The Peaceable Teaching and Learning Process
The Peaceable Teaching and Learning Process
Three phases
- Cognitive: the thinking phase, learning the ideas and facts.
- Active: taking practical action in the community.
- Affective: being concerned, responding, and valuing.
Why teach peace
To reduce social injustice, reject violence, and work toward the end of war.
Peaceful alternatives
Disarmament, non-violence and conflict resolution, transformation, prevention, human rights, human solidarity, and democratization.
Learning peace is not only about knowing facts. It moves through three phases that carry a student from ideas, to action, to genuine care. A person can pass a test on peace and still do nothing with it, so the process is built to reach past the head.
Three Phases of Learning Peace
The peaceable process moves in three stages. Each one does something the others cannot.
| Phase | What happens |
|---|---|
| Cognitive | The thinking stage: learning the ideas, facts, and information about peace |
| Active | Taking practical action in your neighborhood or community |
| Affective | Being concerned, responding, and valuing: caring about the people a conflict affects |
The cognitive phase gives a student the knowledge. The active phase asks them to prove it outside the classroom, showing that peace can actually work where they live. The affective phase is about feeling: when a conflict happens, a peace-minded person is concerned for the people caught in it, not only for themselves. In a connected world, something happening far away still touches lives elsewhere, so that concern reaches wide.
A student has finished studying how conflicts start, then organizes a neighborhood meeting to help two families settle a long dispute.
Which phase of the peaceable process is the student in?
Each phase feeds the next: knowledge gives a student something to act on, and acting on it is what turns knowledge into genuine care.
Cognitive, active, and affective.
Cognitive is the thinking stage, learning the ideas. Active is taking practical action. Affective is being concerned, responding, and valuing the people a conflict affects.
Why Schools Teach Peace
Peace education has clear purposes. It works to reduce social injustice: the gap between those who have and those who have not, spread across a society’s ladder. It works to reject violence, settling disagreements by talking rather than fighting. And it works toward the end of war, since disputes handled through dialogue and mediation need not become armed conflict.
What Peace Education Draws On
Behind the practice sits a body of knowledge. It starts with a holistic idea of peace: the whole picture of a planet living peacefully wherever people are. It includes the causes of conflict and of violence, and it treats these as two different questions. Why a disagreement arises is not the same as why it turns violent, and telling them apart shapes how you respond.
From there, peace education offers a set of peaceful alternatives to reach for instead of force:
- Disarmament, giving up weapons rather than building more
- Non-violence and practical conflict resolution
- Transformation and prevention of conflict
- Human rights and human solidarity
- Democratization, since peace and democracy both rest on people
The last piece is development based on justice, which is another name for sustainable development. When people see that what happens around them is fair, they are less likely to slide into conflict.
Two neighbors are in a bitter dispute over a shared wall. A respected third person steps in and helps them talk it through to an agreement.
Which peaceful alternative does this show?
Choosing the right response depends on a prior question, since a plain disagreement and a fight that is turning violent do not share the same cause.
Because they are different questions.
Why a disagreement arises is not the same as why it turns violent. Conflict is normal and can be resolved; violence is only one possible result, so understanding each helps you respond well.
A dispute rooted in unfairness calls for justice-based development, while one flaring in the moment calls for conflict resolution.
Disarmament, conflict resolution, and human rights.
The fuller set also includes non-violence, transformation and prevention, human solidarity, democratization, and development based on justice.
Of those alternatives, development based on justice reaches furthest, tying a lasting peace to whether people are treated fairly.
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