Learning communities for peace

In light of the current context in Europe – the influx of refugees, threats associated with terrorism and radicalisation, structural inequality, dysfunctional integration policies, divisions in post-war societies – traditional approaches to peace education and conflict transformation seemed to fall short of proposing adequate strategies for confronting rising tensions and fear of difference in schools and their surrounding communities. The Learning Communities for Peace project was conceived as a European project involving 6 partners working alongside each other in different realities sharing the same overall goal and principles, improving relationships and bolstering togetherness within school communities taking a bottom-up approach. It sought to shift the trend away from thinking in terms of universal, pan-European solutions, to acknowledge the uniqueness of each school context and to embrace the belief that ownership is crucial. Instead of offering universal solutions, we chose to support an open-ended process with the school leading the way, building on the wisdom present in their community. This meant that the overall goal was redefined locally to correspond to the lived reality in each setting. We benefited from the exchange of unique experiences and expertise to better understand which conditions need to be fulfilled to build an LCP, acknowledging the ability of schools and teachers to create the change that is so urgently needed. The partners offered a combination of experience in peace education and community building, and in research and higher education. The overall project coordinator, the Department of Education and Special Education of the University of Gothenburg (Sweden), was supported in their coordination task by the Evens Foundation (Belgium), a public-benefit foundation. The Center for Peace, Nonviolence and Human Rights Osijek (Croatia) has carried out post-conflict educational work in schools and communities. CREA (Spain) describes itself as a ‘Centre of Research in Theories and Practices that Overcome Inequalities’, while Place Identity Clusters (Greece) focuses on citizen participation. Finally, ARC – Alternative Resolution to Conflict (UK), a private company, has experience in school and community mediation. The project was launched in November 2016, with the first partners’ meeting in Gothenburg, and lasted until 31 August 2019. The project had five phases. In phase 1, a Joint Staff Training was organized for the partners in order to create community. During this week, we educated each other and got to know each partner’s competences. In addition, we could discussed the project and the concepts used. This training contributed very much to the positive outcome of the project. In phase 2, the 4 operational partners were tasked to identify a primary school to join the project as pilot schools. In total, 5 schools were identified (1 in Croatia, 1 in Greece, 1 in Sweden and 2 in the UK). Delegates of the schools attended a two-day European training, European Learning Communities for Peace Lab which gave the opportunity for partners to introduce the LCP approach, explain action research methodology and offer the schools a platform for sharing, thus creating a European Community of Practice. In phase 3, the schools worked with the respective operational partners to implement an action research cycle including: 1) reflection, 2) action plan, 3) actions, 4) observation and data collection, and 5) interpretation. This operational phase, which lasted a school year on average, was monitored by researchers from the University of Cambridge. In phase 4, the partners summarised the project learnings from the action research projects and the evaluation into four concrete intellectual outputs (action research reports, impact evaluation report, workshop and toolkit). Finally, the project results and outputs were disseminated to local, regional, national and European stakeholders to motivate other schools to become a Learning Community for PeaceThe country reports showed that the action research took the operational partners and schools along different pathways. All actors involved acknowledged that the systematic and cyclical approach of reflecting, planning, acting and observing helped to structure their work. Different actions were implemented and observed, to see if improvement occurred. Even when there were no obvious improvements at first sight, the impact evaluations showed that several could be detected. All schools greatly appreciated the role of the project partners as facilitators, critical friend and external observers. We were in this together: reflecting, planning, acting and observing. This process of searching turned out to be the major strength of the LCP approach.