffin used to talk about poverty as “violence in slow motion.”) But there is also good news: hang out in a school for a week and you’ll see many examples of peacemaking by children and adults– often unrecognized, in small corners of the playground, lunchroom, classroom or hallway.
Interpersonal violence is easy to recognize and measure: count the fights, chart suspensions, research court records, watch prime time TV. In a nation that often responds with punishment rather than prevention, violence counts and it frightens us. Peacemaking is different: it is harder to measure, is largely discounted, and is often taken for granted. How do we document and communicate changes in children’s peacemaking? How do we evaluate program outcomes? How do we honor both evidence-based data and our own experience as parents, educators and neighbors?
Principles and strategies
Fortunately, a growing community of researchers and practitioners has begun to identify principles and strategies for evaluating peace education in the context of broad research interests. Some projects are grounded in a century of developmental theory, and more recently in the Search Institute’s research on developmental assets. The Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL) and the Center for Social Emotional Education (CSEE) draw from Social Emotional Learning frameworks; their efforts have generated state standards that can help evaluate programs. Other projects are grounded in social justice, anti-oppression and cooperative learning frameworks. International evaluation efforts integrate demographic, developmental and popular-education frameworks. The three projects share core principles and strategies:
Three snapshots
To suggest some concrete strategies, I focus on three projects that have helped shape my own thinking about peacemaking, peace education and evaluation. They are by no means exhaustive – and they build on work by many colleagues, past and present.
Peace education with young children and adolescents
Inspired by the work of Dr. Francelia Butler, Peace Games was founded by students at Harvard College in 1992. Incorporated in 1996, we now work with more than 7,000 students annually in four cities, and support educators on five continents. During a three-year partnership, Peace Games works with schools to teach peacemaking through weekly classes and service learning projects, support teachers and family members, recruit and coordinate young adult volunteers, and promote a peaceful school climate. Our program and evaluation involve four core peacemaking constructs: communication, cooperation, conflict resolution and civic engagement. Our evaluation strategies include large-scale annual student and staff surveys (with strong reliability scores), student interviews grounded in developmental frameworks, and observational data. Outcome studies over the past 6 years have helped us measure changes in children’s peacemaking knowledge, attitudes, skills and behavior. For example, 66% of students reported that they have learned to include others in their groups, and 71% said they can walk away from a fight without feeling like a coward. Interviews provide delightful and insightful data from children themselves – who reflect eloquently on what we have come to call “the struggle to be a peacemaker.” For example, one student recounted his personal journey from bully to peacemaker:
“You’ll never believe it, but [he paused] I decided to be a peacemaker… all the time. I’m a helper now. I work hard not getting mad and I try to make the school a better place….When you share, you’re glad for what you done because it makes other people happy.”
And one teacher told us, “I feel that sometimes we as adults don’t think the kids are as capable as they are of making decisions on their own. But they are so capable and it is really cool to see when they work together.”
Peace and justice education with adults
For the past 15 years, colleagues from the greater Boston area have worked to develop and implement a holistic approach to peace and justice education. Supported by Lesley University, we have worked with hundreds of educators and community workers to integrate personal and institutional strategies: starting with the self, we explore the roots of violence and peacemaking so that we can identify democratic strategies that support a transformative approach to programs and leadership for peace with justice. Our conversations with schools and school leaders have identified changes in school policies, instructional strategies, discipline, classroom curricula, professional development, school-family relations and teacher training. Because evidence-based evaluation in a school context is complex, we continue to seek new ways to document and evaluate these outcomes in ways that suggest causal links.
International peace and disarmament education
The United Nations and the Hague Appeal for Peace recently completed a three-year project on disarmament and peace education, focused on communities in Albania, Cambodia, Niger and Peru – all nations that had recently suffered from large-scale civil violence. The evaluation project integrated surveys, interviews and demographic data to document reductions in the reliance on small weapons, policy changes that promote peace education, and positive changes in behavior and community attitudes toward violence. The project and its evaluation measures were all grounded in holistic, democratic, participatory and resource-focused strategies. In Colombia, Peace Games has begun to integrate quantitative and qualitative measures to evaluate the outcomes of peace education in rural and urban schools across the country.
Next steps
These projects, and others like them, suggest some fruitful approaches to the evaluation of peace education. First, we need to identify clear, concrete constructs that encompass knowledge, skills, attitudes and relations. Second, we need to develop, test and refine evaluation strategies that integrate quantitative and qualitative tools within a clear theoretical framework. Third, we need to stay connected -- to children and their communities, to colleagues across traditional professional and political boundaries, to the roots of our commitments as well as the need for evidence-based approaches. Finally, we need to write, teach, communicate, advocate – and support the next generation of peace researchers as well as peacemakers.