Gender Toolkit: A manual for youth peace workers

This guide aims to provide flexible and context-sensitive tools for supporting awareness and gender mainstreaming in youth peacebuilding organisations. It address the challenge of how to include a “gender lens” in the planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of different projects while integrating gender issues at the structural and organisational levels. These challenges can be addressed first by acknowledging their existence and making corrective entries to the organisations’ apparatus of power, and secondly by transforming the challenges into something positive and productive.

The 69-page guide provides a short overview of internal gender mainstreaming and gender mainstreaming in project management backed up by checklists and annotated resources in every section, best practices and trouble-shooters, as well as tips, quotes and advice. An appendix provides some activity modules that will lend a hand in addressing gender issues in organisations and projects.

2010-2011 Playworks Playbook

Playworks is a non-profit organization whose mission is to improve the health and well-being of children by increasing opportunities for physical activity and safe, meaningful play. The Playbook, a 390-page pdf, provides full descriptions of games and activities appropriate for K-5 school children. They are organized in the following categories: Ice Breakers; Readiness Games; Tag Games; Cooperative Games; Core Playground Games and Sports; Core Games Modifications; and Health and Fitness – FitKid Program.

Also included is structured curriculum in Violence Prevention and Peace Promotion. The Violence Prevention materials focus on providing students with a set of foundation skills for preventing violence using a framework called the Five Fingers of Safety. The Peace Promotion materials focus on proactive measures to encourage and foster a healthy community, and can be used with a variety of student groups.

Ten Lessons for Teaching Conflict Resolution Skills

A teaching packet provided by the Fairfax County Public Schools and the Student Safety and Wellness Office consisting of 10 lessons designed to help students learn conflict resolution skills. Each activity takes about an hour to complete and is designed to be interactive. As the authors note: “These skills are important for many reasons. Not only are they essential life skills, but they also help each individual acquire and maintain relationships, help make and maintain cohesive families, and increase the probability of attaining a job through communication and collaboration skills. These are pro-social skills which, in turn, increase student achievement levels and improve student resiliency.”
Topics covered include the following.
Lesson One: Introduction to Conflict and Types of Conflict
Lesson Two: Conflict Styles and Outcomes
Lesson Three: Different Points of View, Identifying Biases and Perspectives, Prejudice Awareness
Lesson Four: Steps for Solving Your Interpersonal Conflicts
Lesson Five: Nonverbal Communication Skills
Lesson Six: Communication
Lesson Seven: Effective Questioning Techniques
Lesson Eight: How to Handle Difficult Conversations
Lesson Nine: Problem Solving and Decision Making
Lesson Ten: Building Relationships, Developing a Win-Win Outcome Through Communication and Collaboration

Beginning with the Children – A guide to creating a Peace Helpers program, grades K-2

This 73-page guide presents a field-tested, step-by-step process schools can use to train and support young students (K-2) in serving as “peace helpers” in their classrooms. After training sessions to develop their skills in listening, handling feelings, and mediating conflicts, they help their teacher establish a peace corner. Upon request they are available to work in the peace corner, listening to a student who is upset or helping two classmates talk out a conflict.

Chapter 1 of the guide describes the Peace Helpers Program at P.S. 24 in Brooklyn, NY, to provide a vision of what’s possible. Chapter 2 describes the ingredients for a successful program and a process a school planning team can use to decide whether now is the time for a Peace Helpers Program at their school. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 describe the steps for establishing and sustaining the program, including detailed agendas for workshop sessions to train the peace helpers. The Appendix has handouts for the peace helpers’ training and other aids for implementing the program.

Civil Discourse in the Classrooom

This 23-page pdf curriculum “will introduce educators to basic tools for teaching civil discourse. It is not subject-specific; on the contrary, the tools of argumentation and discussion lend themselves to any subject in any classroom. Although it is primarily designed for young adolescents, the curriculum can be adapted for students of any age.”

Evaluation report on progress made through the OSCE’s efforts to unify the Gymnasium Mostar: Summer

51-page PDF evaluation “of the unification of the Gymnasium Mostar in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), as commissioned by the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Mission to BiH … the Gymnasium Mostar was an historic and premier secondary school prior to the war of 1992-1995. It was completely destroyed during the war and had become the centre of an effort to revitalize the historic Mostar downtown. An initiative to restore the multinational and high-quality nature of the school was viewed as an opportunity to use this divided school in this divided city as a model or beacon for potential reform efforts throughout the country.”

Evaluation report on progress made through the OSCE’s efforts to unify the Gymnasium Mostar: Summer

51-page Word evaluation “of the unification of the Gymnasium Mostar in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), as commissioned by the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Mission to BiH … the Gymnasium Mostar was an historic and premier secondary school prior to the war of 1992-1995. It was completely destroyed during the war and had become the centre of an effort to revitalize the historic Mostar downtown. An initiative to restore the multinational and high-quality nature of the school was viewed as an opportunity to use this divided school in this divided city as a model or beacon for potential reform efforts throughout the country.”

Licensure Report – Conflict Management Pilot Program In North Carolina

A 9-page pdf document discussing the experiences of Center for the Prevention of School Violence’s “Reach In, Reach Out, Reach Over Conflict Management Curriculum” development initiative and related work done on revising statewide licensure of new teachers to include conflict management concepts and skills. Includes reports on results of focus groups with preservice teachers regarding the need for conflict management skills development. As the report indicates, “Although the goal of implementing a teacher licensure enhancement can be ambitious, there were a number of supporting factors for the initiative and foreseeable challenges that were addressed.”

International summit preconference reader, March 16th and 17th, 2007

Global Issues Resource Center, Office of Community Continuing Education at Cuyahoga Community College, the Organizational of American States, and the United Nations Development Program hosted State and International Conflict Resolution Education Policy Team Meetings. The purpose of the policy team meetings was to allow conflict resolution education and peace education practitioners and supporters to share insights and information about policy, infrastructure and research needs to promote conflict resolution education and peace education. Document contains meeting agendas, list of participants and conference attendees responses to questions for inclusion in the reader.

National curriculum integration project: Final report, phase two (2000-2001)

National curriculum integration project sought to promote the infusion of conflict resolution education into middle school curriculum, teaching it as part of other subjects, rather than as a stand-alone topic. This report shares the findings which suggest that classroom climate improves over the course of the school year using this approach.

National curriculum integration project: Report on year one (1998-1999)

Word document which summarizes findings from research that examined: The best practices for developing and implementing curriculum infusion and integration processes, the impact of the NCIP conflict resolution education on students’ conflict orientations and the impact of the NCIP conflict resolution education on classroom climate.