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education in and for conflict Youth Coordination Unit 1 & " $ & ).4%2.!4)/.!, $%#!$% &/2 ! #5,452% /& 0%!#% !.$ ./. 6)/,%.#% &/2 4(% #(),$2%. /& 4(% 7/2,$ * 4 * / 0 6 3 ) " / % 4 UNESCO Chair on peace and human rights 1 Over the last few years, education for peace (EP) has increasingly been focu- sing on the theme of education in and for non-violent conflict resolution. There are various reasons for this. On the one hand, other sectors and NGOs have been doing important work on some of the corollaries to this theme (co-education, education for development, ecology, etc.). On the other hand, the theme itself is one of the more specific ones that give concrete value to EP , and one from which ground-breaking contributions may be expec- ted because of its focus on non-violence. Furthermore, it is a departure from the more inner-directed lines of thought in EP , which consider peace a condi- tion of contentment with oneself, an absence of war or conflict. Even though, latterly, outright violence is being rejected as a model, alter- native ways of dealing with conflict are unavailable. As a result, in spite of this rejection, violence is still the way conflicts are being dealt with, except where - still a much more common occurrence - other, equally negative attitudes are adopted, such as submission or evasion. EP is now going to throw out a challenge: to provide education in and for conflict. Concretely, this challenge will be taken up in such important areas as: education in and for conflict Paco Cascón Soriano Member of the Seminario de Educación para la Paz [Seminar on Education for Peace] of the Asociación Pro-Derechos Humanos [Human Rights Association] 2 taking a positive view of conflict. Seeing it as a way of transforming society and human relations and making them fairer. Discovering that conflict is an educational opportunity, an opportunity to learn to forge another type of relationship, a way of preparing ourselves for life, learning to assert and enforce our rights in a non-violent manner. learning to analyse conflicts and discovering their complexity. Giving guidelines to teaching staff, parents and students alike so that they have the tools to help them confront and resolve the conflicts that arise in our daily lives. finding solutions that will enable us to confront conflict without violence, without destroying one of the parties, and give us the strength we need to ensure that all of us win and can satisfy our needs. Developing non- violent aggressiveness, assertiveness, and discovering the basis of our own power and others’: these are just a few of the avenues to be explored. Educating for conflict means learning to analyse and resolve conflicts both at the micro level (interpersonal conflicts in our personal surroundings: classroom, home, neighbourhood, etc.) and at the macro level (social and international conflicts, among others). In the new century, learning to resolve conflicts in a just and non-violent way is a big challenge, and one that educators for peace cannot shirk, nor would we wish to. A positive view of conflict There is a very widespread idea that conflict is something negative, and therefore something to be avoided. This idea is probably based on a number of considerations: we think of the way in which we have usually seen conflict being confronted or “resolved”: violence, annihilation or destruction of one of the parties to the conflict rather than a fair and mutually satisfactory outcome. From the very earliest age, the models that we have seen - children’s television programmes, games, films and stories - all point in that same direction. everyone knows that confronting a conflict means investing a lot of energy and time and undergoing an experience that is not particularly pleasant. ✒ ✒ ✒ ✒ ✒ 3 most of us (including educators) feel that we have not been educated to confront conflicts in a positive way and that we therefore lack the tools and resources to do so. In the curricula of education science faculties, such topics as conflict resolution are nowhere to be seen. we have a great resistance to change. Even when things are not going well and we can see it clearly, very often we prefer to let things ride rather than accepting the risk that would be involved in a process of transformation. Nonetheless, conflict is inseparable from human relations. We interact with other persons, with whom we are bound to have differences of opinion and whose interests and needs will often be opposed to our own. Also, conflict is inescapable, and however tightly we close our eyes to it or avoid it, its own dynamic will continue. It is a living thing that will run its course even though we flee from it, becoming ever bigger and more unmanageable. However, we see conflict as positive. Many reasons could be given for this, but we shall emphasize only the following: diversity and difference are valuable in themselves. We live in one single world but one in which plurality and diversity, in the context of cooperation or solidarity, are a source of growth and mutual enrichment. Living this diversity implies differences of opinion, disputes and conflicts. without coming into conflict with unjust structures and/or the people that uphold them, society cannot advance and adopt new paradigms. In other words, conflict is the main lever of social change, something that we, as educators for peace, should consider to be one of our basic objectives. conflict is an opportunity to learn. If conflict is something inherent in human relations, learning to act upon conflict has to be equally fundamental. If, instead of avoiding conflict or struggling against it, we talked about it openly with the children, we could turn conflict into an opportunity for them to learn how to analyse and confront it. Resolving conflict on their own will not only cause them to take pleasure in agreement, it will give them a greater capacity to resolve other conflicts in the future. The challenge facing us will be how to learn to confront and resolve conflicts in a constructive, non-violent way. This means understanding what conflict is and knowing all its aspects, as well as how to develop ✒ ✒ ✒ ✒ ✒ 4 attitudes and strategies to resolve it. By “resolving” conflicts, rather than simply managing them, we mean the process by which we deal with them and even arrive at an understanding and resolution of their underlying causes. However, the resolution of one conflict does not mean that no more will arise. As long as we are alive, interacting and growing, conflicts will keep on cropping up and will give us opportunities to advance or fall back, depending on how we confront and resolve them. For that reason, we as educators for peace see conflict as something positive and inescapable that must be the centre of our work. Therefore, we shall work with the conflicts that daily arise closest to us (interpersonal, intergroup, etc.) in what we call microanalysis, and conflicts of greater scope (social, sectarian, international) in what we shall call macroanalysis. With smaller children, we shall confine ourselves mainly to the sphere of microanalysis, i.e. interpersonal relations, while in higler grades, without neglecting this aspect, we shall increasingly deal with social and international conflicts. The main objective is not to have teachers learn to resolve students’ conflicts, but to work with them so that they can learn to resolve their conflicts on their own, making such resolution not only a goal in itself, but also a learning experience for other situations that they will encounter in daily life. Conflict vs. violence There is a tendency to confuse or consider synonymous the terms conflict and violence. Thus, any expression of violence is thought of as conflict, while the absence of violence is considered a conflict-free situation or even peace. From our point of view, however, a situation is defined as conflictual not on the basis of its outward appearance, but according to its content and its deeper causes. The first basic idea is that not every dispute or difference of opinion implies conflict. These are typical situations of daily life in which there is some contention between parties but no basically antagonistic interests or needs. In almost every case, resolving them is a matter of establishing levels of connection and effective channels of communication that will allow a consensus or compromise to be reached. 5 We shall speak of conflict in those situations involving a dispute or difference of opinion in which there is a clash of (tangible) interests, needs and/or values. We shall define such a clash of interests as a problem: satisfying one party’s needs prevents the other party’s from being met. On the basis of this definition, we can differentiate two situations that may be confused with real conflict: pseudo-conflicts and latent conflicts. With pseudo-conflicts, although there may be the appearance of a quarrel, there is not really a problem as previously defined, even though the parties involved may believe uploads/Management/ education-in-and-for-conflict 1 .pdf
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- Publié le Jan 02, 2023
- Catégorie Management
- Langue French
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