Teaching Peace When Students Don't Know (About) War

This paper examines the challenge of engaging upper division political science students in participatory learning about peace and conflict resolution. Every other year, a Politics of Peace class (upper division, geared towards seniors but without formal prerequisites, enrollment capped at 48 students) is offered as part of the political science department’s international relations/comparative politics offerings. While a clear interest in the class exists (always oversubscribed with students asking to be added to waiting list), past experience has shown that teaching peace and conflict resolution can face a double challenge. The first problem deals with a small knowledge base. Many students are drawn to the idea of studying peace but have very little understanding of the majority of the world’s conflicts. When examples are mentioned in class or in the readings in order to illustrate a particular approach to conflict resolution, class time can be taken up with histories of specific conflicts often leaving much less time to focus on the approaches to their resolution because of a basic lack of knowledge about international developments. In other words, there is a danger that a peace and conflict resolution class turns into a survey class of the world’s conflicts. The second challenge is pedagogical. To fully understand, appreciate and internalize the nature of peace studies, it is helpful to provide the students with a learning environment that challenges existing power relations including those traditionally found in academia. A critical approach to pedagogy, especially one that borrows from Paolo Freire seems to lend itself quite naturally to the teaching of peace and conflict resolution. By moving from what Freire called a banking to a problem-posing concept of education, students and teacher are much freer to engage with the study of peace and conflict resolution. However, when students and/or teacher/facilitator are very used to the banking concept, this approach to learning can be disconcerting and combined with the students’ lack of understanding of global developments can be experienced as sometimes frustrating and possibly off-putting rather than as engaging. The challenge then is to develop a teaching model that overcomes both the knowledge gap and allows students to explore the study of peace and conflict in a manner that can facilitate their full engagement. In this paper I offer an overview of a range of teaching techniques designed to address this two-fold challenge. I will discuss a variety of assessment and participation techniques through which the students are encouraged to both learn specific content and the practice of conflict resolution. Because I experienced the two-fold challenge outlined above when I first taught the course in the spring 2010 semester, the following account will first explain how the class was taught then before explaining the changes that I implemented as a way of overcoming those obstacles. The learning techniques used range from small break-out group as well as large group discussions; written analyses of track I and track II diplomacy, student presentations and, a conflict mediation simulation. I added this last component to the syllabus based on student demand for the inclusion of conflict resolution skills into the syllabus and because I hoped it might help in working both on strengthening the students’ knowledge base and add a valuable experiential learning component. This semester’s experience will thus add an interesting test case to see whether the actual experience of a short mediation exercise adds to the students’ learning experience and to their understanding of the complexity involved in learning about peace and conflict. While student feed-back has shown that students want to move beyond the traditional lecture format and are actively calling on innovation in teaching, there are nonetheless a number of limitations that still need to be addressed. I conclude by offering some recommendations as to how these might be overcome.