Approach and learning goals

This course is builds on strong interests within the Center in such areas as new conceptions of learning, understanding genocide, healing and reconstruction, and social capital. Many Center members are deeply concerned with the severity and spread of violent conflict throughout the world that focuses urgent attention on effective post-conflict community interventions. Many different kinds of situations have emerged, including refugee and displaced community situations, with a wide range of educational demands and implications. We believe that educational interventions are important, yet how does schooling fit within larger efforts to regenerate social support networks and community well-being? What do communities learn from conflict? What broad approaches to learning and community development might better facilitate healing, resilience, and the rebuilding of trust? Further, how can community interventions and policy initiatives account for the gendered impacts of conflict? These and other questions serve as the impetus for this course.

As primary facilitators, we have created an initial structure and sequence of topics that we believe are important in understanding learning in post-conflict situations. We hope that all participants will modify and build this course as we move through the topics. Our overall goal is to have a more fully developed course by the end of the semester - everyone's participation in that process is crucial. We understand our roles as learners in this process and facilitators of sessions, although we would be pleased if others stepped forward to take on specific topics. We will take a multi-dimensional approach to conflict and learning, with a focus on international settings, involving participants with both domestic and international interests.

Objectives

The course will provide a setting for both individual and collective learning. Individually each participant will reflect on their personal and professional experiences and interests, set their learning objectives for the course, and develop a project. The project may be done collaboratively, or with one or more other course participants. Collectively, the course objective is to examine opportunities for establishing learning environments within post-conflict situations. We will examine learning in post-conflict situations through three inter-related lenses:

• The nature, mapping and roots of social conflict:

o What is conflict? How has it evolved during the 20th and 21st centuries?
o How can we map conflict zones throughout the world?
o What are the roots of conflict? How is conflict averted, how is peace built?
o How does conflict impact individual and community capacity for learning, for development?
o What are key sources of information, research and analysis on conflict prevention and peace building?

• Opportunities and experience providing education in post-conflict areas:

o Who are key actors, cases providing education in post-conflict areas?
o What are their policies, agendas, and projects? How have these evolved?
o What can we learn from these cases to guide future policy and practice?

• Learning and Peace Building

Fundamental to the course is an appreciation of what we know about the nature and process of learning, and how, within the crisis and challenge of post conflict contexts, learning environments can be created. We are interested in environments, or in the words of Jan Visser, 'learning ecologies', that contribute to individual and community well-being and development. The focus on learning, rather than schooling, broadens our focus to explicitly include psycho-social needs, the process of healing, building trust and the reconstruction of social relationships. Using the lens of learning and peace building we will critique and build on existing and proposed educational policies, practices and programs through questions such as:

o How can an education project (in a post-conflict area) create a sense of security for members of a community?
o How can participation in project design and implementation build connection and a sense of belong among participants and learners?
o How do education activities affirm the identity and potential of learners?
o How do education activities enable learners to sharpen their comprehension of reality and meaningfulness?

Assignments

There are three course assignments:

1) An initial Reflection and Personal Project paper of 2-3 pages, with an annex that

a. Describes your personal/professional experience(s) with a conflict situation, its meaning for you, and the implications of this event(s) on education and learning;
b. Sets out your personal expectations and learning objectives for the course, describing what you hope to learn, to achieve and produce;
c. Identifies resources - websites, papers/books, institutions, cases - that you believe will be useful in pursuing your objective (this is the annex).

2) A mid-term paper of approximately 15 pages that analyses a particular project or case, providing a critique and a set of recommendations for project development.

3) A final paper, presenting your course project. This may be either an individual or collective (2 or 3 persons) activity.

Readings

There is a large and growing literature on education in post-conflict situations, much of this very recent and available through Internet. We will draw heavily on this source for the course, and this will be facilitated through the use of a course Website:
http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~educ870/PostConflict/index.htm

During the course we will be continually building this site, which now contains basic papers and texts, linked websites to organizations, universities and institutes working on conflict prevention, educational initiatives, and learning. We will also use the website to post papers arising from individual and collective work done in the course.

The newly published book, Helping Children Outgrow War, edited by CIE members Vachel Miller and Fritz Affolter, was developed from case studies used in the course, and will be distributed at our first class.

At Copy Cat, on East Pleasant St., there is a set of Collected Readings that you should purchase:

Sinclair, Margaret. 2002. Planning eduction in and after emergencies. IIEP: Fundamentals of Educational Planning, No. 73. Paris: UNESCO.

Country Indicators for Foreign Policy (cifp). From
http://www.calrton.ca/cifp.htm

Collier, Paul. 2000. Economic Causes of Civil Conflict and their Implications for Policy. Washington, D.C. The World Bank.

Bush, Kenneth D. and Saltarelli, Diana. 2000. The Two Faces of Education in Ethnic Conflict: towards a Peacebuilding Education for Children. Innocenti Research Center, Florence: UNICEF.

Kirby, Jon P. 2002. Culture-Drama and Peacebuilding: a Culture-drama Workbook. Tamale, Ghana: Tamale Institute of Cross-Cultural Studies.

Also, we will distribute a CD which contains a large number of really useful papers and references.
You will be asked to download, print and bring to class particular papers from the CD and from the Internet.