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Service learning is a popular approach at secondary and higher education institutions to enhance learning for students by involving them in community service as a part of their educational experience. Despite the vast number of service learning efforts at universities across the nation, there is often little attention to the intended and actual results. Some programs may actually reinforce negative or counterproductive attitudes among students. Most efforts fall short of maximizing the potential social change impact of the activity. This session will review and compare ways that the impact of service learning has been measured in the literature.

The U.S. was founded on the democratic community, in which citizens joined together for the benefit of all, yet communities like this are becoming rare. Conflict, which should be seen as healthy, escalates destroying lives and reputations. When citizens come together in democratic community, they are empowered to reach mutual goals, and to begin to view their actions in terms of the greater good. This session will tell the story of a group of citizens who used the six Principles of Democratic Deliberation, as named by Mathews (2006) to form and maintain a park district with no public funding. The Principles are explained and illustrated.

Initiatives undertaken, mainly by the Center for Peace Education, in cooperation with the Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict (GPPAC) and the Global Campaign for Peace Education, towards promoting and mainstreaming peace education in the Philippines will be shared along with practices and projects that may be useful to other contexts. A hopeful sign, the presence of an Executive Order calling for the “Institutionalization of Peace Education in Basic Education and Teacher Education” will be reviewed along with the initial progress on implementing the Executive Order.

This workshop will include an overview of various pedagogical methods of incorporating USIP certificates into introductory courses at the community college level. Workshop participants will receive materials, examples, and hear student experiences from using the materials. Participants will have an opportunity to experience part of the USIP courses. Each participant will leave the workshop with a draft activity using USIP certificate courses.

In 2008, an intergenerational group of twelve Protestants and Catholics in Portadown, Northern Ireland collaborated on a conflict resolution, oral history and visual art project, revisiting the violent conflict known as the Troubles. During the project, everyone participated in conflict resolution workshops. The older generation reflected on their experiences of violence and the younger generation explored ways of interpreting the elders’ memories and feelings in visual form. This workshop will share the results of doctoral fieldwork on the development of empathy and humanizing the other, the roles of generational bias, memory, and the role of the arts and oral history in facilitating reconciliation in a post-violent-conflict society.

Do your students use the same PE and Conflict Resolution Education (CRE) skills when they are home? Do parents support your school’s PE and CRE program and take part in it? Do you want your PE/CRE program to be helpful not only for your students but also to adults in your community as well? These challenges are faced not only in the U.S., but also in the Crimea. The training system for PE work with parents for teachers will be presented and its applicability in various contexts will be discussed.

The results of a group program designed to present awareness of bullying and violence prevention practices to female juvenile offenders will be shared. The program considers challenges facing participants: prior experiences of violence; adult modeling of violence; family distress and fragmentation; poverty; academic challenges; gender issues; and community violence. Early observations find that despite multiple risk factors, girls in the juvenile justice system are resilient, creative, and learn to survive. Through engaged, appropriate adult involvement and modeling, juvenile offenders can develop a framework where bullying behaviors and violence are not the only choice.

This workshop will focus on creating and implementing a Peace Studies course or program in a community college (C.C.) setting. While Peace Studies and CR courses have been in universities since the 1960’s, these courses are still often considered new in two-year colleges yet, that is where they are needed the most. C.C.’s have the most diversity of all avenues of higher education, as places where we train our first responders. Resources provided include: materials for approaching administration, sample syllabi, textbook and film suggestions, transfer possibilities, examples of assignments, opportunities for receiving training, and ideas for raising campus awareness.

The Take Ten CR curriculum, developed at the University of Notre Dame, is implemented at local schools and community sites in South Bend. Trained college students teach it in local schools, a homeless center and a juvenile correctional facility. Workshop participants will learn the essential elements of developing and implementing a CRE curriculum that work in a variety of settings. The foundational elements of this effective program will be presented in an interactive format allowing participants to engage in exercises and interact with one another to process how real change occurs when learning the needed skills to resolve conflicts peacefully.

