UWCSEA WHITE PAPER 1 September 2021 EDUCATING FOR UWCSEA’sPEACE:Mission for future peacebuilders
Teaching and Learning, UWCSEA Dover
Ellie Alchin, Director of
“Peace education is what we do and how we do it, not just what students learn.”
UWCSEA MISSION COMPETENCY: PEACEBUILDING
Peacebuilding means students possess a competency in building peace in both local and global contexts.
In one his earliest speeches, titled Education and Peace: The Foundations of Modern Society, Hahn explicitly outlined his vision for the way education can be designed to help increase understanding between people of different cultures and backgrounds.2 “Nothing but goodwill between nations and classes can save this generation from wars and revolutions. And education can help to build this bedrock of goodwill as a foundation of the society to be,” he Sincesaid.its
One of Kurt Hahn’s aims when he conceived of Atlantic College, the first of the 18 United World College (UWC) schools and colleges in the now-global Movement, was to foster greater peace in the world. As a German educator who was profoundly impacted by the First and Second World Wars, his experiences helped shape his vision for a school that “fosters world citizenship; an interconnected leadership of people who have experienced a collective life of active dialogue and peacemaking service.”1
Extracted from UWCSEA Guiding Statements 2021 UWCSEA Mission Competencies
Competencies.3Amissionfor peacebuilders
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founding in 1971, UWC South East Asia (UWCSEA) has placed Hahn’s philosophy at the centre of its approach. Explicitly stated in the UWC Mission, which is to make education a force to unite people, nations and cultures for peace and a sustainable future,3 peacebuilding is now identified as one of the school’s five Mission
Peacebuilding is a core Mission Competency at UWCSEA that underpins the school’s curriculum, its philosophy of learning, and its community engagement.
Broader than a single subject, UWCSEA’s peace education programme aims to instil a deep understanding of what peace is, the different ways peace can be achieved through small and large actions and to embed peace throughout a wide range of learning opportunities in the school and its community.
“Peace education is what we do and how we do it, not just what students learn,” explains Ellie Alchin, Director of Teaching and Learning at UWCSEA Dover. “Peacebuilding is not a standalone curriculum because it influences so many different areas of the school. There are elements of peace education in the Personal and Social Education curriculum, there are conceptual understandings relating to peace in the Humanities curriculum. It’s explicitly taught in Global Citizenship and Global Politics, and in IBDP and (I)GCSE History. It’s also built into our Service curriculum, and is anywhere that students learn about sustainability.”
DEFINING PEACE
At UWCSEA, peacebuilding is something that is explicitly taught and considered to be critical to the foundations of a healthy community and society. While it is an act of service, it is also recognised as a core understanding and disposition that helps people achieve peace both personally and in complex, real-world situations. Hearing the voice of youth in peacebuilding is necessary for any future global lasting peace.
2 | UWCSEA White Paper Peacebuilding1 as a competency BUILDING PEACE IN LOCAL AND GLOBAL CONTEXTS
Ellie Alchin Director of Teaching and Learning, UWCSEA Dover
The first fundamental aspect of determining how peace education is built into UWCSEA starts with a definition. This may seem a simple step, but peace can occur across many levels. There can be peace within yourself or in your family, peace within a community and, at its largest consideration, peace between countries, cultures and Peacepeoples.mayalso take many different forms in practice. Positive peace is when the attitudes, structures and institutions that underpin peace are in place and function well and a society is free of violence. Negative peace is “the absence of violence and the absence of fear and violence”, according to the Institute for Economics and Peace, a non-profit think tank. However, in this state, while a society may be free from violence, its peace structures are still fragile and lack the necessary frameworks to support it into the future. This in turn can result in a peace deficit, where the peace a society has gained can’t be sustained in the future by its internal socio-economic development and the institutions and support networks needed to maintain peaceful societies.4
At UWCSEA, students examine all potential aspects of peace, but the focus is on giving students the understanding, skills, and knowledge to help them build the structures and relationships that can help support peace into the future.
