A Vision of Peace: Peace Education for Upper Secondary Education

<< Background >>Students today participate in formal education in an era of war in Europe. Schools in A Vision of Peace project come from Russia’s neighboring countries and have students from Ukrainian and Russian backgrounds. The Vision project started at the request of teachers who felt that schools can play a crucial role in furthering sustainable peace as a part of their communities but need support in developing solutions to conflicts arising in classrooms and finding constructive ways to create dialogue to address the rising radicalization and polarization of society. Students’ psychological and social well-being was a special concern for the teachers. Partners in the project saw a need for innovative and participatory peace education to develop appropriate knowledge, skills and tools for empathy and critical reflection through interdisciplinary study. Vision addressed the needs of students, teachers and schools to strengthen their capacity to respond and engage with the current geopolitical circumstances and events as active citizens with non-violent, constructive and peace-building social responses through Peace Education.<< Objectives >>The Vision project had four key objectives:O1. to identify needs and challenges with peace education in schoolsO2. to develop partners’ competence in peace education and methods in their workO3. to develop students’ competence and confidence to engage in themes of peace education as active citizens at school and community level and in civil societyO4. to produce and disseminate high-quality peace education material for upper secondary education<< Implementation >>The following activities were implemented. There were five online Transnational Project Meetings in Teams with the partners. RKI and TAPRI produced three Training of Teachers flipped learning units titled Introduction to Peace Education; Peace, Causes of War and Conflict management and Sustainable Peace October. These are video lectures with reflection questions and lesson plans. Three LTT TEACHERS seminars were held: Safer Spaces for Dialogue in Riga, Latvia; Negative Peace in Oslo, Norway; and Positive Peace in Oulu, Finland. In terms of Development of students’ competence in PE, partner schools planned and implemented PE lessons in their classrooms. Lessons were developed and co-developed as action research with students based on student feedback and teacher experiences and evaluation. Schools also implemented whole school events. Partners also arranged three Student LTTs, two online events on Critical Media Literacy and the enaction of the Model Peace Council developed in the project in Inari, Finland, for 20 students. There were also transnational activities between the schools and between the students, such as joint classes and pen pal exchange. Schools have had outside events and seminars and dissemination activities.<< Results >>RKI and TAPRI produced 3 audiovisual ToT modules. ToT1 Introduction Peace Education and 6 videos for ToT2 on Peace, Causes of War have been distributed in Vimeo. ToT3 was examples of PE lesson plans. There were 3 seminars: LTT1 in Riga, Latvia (2023),LTT2 in Oslo, Norway and LTT3 in Oulu, Finland (2024) on topics: Safer Spaces & Dialogue, CML, Indigenous and Sámi issues. All partner teachers (15) have undergone the ToTs and LTTs. Schools implemented PE from January 2024, and continue to do so. Total amount of hours are 480 in various subjects with 780 students. 8 school events were organized with 3020 participants in total. We had 2 online events on Critical Media Literacy and Model Peace Council in Inari, Finland. We produced unit Peace Education Lesson Plans for Upper Secondary Education which is available at RKI website and Moodle. We reached 175 individual teachers in partner teachers’ meetings and 370 other schools’ staff in other events. We also reached a politician, academics, 35 youth workers and 7 CSO workers, and 25 students in 2 other international projects. RKI staff of 13 people is able to use project outputs. Vision featured in 3 newspaper articles and partners disseminated outputs in networks and social media.