This multi-year, FIPSE-funded project, is building the capacity of the interdisciplinary field of Conflict Analysis and Resolution (CAR) to play a key role in improving undergraduates’ ability to apply theory to practice in CAR courses, in general education, and beyond the classroom. The project is focused on curricular innovation in experiential and service learning, specifically the development, testing, and dissemination of new approaches and materials. Workshop presenters will offer lessons learned from the ongoing project, and share best practices for using experiential and service learning activities in undergraduate conflict resolution education.

This day-long workshop examines the opportunities for developing partnerships with city government, public schools, non-profit agencies, and across the higher education community to examine and address social issues using the perspectives and techniques of conflict and peace studies. The presenters will explore techniques, strategies, and best practice models to help build one-time projects into longer-term partnerships through personal experiences, case examples, and research about developing, building, and maintaining partnerships. Topics include: program development/consultation; community based research; integrating service-learning across the curriculum; and direct service. Developing partnerships outside the university is essential for providing hands-on learning experiences and career opportunities for students, developing practice relevant scholarship, providing access to continuing education for practitioners, and engaging practitioners as co-creators of knowledge and co-educators of students. All of these interrelated elements can be achieved by appropriately engaging and sustaining relationships with community partners. The presentation is relevant to both higher education faculty and any practitioners/community organizations who may partner with higher education to develop their practices or services.

In 2009, the National Steering Committee (NSC) on Peacebuilding and Conflict Management in Kenya, including, Civil Society, released the final draft of the national policy on Peacebuilding and Conflict Management. The vision of this policy is “A peaceful and stable Kenya” while the mission is “To Promote sustainable peace through a collaborative institutional framework between state and non-state actors”. Such collaboration in Kenya includes The Peace Education (PE) Conference co-organized by Nairobi Peace Initiative-Africa (NPI-A), a peace resource non-governmental with the Ministry of Education and GPPAC. Best practices in PE were discussed as a way to promote a culture of peace through education. This workshop will examine effective collaboration among civil society and government to monitor and report imminent conflict and ensure preventive action prior to and during the referendum on the new constitution of August 2010.

Learning another language: embedded in this challenging and compelling task is a desire for knowing the Other, communicating with another of difference, bridging cultural gaps and differing values, and gaining local and/or global literacy. Since the early 1990s, scholars and teachers in both Peace Studies and Second Language Studies (SLS) or English as a Second Language (ESL) have been calling for more overt approaches to addressing peace issues in the language classroom. An overview of best practices in classrooms in multicultural Hawaii and Japan will be explored along with possible stimulating and engaging topics in language learning that can promote resolution of conflict in various communities.

In an effort to develop sound conflict resolution education, many educators fail to plan and implement learning experiences that build on the fundamental tenants of effective education curricula. Of particular importance, is the conflict resolution instruction designed for elementary and intermediate students. Educators are wise to invest time in preparing effective conflict resolution instruction for young learners. Fortunately, evidence-based guidelines, including the Health Education Curriculum Assessment Tool (HECAT), are available to assist with the development of sound learning experiences. In context of the characteristics of effective health education, attendees will examine the fundamental concepts of children’s literature in context of conflict resolution strategies. In addition, applied learning activities in this session will enable participants to analyze children’s literature as a means to improve conflict resolution instruction.

Cuyahoga Community College (Tri-C) students will share their experience with SD over the past semester. SD is a process of weekly meetings that provide students a forum for engaging with critical issues of intercultural communication, diversity, and other issues of social division. Through the process, relationships among students are transformed and strategies are developed to improve campus climate. Tri-C is the first community college to pilot SDCN. Students will highlight the training they received, personal insights experienced during the process, topics they addressed, and sample proposals submitted to the college to address these issues. Students will offer personal insights into lessons learned for community college application of SDCN.