Service Learning: Making Peacemaking Real

Spring means that Peace Games classes shift from teaching the skills of peacemaking to helping students put peacemaking into action. Peacemaker Projects are service learning projects that are developed and implemented by the students, with some help and guidance from their teachers. After four lessons to explore the concept of service and community, students begin the process of figuring out who to help and how. Here, then, is the story of one project.


I. Who Needs Help?

When we ask the second graders if there are people in their community that need, somewhat ambiguously, "help," we expect the usual cascade of well-meaning but somewhat recycled cliches (the poor, the homeless, maybe a police officer or fire fighter; all of them good and worthwhile suggestions). Instead, the class zeroes in on a pretty simple concept: people who feel sad.

Well, that could mean a lot of people, at least some of the time. Who are some people who might feel sad? we ask. One girl raises her hand and says, "Sick children?"

Indeed, we agreed children who are sick might feel sad. And then another child volunteers that she had a cousin who was sick and that, actually, her cousin had been in the hospital. It was a comment that helped her make a personal connection to the conversation - and it seemed to generate a more generalized empathy. After all, we all know what it's like not to feel well, even if we haven't stayed in a hospital.

Hmmm, so what could we do, we ask, to help a sick child in the hospital feel better?

"Give them medicine?" one boy says. "Or chicken soup," another adds. "Give them my toys?" offers a boy sitting at the front. "Play video games!" calls another, seemingly spurred by the reference to toys, which generates a lot of suggestions that we go play all kinds games with them. "Let them come to my house?" one girl suggests, earnestly but with a little hesitation since she hasn't cleared this with her mother. "Visit them," says a boy, with a tone of obviousness, surprised that he hasn't thought of this, "and bring them flowers," he adds. At this, another girl suggests bringing balloons, which gets a lot of support and nods of agreement. Side conversations start up about how nice it is to get balloons and about a time that they'd received balloons.

The more we talk, the more the suggestions come. All of them are written down. Eventually, the conversation starts to resemble one that we had earlier in the year, when we'd talked about how to support a friend when they can see that they're either upset or angry. That conversation had centered a lot on how you can make someone smile or laugh, even when they might not feel like it. We make an oblique reference to this, and sure enough someone offers, "Make them laugh! Tell them jokes!" It's added to the list.

Once we have a long list, we say that we should try to figure out what might be possible. We point out that we probably can't give medicine to the children in the hospital - the nurses and doctors probably want to do this, we say, and get agreement. We also say that it might be hard to go visit, especially if some children are really sick, but we don't know for sure. We rephrase some of the other suggestions: collecting and giving toys to a hospital, balloons (of course), making cards.

All of these are good, but what about the joke-telling suggestion. I'm drawn to it and its possibilities, but stuck on the fact that it would be hard to write a stand-up routine and bring it to a pediatric ward. If we can't go to them, how could we send the jokes in our place?

And then it comes to me, a joke book. It might be too much, but I suggest it, and it gets enough agreement to be added.

And with that, we take the list and summarize what we know about our Peacemaker Project so far: we are going to do something to help children in the hospital, children who are sick and who might feel sad. We don't know how yet, but we have a lot of good ideas. And next week, we'll try to find one that works.

We end the class, of course, with a game.

...to be continued.

See other posts in this series:

• Part II: Building Authentic Community Connections
• Part III: Creating Community Change
• Part IV: Finishing and Reflecting
  

When The Teacher's Away

In the season of flus, family vacations, and fearless weather-related commuting, substitute teachers tend to get some extra work. That was the case last week in my Peace Games class.