“There are lots of definitions of peace. And the most common idea is that peace is the absence of war, that idea of negative peace. But I would say that when we think about peace at UWC, and when we talk about peace education, we’re really talking about positive peace,” says Alchin. “The most common idea is that peace is the absence of war, that idea of negative peace. But when we think about peace at UWC, and when we talk about peace education, we’re really talking about positive peace.”
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT EndPEOPLEpoverty and
PEACEFosterpeaceful,
UWCSEA’s programme is designed to link to the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). Peace is one of the Five P’s that the UN uses to conceptualise sustainable development, together with People, Planet, Prosperity and Partnership. More specifically, UN SDG 16 is to “promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.”
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ProtectPLANETourplanet’snaturalresourcesandclimateforfuturegenerations harmonyandPROSPERITYEnsureprosperousfullfillinglivesinwithnature PARTNERSHIPImplementtheagendathroughasolidglobalpartnership UWCSEA Five
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As a pillar of the school’s educational philosophy, this broader understanding of the concepts of peace helps guide the teaching approach across the different year groups, including Primary, Middle and High Schools, and enables peacebuilding to be woven into many different subject areas in all grades. It also ensures that peace education is interlinked with other the Mission Competencies, such as Sustainable Development, and Interpersonal and Intercultural Understanding. hunger all forms and ensure dignity equality just and inclusive societies P’s Framework Modified from United Nations Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals
LINKING WITH GLOBAL CONCEPTS
• GLOBAL PEACE • Internationalconflict • htuoYsastnegafoegnahcycacovdadna • Peacebuilding •INTERPERSONAL PEACE• Relationships • secnereffidfoecnapeccAt•noitaicerppalarutluC • HumanRights • PERSONAL PEACE • ytIdenti • gnieblleW•enerawafleSss Modified from Crawford and Shelit (2012) for UNICEF UWCSEA rings of Peacebuilding From definition to practice
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The first concept, forming the inner core of the peacebuilding rings, is personal peace, which starts with the ideas and concepts of identity, including an understanding of who a student is, their cultural self and a sense of self awareness.
The next ring is the concept of inter-personal peace. This relates to inter-personal relationships and the acceptance of differences, including an ability to appreciate different cultures and perspectives, so that people know how to interact with each other and can understand each other’s different ideas of community peace.
Starting from K1, these concepts guide curriculum development and each student’s experience of the Learning Programme throughout their time at the school.
The third and outer ring is the concept of global peace, which includes resolution of international and intercultural conflicts, the role of youth as agents of change and advocacy, and peacebuilding in the wider global sense, including how we build the systems and structures that might lead to a more peaceful future.
The definitions of peace have an important impact on the way that peacebuilding is incorporated into the UWCSEA curriculum, according to Alchin. The programme begins with the definitions, and then explores three key layers—or rings—of building peace. These layers help shape the way that peace is taught from the Primary School through to the senior years, and they intertwine with the five elements of the Learning Programme to contribute to the development of Peacebuilding as a Mission Competency.
Strachan points to a newly developed K1 unit of study called Peace Begins with Me which introduces these concepts in an age appropriate way starting in the earliest year of school. Peacebuilding education expands to the concepts of Global Peace through the understanding of historical conflicts, through global politics and global citizenship courses, and again through the Activities and Service programmes. Students who choose to focus on peacebuilding in High School can participate in the Initiative for Peace (IfP), UWCSEA’s flagship peacebuilding education programme (refer to page 8), as well as the more widely-known Model United Nations conferences. The IfP focuses on creating conditions for development of Mission Competencies in Interpersonal and Intercultural Understanding and Sustainable Development as well as Peacebuilding.
“In order to connect with and give service to others, you have to have an understanding of yourself. It’s about looking inside ourselves and asking how we become at peace with ourselves by identifying what’s important to us and who we are.”
opportunities to develop personal and interpersonal peace in all grade levels by focusing on understanding the self, understanding others and transferring understanding across environments. Learning happens explicitly in PSE lessons, morning meetings, through mentor or advisory time and grade-level assemblies, and implicitly through one-on-one and group interactions.
these aspects of personal and interpersonal peace education apply to different parts of the Learning Programme, like Service, as explained by Andrea Strachan, K1 Head of Grade and Infant School Curriculum Coordinator at Dover Campus, “In order to connect with and give service to others, you have to have an understanding of yourself. It’s about looking inside ourselves and asking how we become at peace with ourselves by identifying what’s important to us and who we are.”
