Tabletops for Peace: Technology Enhanced Peacemaking in School Contexts

Introduction Promoting peace or educating for peace in school contexts through the means of technology is a topic we rarely see addressed. Although technology has been extensively employed to improve instructional design, development and delivery of instructional content, and access to information, its potential to foster peace within educational interventions is relatively unexplored (Veletsianos & Eliadou, 2009; Buckner & Kim, 2011). Veletsianos and Eliadou (2009) conducted a systematic review of research on the use of technology in educational initiatives to promote peace and peace-related outcomes. Their exhaustive search resulted in only 37 relevant works in the period 1990-2009 out of which only five presented empirical evaluations of technology-infused interventions aimed at promoting peace outcomes (the remaining included theoretical papers or descriptions of technology-infused interventions without empirical data). The focus of these 37 efforts, revolved around the use of the Internet technologies mediating long-distance collaboration, in particular: (i) virtual learning environments to host learning activities related to peace, (ii) Web 2.0 technologies (blogs, wikis, social networks and video sharing sites), Email, and video conferencing to promote communication and collaboration among people of diverse backgrounds, and (iii) serious games or MMORPGs to promote exposure to diverse populations and social interaction, such as the PeaceMaker game (Burak, Keylor, & Sweeney, 2005) which simulates the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and engages dyads in negotiating peace (Veletsianos & Eliadou, 2009). Building on Veletsianos and Eliadou (2009) and further reviewing literature from 2009 to 2015, we argue that empirical work on technology-enhanced peace interventions in educational contexts continues to be very limited and sporadic. Internet-based interventions dominate any efforts, for example using mobile devices to share narratives of digital stories with a broader community (Buckner & Kim, 2011) or learning about conflict management through simulations and games (Brynen & Milante, 2013; Gehlbach et al., 2008). Collocated technology-enhanced peacemaking educational interventions are virtually non-existent in the literature. We set the present work on the basis that schools can be conflict-stressed environments where peacemaking actions are needed, yet very little work in this area has taken advantage of the current educational innovations. We seek to investigate the mediating and supportive role of multitouch interactive tables (tabletops) in shaping relationships and reducing conflict among students, recognizing the potential of this technology to redefine collocated collaboration and communication. We further consider physicality and collocation to be important factors in peacemaking efforts, especially in cases where language barriers to effective communication exist. The study took place in a conflict- stressed school environment where increased incidents of violence and delinquency existed (including verbal and physical conflict and bullying). The leading research question of the study was: Do tabletops provide a means for communication and collaboration, enabling students in conflict to share a common space, perhaps breaking down barriers? Given the lack of research in the area, we consider this work timely and relevant, while serving an important purpose. Mutlitouch interactive tables Tabletops are large horizontal displays that enable interaction by multiple concurrent users. They are relatively new technology, being commercially available only since 2009 with the introduction of MS Surface. Despite this, there is substantial research around them. Tabletops have attracted the attention of designers of formal (Dillenbourg & Evans, 2011; Higgins, Mercier, Burd & Hatch, 2011) and informal (Davis et al., 2015) learning experiences as highly supportive systems for collaboration and interaction. …