Given all of the variables that a substitute teacher introduces into a classroom - new routines, unknown names or personalities, a lesson plan that may be too much or not nearly enough - the day can quickly descend into six hours of crowd control. It was certainly the case when I was in school and not much has changed in the years since. I'm used to this, and so when the students were a little rowdier than usual I took it in stride. I saw it as an opportunity to let some of their true selves rise to the surface. I saw that Caroline is the not-so-subtle leader - the real "Queen Bee" - in this class, as she gathered friends around her and excluded others. I tried to console Lebron through his suddenly unpredictable mood swings, as he went from coloring quietly to tossing his marker across the room to nursing his bruised ego. And I couldn't help but see that Zhade stayed remarkably calm through all of the chaos. I just tried to take it all in and make it a learning experience, more for me than for them but I thought that was pretty good considering. I mean, we got through a lesson plan and no one was seriously injured, egos aside, so I called that a success.

My co-teacher, a graduate student originally from Eastern Europe, saw the scene very differently. She was mortified. And when I told her that it was really pretty good in comparison to some I'd seen, she was in shock. I wondered whether maybe I'd just become immune - or worse, insensitive. The more people she spoke to, however, the more normalized it seemed to become: this is just the way things are, at least in this country. She seemed disinclined to settle for this oversimplification, and her perspective got me thinking a little bit about substitute teachers and what they inspire.

I picked over in my head some of the more memorable substitute teachers I'd had in my lifetime and some of the things that we'd done to them, and it occured to me: being a student in a substitute teacher's classroom is quite possibly the closest I've ever come to being in a mob. It really was like a mob mentality. I remembered one day with particular horror. I think it was fifth grade and by the end of the day students were literally lifting their desks and chairs over their head and carrying them out of the building. They wanted to sit outside, they explained, and out they went. And meanwhile, inside, it was a free-for-all - running, falling over each other, scribbling on each other's notebooks, using colored chalk on the board - and I was right in there. And it's not like we didn't know how to behave - or didn't expect to be reprimanded as severely as we were (and as we surely deserved to be) - but it felt out of our hands. We were looking for leadership, and when we couldn't find it at the front of the classroom (from this poor woman who'd never been to our class, who didn't know the first thing about us, who was wholly ill-equipped for what we threw her way, both literally and figuratively) we looked to each other. The loud voices rose to the top, by their words and their actions, and pretty soon we were all maurauding with the best of them. A righteous, directionless mob of 10 year-olds.

In the aftermath - the day after - we took a real verbal thrashing from our teacher (who, in fairness to us, had been very transparent about her "Irish temper" on the first day of school, so we really should've known better). I'd never seen her so mad. And when she asked - no, demanded - that we explain ourselves, there wasn't one person who could do it adequately. After all, what excuses could we give? There were none. We couldn't understand what we'd done. It was as if we had been in a trance - or at least, that's how I felt.

So, what to do. After all, despite best intentions and hopes to the contrary, most every teacher needs to take a sick day once in awhile - and it's in these situations that we, as the adults, look to students to be the leaders. And there's no question that this is exactly what they become. The question is, what kind of leadership will they show? The true test determinant in whether we have prepared them adequately to be peacemakers is what happens when a fight breaks out and no adult is there to be the deterrent or arbitrator. What instincts win out in a vacuum?

Of course, our class last week was just one mile marker on the road to peacemaking. It wasn't the worst case scenario, but when we were confronted with conflicts we tended to juggle them rather than manage them. It's what most teachers do all day long, out of necessity. Because of that - and because a week has passed and because I'd become acclimated to craziness around substitute teachers, unlike my co-teacher - I'd been inclined just to let it all go, to go in next week and leave the "baggage" at the door and start over. It's not an entirely bad idea, necessarily, but it lacks a little creativity and a lot of courage.

It takes courage to confront conflict and be willing to acknowledge it, to say unambiguously, There was a problem here and here's how it made me feel. It's a not-so-tacit way of saying that actions have reactions and consequences, and it uses a real and non-abstract example. It doesn't need to be finger-wagging and scolding, but if done well and to the point it could create a new set of expectations for the next time we're on our own, expectations rooted not just in "rules" but in relationships.