Andrea Strachan Head of K1 and Infant School DoverCoordinator,CurriculumUWCSEA
PSE helps students to develop their identities by learning to manage emotions, understand their changing bodies and develop approaches to personal challenges. They learn how to manage relationships, make decisions and communicate in a culturally diverse environment. Illustrating the interdisciplinary nature of the learning, this also supports student development in the Mission Competencies of Interpersonal and Intercultural Understanding, and Self and Community Importantly,Wellbeing.
The Personal and Social Education (PSE) element of the UWCSEA Learning Programme gives students
UWCSEA White Paper 1 | 5 FOUNDATION FOR PERSONAL AND SOCIAL EDUCATION
Definitions and appreciation of the social and legislative concepts of peace.
This is achieved by a framework that incorporates three interrelated opportunities for learning. The first is an understanding of peace, that helps students and the community appreciate that peace is not just an absence of conflict, but spans social and legislative concepts including social justice, equality, and human rights.
UWCSEA Peacebuilding: opportunities for learning PROMOTIONOFPEACE
UNDERSTANDINGOFPEACE
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PARTNERSHIPSFORPEACE
The second is the promotion of peace, which embeds peace education across all aspects of the school, from subject curricula to teacher training, through to parent interaction and community engagement. This leads to the third strand, partnerships for peace, which sees UWCSEA work with like-minded organisations in the pursuit of peace, whether that be at an intra-school level, within the Singapore community, or globally through the Service programme or the IfP.
Peacebuilding is not something that is learned overnight. It’s about a deep understanding of the concepts and skills, developing a mindset about being a constructive contributor to peace, as well as about embedding peace into the written curriculum. Peacebuilding is woven into the ethos of the school and aims to educate students and help teachers and the broader UWCSEA community grow their peace education and advocacy.
Embeds peace education across the school’s curricula, teacher training and community engagement.
Frameworks for peace education
LEVERAGING INTERRELATED OPPORTUNITIES
Working with organisations to develop partnerships to create a global network of peacemakers.
Melanie Wilson Head of High School Global Politics, UWCSEA East
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“Peace is embedded in UWCSEA’s curriculum in a lot of different ways. I have a son in Grade 5, and he has completed a unit on peace, which he really loved. And the way peace is defined at that level is not dissimilar to how we define it and look at it in the High School.
What UWCSEA is hoping to individually foster in students is that understanding and ability to be a peacemaker in a positive peace sense,” she explains.
“What UWCSEA is hoping to individually foster in students is that understanding and ability to be a peacemaker in a positive peace sense.”
Melanie Wilson, Head of Global Politics at UWCSEA East, says embedding peace into the school in this way ensures deeper learning experiences for the students. The first principles of peace are learned throughout Primary School and provide the basis for more complex learning in the High School, while the community approach ensures teachers and the community alike help reinforce the learning.
Wilson gives an example of how the UWCSEA IBDP Global Politics course looks at the theoretical foundations of peace education to understand where peace and politics intersect, and says that this also helps shape the school’s approach.
Using the background research and skills they develop in the year-long conference preparation, UWCSEA students help facilitate interaction between the delegates with the aim of developing personal harmony and increasing understanding of opposing situations among the groups. The end goal is to inspire the participants to continue with the work of reconciliation post-conference, using their new knowledge, understanding and appreciation of both sides of a conflict. Modelled on a process run in Argentina at the end of the Falklands War, the first IfP ran in 2002. Titled Initiative for Peace – Focus on Kashmir, the meeting brought participants from India and Pakistan, aged 16 to 19-years-old, to Singapore and employed trust- and team-building activities and workshops to dispel misconceptions and build understanding between the groups. The conference culminated with development of a Mission Statement and Statement of Common Ground that was the basis for the conference participants to return to their respective homes and continue to work upon building peace between the two sides by fostering greater understanding among their communities.
