Building peace through education

ABSTRACT

Can we pave the way to world peace through education of the next generation? This paper focuses on how teaching social and emotional learning (SEL) skills in schools could promote the positive development of children and youth so that they can choose prosocial, nonviolent ways of building relationships with others. First, research on how belonging and fairness develop early in life is briefly reviewed. Then the authors introduce SEL and the research supporting its impact, and explain how it can be supported through various strategies in the classroom, including programs, teacher–student relationships, cooperative learning, approaches to discipline, and solving problems and dealing with conflict peacefully. Building peace by promoting social and emotional development through education offers hope for future generations.

KEYWORDS:

• War and childhood
• educating for peace
• social-emotional learning
• teacher support
• peaceful conflict resolution

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank the Edith Lando Charitable Foundation for their support of our work in this area.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shelley Hymel

Shelley Hymel, Ph.D., holds the Edith Lando Professorship in Social-Emotional Learning in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia in Canada, through which she has co-established a Masters concentration, two Teacher Education cohorts in SEL, and an online resource for educators, the SEL Resource Finder (www.selresources.ca). She is a member of several national and international research advisory boards and is co-founder of the International Bullying Research Network (www.brnet), linking researchers from around the globe. She works collaboratively with schools and publishes extensively on social development, peer relations, and school bullying, with over 100 refereed articles and chapters to date.

Lina Darwich

Lina Darwich, PhD is currently an assistant professor of teacher education at Lewis & Clark Graduate School of Education and Counseling, in the United States. Previously, as part of the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia, Canada, she taught classes focused on human development, diversity and social justice, and on creating supportive and caring learning environments for all students. Her commitment to diversity and equity guides both her teaching and research, linking diversity to our universal and basic need to belong. As a teacher-educator, she focuses on raising future educators’ awareness of issues of social justice, equity and diversity, urging them to become active agents of change toward more inclusive, caring, and equitable learning environments for their own students.