And that, really, is at the heart of this peacemaking thing.

From Kindergarten to the Campaign Trail

I remember writing a "short story" in fifth grade, in which I was the President of the United States. As I recall, the plot was either unconventional or uninteresting, depending on your point of view: I stopped at a McDonald's and wound up being mobbed by the adoring crowds before sneaking back to the White House with tattered clothes and a half-eaten cheeseburger. Another report came out this week that suggests that my story - or even the remote possibility that my teacher, Ms. McNamee, remembers reading it - may come back to haunt me, should I ever decide to run for public office.

Kids, be careful what you write about wanting to be president. Those refrigerator gems are now fair game. As reported in the Chicago Tribune this weekend, the rhetoric between Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama has turned into something resembling a recess spat. This weekend, Clinton's campaign issued a press release that cited these alarming anecdotes:

• In third grade, Senator Obama wrote an essay titled 'I Want To Be a President.' His third grade teacher: Fermina Katarina Sinaga "asked her class to write an essay titled 'My dream: What I want to be in the future.' Senator Obama wrote 'I want to be a President,' she said." [The Los Angeles Times, 3/15/07]

• In kindergarten, Senator Obama wrote an essay titled 'I Want to Become President.’ "Iis Darmawan, 63, Senator Obama's kindergarten teacher, remembers him as an exceptionally tall and curly haired child who quickly picked up the local language and had sharp math skills. He wrote an essay titled, 'I Want To Become President,' the teacher said." [AP, 1/25/07 ]

They were part of her rebuttal to Obama's claims that, unlike himself, "others" in the field have been priming their careers and angling for the presidency for decades. Sure showed him, I'd say.

This new strategy notwithstanding, I have no regrets about that fifth grade story. I've since become a vegetarian, tend to shun suit-wearing whenever possible, and feel okay with not being president - but there is something affirming about having been able, encouraged even, to write a story like that. In fact, I'd suspect that Little Hillary has a few of these in her past, too. They are hallmarks of hopeful childhoods that have had at least some modicum of encouragement, whether that be from a family member or from someone like either Ms. Darmawan or Ms. Sinaga (in Obama's past) or Ms. McNamee (in mine).

Enseñando La Paz en Colombia

"[Peace Games] changed the way I look at my students."

- first grade teacher, Norte de Santander, Colombia

Those who attended the Second Annual Peace Games Network Conference this past June are already acquainted with Juegos de Paz.

Peace Games in Colombia has its roots in relationships, happy accidents, and the uncompromising commitment of some brave and thoughtful individuals. In 2002, a young Colombian woman studying English in Boston walked into our offices and asked if she could be an intern. Thankfully, our Director of the Peace Games Institute, Steven Brion-Meisels, had the foresight to say yes. This young woman taught a weekly Peace Games class at the Kenny School in Dorchester and did some rudimentary translation work.

Her name is Silvia Diazgranados Ferráns.

When Silvia returned to Colombia, she began working with former guerrilla soldiers, helping them to reintegrate into society. At about this same time, the new administration in Colombia launched a drive to create national citizenship competencies and invited colleagues from around the world to present at the First National Forum on Citizenship Education in Bogotá in October 2004, including Silvia and our own Steven Brion-Meisels.

The citizenship competencies that were developed as a result of the forum were thorough, thoughtful, and a reflection of the collective wisdom and commitment of their authors. The comptencies were organized in three strands: convivencia en paz (living together in peace), participación democratica (democratic participation), and pluralidad (plurality or diversity). That peace is a central tenet of their citizenship education is surely a reflection of a culture in which more than 20,000 people still lose their lives to homicide each year, but it also reflects a deep and abiding commitment to peacemaking that perhaps only those who have lived with war can appreciate.

