Peace Education Doha 2024

The conclusion of the classes. Spending a Saturday stuck in a lecture was never ideal, but, as with most things in life, you have to make peace with what you can't control.  Some very thought-provoking ideas were shared in today's session. The most notable and by far my favorite idea was that of the Willing and Able decision-making framework. By factoring in these two options, a variety of situations can be easily solved and dealt with quickly. We used a four-block diagram to label the decision-making process. A learner could be willing or not and able or not. By combining these two options in different manners, an option about the desired outcome of the interaction would be presented.  To me, the biggest headscratcher was the idea of an Able and Unwilling learner. The outcomes were either to encourage or to enforce consequences. Now, we all know that consequences come in all forms and sizes, and we as educators try our best to administer them sparsely. So to hear an...

I think I finally found the reason why management is so obsessed with the idea of keeping the learning objective nailed to the wall for all students to see. I've always been against it. I teach year 2 and the learning objectives are too hard to read for them or so basic that they don't need to be presented. Well, I was wrong.  Each day we were presented with slides with information that seemed to deal with a variety of topics and they were scattered far and wide. Some are close to each other and the relationship can be easily seen. The presence of a goal or objective in the presentations would have been so beneficial to the course. Well, I think I finally found them, they were in the course Syllabus and when reviewing it, it all linked together.  So back to the purpose of today's assignment.  Our resource share was sprinkled with lots of good examples and activities that we could use in the classroom. The most effective activity was a group-based one where the purpose of ...

So, for my daily peace action, I made peace with the fact that the resources won't be shared and I'll take notes of what is said. Should I have continued to fight for access to information? Why stir the pot for someone who has made up their mind about a topic only to anger yourself in the process.  I thought going into the class, peace goal achieved. All was forgiven and notes were taken. An activity was done where we had to categorise our social identity awarenesses and how from what we see as important and how we perceive others to see us. An interesting discussion came about during the sharing of our findings. I stated that I like to mess around with my socio-economic identity whenever I can. To appear as poor as I can when conducting professional activities in my personal life (Going to the bank, buying cars, getting finance etc.). My goal is always to surprise others with biases. My privilege suddenly became very real when a fellow South African of colour stated that they ...

Coming to class today, I thought about my deliberate peace action for the day, trying not to get worked up if I don't finish all my planned activities for the day. The problem was that I could not recollect what I had dreamt up the previous night. Upon opening my laptop in class, I realised that yes, I didn't finish all the lessons I had planned. It was yet another day with a setback that was not planned. But, recounting the morning, I realised that I had achieved the goal I set out for and I was not annoyed by it in the least.  We started with a discussion of Technical vs Adaptive problem-solving. It came up as part of what power grants to you. Thinking about this in class, I was puzzled by the two distinctions. Every possible problem I could think of was adaptive. Every possible solution was technical. There was a direct address to a problem that arose. Fixing a toilet is a problem, yes, but it also has to be adaptive. Unclogging it might be short-term (technical), but it wil...

In class today, we had the assignment of choosing 3 peace quotes and discussing the quotes we chose. From these three, we had to agree on what our definition of peace would be.  My three quotes were:  “A people free to choose will always choose peace.” — Bernice Johnson Reagon “Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.” — Desmond Tutu “Peace is a willingness to question all your own abilities, your knowledge, to become humble”. -Loris Malaguzzi I chose these three as they all interlinked for me. A free people will not choose to go to war. Free people have the opportunity to be humble and act in kindness.  To me, the combination of our quotes meant very little. We took the key phrases of the quotes we chose and muddled them together for a definition. We came up with more jargon than was necessary and I thought it was too long to be an effective definition. This brought me back to my first day in class wh...

 Today's topic of the violence triangle struck a cord upon discussing it within our group. We dissected the topic of assessments and parent influence on teachers with these assessments. It became clear that our group all had similar interactions with certain communities regarding assessment results. There would be a cultural expectation that the learners need to have good grades no matter the outcome. After much intervention from the parents to meet this expectation, a structural shift would occur within the school to accommodate the expectations of the parents. This could by either inflating the marks of the students or simplifying the assessments so that students can achieve higher grades. The structural changes to the system are all put in place when the ones who can stop it have no protection from cultural violence. This in turn leads back to direct violence against the teachers for yes, yet again students not achieving the coveted 100% grade.  Upon concluding our discussi...

Growing up, I didn't really receive any messages about peace except one memorable interaction with my father around my teenage years. He was a World War 2 History Buff and told me that if I’d ever get conscripted or called up for duty in war, he’d go to the ends of the earth to help me escape. He told me that I had no place dying on a field somewhere for no reason. To me, peace was only used as the opposite of war. Personal peace was not a concept. Being born in South Africa at the height of the Apartheid regime, as a white male I knew nothing but a sheltered life of peace. My parents voted for a government to keep the majority of the nation restricted from access to all government, social, and economic activities. To an 8-year-old white boy, when Nelson Mandela and the ANC got voted into power this meant very little. I was completely isolated from these events and only after 1994, I started noticing some new faces joining our school. Thinking back now, the perspective change for t...