Peace building in action: UWCSEA’s Initiative for Peace
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Now a cornerstone of UWCSEA’s peace building programme, and a flagship experience for many High School students and teachers, the Initiative for Peace (IfP)5 began in 2001 as a means to gain experience in conflict resolution in action. Initially developed to extend an existing Peace and Conflict Seminar Series, IfP today begins with extensive planning and preparation, and culminates in a multi-day conference that brings together young people (delegates) from different sides of a conflict.
Subsequent programmes have run in Bali, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Timor Leste and Thailand, with delegate participants selected from schools, refugee camps or youth groups in the impacted communities who are already involved in peace building efforts within their country.
LONG-TERM COMMITMENT
Louie Barnett, a teacher and former facilitator of the IfP programme at UWCSEA East, says that for the UWCSEA students, the conferences are the practical culmination of a year of learning about peacebuilding while developing parallel skills in facilitation and diplomacy. IfP conferences provide students with
PRACTICAL AND PERSONAL APPLICATION
UWCSEA White Paper 1 | 9 an opportunity not only to use their skills for good but also to develop a deep understanding of the complexities involved in conflict. For the invited delegates who are hosted at the conference, it’s about further developing their existing skills while enhancing their support network, and developing new contacts, so they can further their work when they return home.
“For the participants, it’s further developing their knowledge of peacebuilding, because a lot of them are already involved in that type of work. But the most powerful part of these conferences is the connections that are made. Coming out of their home environment and making connections with UWCSEA students,” he Anishaexplains.Wilmink, a High School English teacher on the Dover Campus who graduated from UWC Atlantic before completing a Masters in Peace Education as part of her teaching degree, now helps coordinate Dover’s IfP programme. She says that the most important skill that students learn through the peace education curriculum and the conferences is to listen and really hear what people are saying, along with organisational and project management skills that come from the students having to organise all aspects of the conferences themselves.
EXTENDING THE OPPORTUNITY: UWCSEA IFP TOOLKIT
The most recent IfP development is the launch of the UWCSEA IfP Toolkit which gives educators, students and other organisations the information and tools they need to develop their own Initiative for Peace programmes or conferences that are relevant to their own specific contexts.
The comprehensive toolkit includes an overview of what the IfP programme and conferences are, including examples, an outline of how to design and implement both IfP approaches, information on supporting facilitators of the conference, and a wide range of supporting resources.
“What the school is trying to do with this toolkit is to create programmes, and systems and frameworks, which can be adapted and changed in multiple contexts. If you’re running peace education in a post conflict society, versus a conflict society, versus a society where you have the absence of conflict, each IfP should be completely different,” Wilmink adds. “So it’s about the principles, how we put them together, and how these can be transported into different contexts. It’s about sharing the frameworks for peace building, so we can build a bigger IfP community globally.”
Shared through a Creative Commons copyright license, UWCSEA’s IfP Toolkit aims to enable schools and other youth-focused organisations throughout the world to begin peace initiatives in their own communities and to create a connected global community of young peacemakers.
Learn more about IfP Access the IfP toolkit
“UWCSEA students have gone on to run IfP programmes in their own countries. They not only have the ability to talk about peace and facilitate and listen, but also the hard skills of how to organize a conference,” Wilmink says. “And I think that’s massively empowering for them to be able to do something concrete, as well as to listen. Those are the two biggest things they walk away with.”
This growth in peacebuilding learning at UWCSEA included a formal mapping of the peace education curriculum, which combined experience from existing programmes with outside research. The process included an Educating for Peace Conference run by UWCSEA that helped equip educators at the school and in the region with the knowledge and understanding they need to better teach youth peacebuilding.
The goal of this was to not only develop the teachers at the school, but also to develop a regional conversation about what peace education is and to provide resources to other organisations that may want to embark upon their own peacebuilding education.