Putting Peace Games to the Test
Attending the forum were teachers from the rural department of Norte de Santander, an expansive province in the northeastern part of the country and a "hot zone" for paramilitary activity. The local Department of Education in Norte de Santander had received money from the World Bank to pilot programs aimed toward teaching the new citizenship standards, and they asked if they could use a portion of the funding to teach Peace Games - in Spanish, Juegos de Paz.

What made Peace Games in Colombia possible was Silvia's unassailable drive to have the curriculum translated, published, and adapted for Colombian schools. Almost single-handedly, she brought people together who could make it possible: Steven and other Peace Games staff, representatives from the Ministry of Education, and the founder and publisher of Magisterio, a non-profit publishing company based in Bogotá. When an agreement was made, Silvia and her mother immediately began translating the curriculum. She enlisted an incredibly gifted painter and family friend (Elvira Rico Grillo, who taught herself how to use new graphics design software specifically for the project) to provide the original illustrations. And she wrote new Colombia-specific material, compiled new booklists pertinent for Latin America, and personally oversaw the layout and final proofs of all eight books (one book each for kindergarten through fifth grade, one for our community service learning curriculum, and the games book).

With the books available, the Ministry of Education enlisted Silvia and a team she assembled from Universidad de Los Andes to administer a pilot program for Juegos de Paz. The pilot would be six months long and would enlist five "educative centers," including three escuelas nuevas. Escuelas nuevas are schools adapted for a rural setting. They have a central administration building and several remote classrooms that operate as one-room schoolhouses.

With the schools chosen, the pilot began in January 2006. A team of three trainers from Peace Games in the United States and the Los Andes team met in Bogotá and traveled to Bochalema, a small town in Norte de Santander, where they spent five days training 45 teachers and administrators. Following the training, teachers spent four months teaching the Peace Games curriculum, including Peacemaker Projects - mostly in 90-minute blocks. At the conclusion of the pilot, the entire group reconvened in Bochalema in June 2006 to evaluate and celebrate their work.

Drawing on pre- and post-surveys as well as interviews with teachers, students, and administrators, the Los Andes team wrote an exhaustive 80-page report on the pilot and submitted it to the Ministry of Education, which determined that "Juegos de Paz" was a viable and compelling program for Colombia. But perhaps more compelling than the report were the words of one of the teachers who took aside one of the U.S. trainers at the conclusion of the second training and said, "You're helping to bring peace to my country."

Continuing to Grow
At the June 2006 training in Bochalema, teachers and administrators at each school agreed enthusiastically that they wanted to continue using Peace Games - and in fact that they wanted to expand the reach of Peace Games in their communities. In the summer of 2007, the teachers' cooperative in Norte de Santander, in partnership with the Los Andes team from the pilot, applied for and received funding from the European Union Laboratorio de Paz to bring Peace Games to additional schools and to build a local network of Peace Games schools. Thanks to this support, Peace Games is now being taught in six additional schools in Norte de Santander, bringing the total of sites to 23.

In addition, funding from the Interamerican Development Bank is going to be used to implement and evaluate seven programs for teaching citzenship in medium-sized cities in Colombia. Peace Games is one of only two international programs chosen and will most likely be taught in schools in Barrancabermeja, a city in central Colombia, beginning in January 2009. This project will be led by Freddy Velandia, a former social studies teacher working on the competencias ciudadanas program at the Ministry and who attended the Peace Games National Conference in June 2007.

Another important way that Peace Games continues to reach committed educators is through Magisterio, which has to date sold more than 5,000 copies of its Colección Juegos de Paz books throughout Colombia, including 300 sets to the Department of Education in Bogotá (as well as Peru, Argentina, Venezuela, and who knows where else).

Beyond these projects, the future of "Juegos de Paz" is still being forged. In many ways, it continues in much the same way that it began: it remains rooted in relationships. Silvia, Lina, Berta, and Marcela - the Los Andes team that has managed the pilot and the Peace Lab work - continues to respond to requests for Peace Games on our behalf. Alfredo and his family at Magisterio continues to cultivate relationships with schools buying the curriculum. And allies at the Ministry continue to be strong supporters committed to making sure that Peace Games is "more than a set of books on a shelf."

