Historians often ignore the day-to-day struggles of ordinary people to improve their lives. They tend to focus on the accomplishments of illustrious leaders. Peace Education from the Grassroots tells the stories of concerned citizens, teachers, and grassroots peace activists who have struggled to counteract high levels of violence by teaching about the sources for violence and strategies for peace. The stories told here come from the grass roots meaning the educators are close to the forms of violence they are addressing. This collection of essays tells how citizens at the grassroots level developed peace education initiatives in thirteen different nations (Belgium, Canada, El Salvador, Germany, India, Jamaica, Japan, Mexico, the Philippines, South Korea, Spain, Uganda, and the United States). A fourteenth article describes the efforts of the International Red Cross to implement a human rights curriculum to teachers on the ground in the Balkans, Iran, Senegal, and the United Sates. These chapters describe a variety of schools, colleges, peace movement organizations, community-based organizations, and international nongovernmental organizations engaged in peace education.

This book seeks to address several questions about the emergence, present state, and future of the field of peace education, and to ground the definition of the discipline in its origins - origins set in both formal institutions and informal movements. These origins are vital in imparting identity, and in nurturing the growth of both the academic discipline and the worldwide peace movement - a combination that can unify, fuel, and inspire dialogue among scholars, researchers, activists, educators, government leaders, and all individuals committed to creating cultures of peace throughout the world. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Peace Education.

This volume addresses the role and importance of education for processes of transitional justice. In the aftermath of conflict and mass violence, education has been one of the tools with which societies have sought to achieve positive transformation. While education has the potential to trigger, maintain, and exacerbate conflict, it has also been designed to promote a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the past and to advance reconciliation, peacebuilding, and prevention. The original contributions in the book reflect on lessons learned from education policies of the past in post-conflict societies and seek innovative, sustainable, and context-sensitive grassroots approaches, designed to advocate critical thinking, values of inclusion and tolerance, and ultimately a culture of peace.

Again and again social change movements--on matter s from the environment to women's rights--have been run by middle-class leaders. But in order to make real progress toward economic and social change, poor people--those most affected by social problems--must be the ones to speak up and lead. It can be done. Linda Stout herself grew up in poverty in rural North Carolina and went on to found one of this country's most successful and innovative grassroots organizations, the Piedmont Peace Project. Working for peace, jobs, health care, and basic social services in North Carolina's conservative Piedmont region, the project has attracted national attention for its success in drawing leadership from within a working-class community, actively encouraging diversity, and empowering people who have never had a voice in policy decisions to speak up for their own interests. The Piedmont Peace Project demonstrates that new ways of organizing can really work. Bridging the Class Divide tells the inspiring story of Linda Stout's life as the daughter of a tenant farmer, as a self-taught activist, and as a leader in the progressive movement. It also gives practical lessons on how to build real working relationships between people of different income levels, races, and genders. This book will inspire and enrich anyone who works for change in our society.

Over the past five decades, both peace education and human rights education have emerged distinctly and separately as global fields of scholarship and practice. Promoted through multiple efforts (the United Nations, civil society, grassroots educators), both of these fields consider content, processes, and educational structures that seek to dismantle various forms of violence, as well as move towards cultures of peace, justice and human rights. Educating for Peace and Human Rights Education introduces students and educators to the challenges and possibilities of implementing peace and human rights education in diverse global sites. The book untangles the core concepts that define both fields, unpacking their histories and conceptual foundations, and presents models and key research findings to help consider their intersections, convergences, and divergences. Including an annotated bibliography, the book sets forth a comprehensive research agenda, allowing emerging and seasoned scholars the opportunity to situate their research in conversation with the global fields of peace and human rights education.

Practice and research of peace education has grown in the recent years as shown by a steadily increasing number of publications, programs, events, and funding mechanisms. The oft-cited point of departure for the peace education community is the belief in education as a valuable tool for decreasing the use of violence in conflict and for building cultures of positive peace hallmarked by just and equitable structures. Educators and organizations implementing peace education activities and programming, however, often lack the tools and capacities for evaluation and thus pay scant regard to this step in program management. Reasons for this inattention are related to the perceived urgency to prioritize new and more action in the context of scarce financial and human resources, notwithstanding violence or conflict; the lack of skills and time to indulge in a thorough evaluative strategy; and the absence of institutional incentives and support. Evaluation is often demand-driven by donors who emphasize accounting given the current context of international development assistance and budget cuts. Program evaluation is considered an added burden to already over-tasked programmers who are unaware of the incentives and of assessment techniques. Peace education practitioners are typically faced with forcing evaluation frameworks, techniques, and norms standardized for traditional education programs and venues. Together, these conditions create an unfavorable environment in which evaluation becomes under-valued, de-prioritized, and mythologized for its laboriousness. This volume serves three inter-related objectives. First, it offers a critical reflection on theoretical and methodological issues regarding evaluation applied to peace education interventions and programming. The overarching questions of the nature of peace and the principles guiding peace education, as well as governing theories and assumptions of change, transformation, and complexity are explored. Second, the volume investigates existing quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods evaluation practices of peace educators in order to identify what needs related to evaluation persist among practitioners. Promising practices are presented from peace education programming in different settings (formal and non-formal education), within various groups (e.g. children, youth, police, journalists) and among diverse cultural contexts. Finally, the volume proposes ideas of evaluation, novel techniques for experimentation, and creative adaptation of tools from related fields, in order to offer pragmatic and philosophical substance to peace educators’ “next moves” and inspire the agenda for continued exploration and innovation. The authors come from variety of fields including education, peace and conflict studies, educational evaluation, development studies, comparative education, economics, and psychology.

Many judgments regarding what is good or bad, possible or impossible, rely upon unspoken assumptions or frameworks which are used to view and evaluate events and actions. Philosophers uncover these hidden aspects of thoughts and judgments, scrutinizing them for soundness, validity, and fairness. These assumptions and frameworks permeate the topics of violence, nonviolence, war, conflict, and reconciliation; and these assumptions influence how we address these problems and issues. The papers in this volume explore what kind of assumptions and frameworks would be needed in order for people to see nonviolence as a sensible approach to contemporary problems. Topics include conceptions of positive peace, nonviolence and international structures, and perspectives on peace education. Contributors are Elizabeth N. Agnew, Andrew Fitz-Gibbon, William C. Gay, Ronald J. Glossop, Ian M. Harris, John Kultgen, Joseph C. Kunkel, Douglas Lewis, Danielle Poe and Harry van der Linden.