“I think our understanding of peace education, and what it means has really evolved radically in the last five years. We have deepened our understanding of other practices and honed what we know to be powerful learning,” Alchin says of this development.
In addition to developing the UWCSEA IfP Toolkit, the College is also moving to formalise partnerships with external groups that will provide further educational and development opportunities for students and the community. This includes a partnership with Amala,6 a not-forprofit education provider founded by two UWC alumnae that provides High School certificate programmes for displaced youth and refugee communities around the world, and the Asia Peace Programme in conjunction with the Asia Research Institute7 (ARI) at the National University of Singapore.
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“This is important because it means we can articulate the programme to people. And a lot of people who think, ‘well, if I’m not learning about conflicts, am I really doing peace education?’, we’re able to say ‘yes, you are’, because even the idea of the democratic classroom, the idea of developing self, of recognising linguistic identity, and validating that—even that is peace education. We don’t think we should be teaching anything unless we can really explain and justify why it’s important.”
Building bridges
The Asia Peace Programme partnership included the establishment of a one-year UWCSEA fellowship at the ARI to focus on peace, peace building and conflict in ASEAN, and a policy essay competition for UWCSEA students, the winners of which were published by the Asia Peace Programme. Longer term, the partnership also aims to help foster a global network of like-minded institutes focused on the role of youth in Formerpeacemaking.ChairofUWCSEA
Both of Mahbubani’s children attended UWCSEA and he says the most important skills students learn through the peace education programme
FURTHERING PEACE THROUGH PARTNERSHIPS
Board of Governors, Professor Kishore Mahbubani,8 Distinguished Fellow at the ARI, is well versed in the difficulties involved in peace building. Having served as a Singaporean diplomat for 33 years prior to moving to academia, his career included time as the permanent secretary of the Singapore Foreign Ministry from 1993 to 1998 and two postings as Singapore’s Ambassador to the UN.
“Making peace is not necessarily about having a certain skill. It’s more about having a commitmentcertainto try and bridge the gaps in towhatviewdifferenttotryingwithinunderstandingpeople,andtoreachoutunderstandapointof…Andthat’sUWCSEAtriesdo.”
Professor MahbubaniKishore Distinguished Fellow, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore
UWCSEA White Paper 1 | 11 is the ability to appreciate opinions and cultures that are different to your own, and to build them into your perspective of a situation.
[1] “Kurt Hahn and the Aims of Education, Thomas James, 2000 https://www.kurthahn.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/james_final.pdf
“Making peace is not necessarily about having a certain skill. It’s more about having a certain commitment to try and bridge the gaps in understanding within people, and trying to reach out to understand a different point of view. That’s critical. And to see how you can build across those bridges. And that’s what UWCSEA tries to do. To make you aware that there are many diverse societies, diverse cultures, and that you can bridge them, and you can make friends across different communities,” he says.
[3] Guiding Statements, UWCSEA website, 2022 https://www.uwcsea.edu.sg/about/guiding-statements/uwcsea-mission-competencies
[2] Education and Peace: The Foundations of Modern Society, Kurt Hahn., March 24th, 1936 https://www.kurthahn.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/ed_peace.pdf
[4] Positive Peace Report 2020: Analysing the Factors that Sustain Peace, The Institute for Economics and Peace, 2020 https://www.economicsandpeace.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/PPR-2020web.pdf [5] Initiative for Peace https://www.uwcsea.edu.sg/our-big-ideas/educating-for-peace/ifp [6] Amala https://www.amalaeducation.org/ [7] Asia Research Institute https://ari.nus.edu.sg/ [8] Kishore Mahbubani https://mahbubani.net/
Dover Campus 1207 Dover Road, Singapore 139654 T +65 6774 2653 | E uwcsea@uwcsea.edu.sg East Campus 1 Tampines Street 73, Singapore 528704 T +65 6305 5353 | E uwcsea@uwcsea.edu.sgOOTP-2122 Scan the QR code to learn more about Educating for Peace at UWCSEA. Scan the QR code to read all the UWCSEA White Papers.