Moose, Elephant, What?

It's hard to learn cooperative games just by reading about them. For a lot of us, especially us experiential learners, we need to see or play a game in order for us to be able to play it with others.

Two years ago, thanks to the help of two undergraduate students at Emerson College, Peace Games gathered middle school students from the Tobin School and spent an afternoon playing and debriefing games. Now the full video - in five parts - is available on YouTube.

Here's Part Three:

Standing Still and Learning to Be Astonished

I feel like I've been moving too fast - and there are too many astonishing things that happen everyday. And as a former English teacher - and on-going poetry junkie - I found some comfort and inspiration in this poem from one of Mary Oliver's most recent collections. Mary Oliver is perhaps one of this country's greatest treasures, and while she appears to write most often about the natural world I always find fodder in her words for my more cerebral self.

Messenger
by Mary Oliver

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.

Getting to the "Us": Peacemaking in the Inclusive Classroom

I remember the "resource room" stigma.

In my elementary school, it was the five or six students who used to be taught in what were essentially closets, who used to eat at a separate table in the cafeteria with their teachers, who seemed completely in their element with each other but who when one of them would board my school bus in the afternoon seemed suddenly isolated and ostracized (probably because she was, probably because we ostracized her). My reaction to my classmates then seemed one of contradictions: I remember feeling occasionally envious of their bond with each other but never so envious that I wanted to befriend them myself. I never really felt able to be friends with them; I felt like I had too much not in common, that we were fundamentally different. Mostly, I regarded them with curiosity, when I regarded them at all.

The more I write, the more troubled I am that I keep using one word: them. That I saw a Them at all is really where the problem lies. I mean, I'm not naive enough to think that we should be "colorblind" to differences between students, but I am struck by how institutions can reinforce and stigmatize differences. (After some thought, I am comforted - or at least, less shamed - that I can at least remember one name: Dolly. She was the girl who rode my bus and who would join us for gym but nothing else. Better to have names instead of them's. It's the meagerest but most tangible sign of respect.)

And all of this was eight years after Congress passed what would become known as Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the landmark law that sought to ensure that all children with disabilities have access to free and appropriate public education in the "least restrictive environment," legalese that means that students should be educated in a regular classroom with their peers whenever possible.

It wasn't until this week that I took three steps back far enough to notice just how much things have changed in the decades since Dolly and I shared a twice-a-day bus ride. While students are still occasionally pulled out for special services, these days the majority of the 6.3 million students enrolled in special education - more than half of whom have learning disabilities - learn alongside their peers in inclusion classrooms.

I am teaching Peace Games this year in an "inclusion school." More than half of the students have IEP's. The class size is smaller than I'm used to. Each grade has the help of a paraprofessional - and I'm told that additional reading and "inclusion specialists" are available to work one-on-one or in small groups with students. On the surface, it's a very welcoming, very promising, very hopeful place. The hallways are colorful. The teachers are skilled. And the students are charming.

I suspect that it won't stray that far from most schools I've been lucky enough to see these last five years, but I am suddenly more tuned into what it will mean to teach, talk about, and practice peacemaking in an "inclusive" environment. I look back on my own experience, and I am struck by just how much subtle, unconscious exclusion I was a party to and how much of it was because students whose disabilities would be considered mild were separated from me. And how prone I was to misunderstanding them, to judging them "different" or "less than," as a result. There was never a chance that we might be friends - or even friendly, for that matter.

Early elementary school is prime ground for children's social development. And friendship - what it means, how it shifts, how it gets mended - is at the vanguard of peacemaking for an eight year-old. That all of the students will share the same space may not be the solution, but it's an essential step in the right direction.

At least with all of the students sharing the same classroom, we can rightfully call ourselves "us."