E-learning: Tools for Peace

If you are reading this, you are logged on, you are interested in peace and look to the web for information. Human Rights activists know this and increasingly the United Nations too: welcome to the new universe of free, downloadable teaching material for educators and students around the world on some of the hottest topics of the planet.

This has meant the birth of the Cyberschoolbus, a United Nations web portal described as a global teaching and learning project that offers curriculums for teachers in a number of key subjects such as peace education, human rights, world hunger, weapons control and disarmament, to name a few.

Launched to coincide with the United Nations Program of Action meeting in NY held July, the United Nations launched its new curriculum on disarmament created by New York University professor Peter Lucas and a curriculum on the non proliferation of nuclear weapons, created by Kathleen Sullivan a peace educator active in the United States and in Japan.

The goal is to support educators in high school to the first years of college. Do not, however, expect to find reams of paper to print. Education online is first and foremost interactive and informative.

Online education is also heavy traffic: According to Disarmament Curriculum author Peter Lucas, both curriculums have received an average 500 thousand series access a month: a series access means people who log on and who carry out multiple activities on the site. “Visitors come from all over the world, Europe, South Africa, the global south”, said Lucas. 

This particular portal originated in the United Nations Department of Disarmament Affairs that must carry out educational activities as part of its mandate. The idea across the board in the United Nations however, is to more and more infuse educational activities into every part of the UN.

For his own part, Lucas is clear on the goal of the curriculum: “We are not looking to create mind sets, what we do is offer educators and students tools so that they can gather and use information themselves”. Adding that along with the mission to inform, his task as an educator is to rise to the challenge of engaging a generation growing up with new media:

 
“I bring to it the infusion of media environments, I think today the nexus of critical consciousness and social transformation is dependent on access to the latest media technologies, the free exchange of ideas and information, a life-long access to knowledge... today we access knowledge more and more though technology and new media, it is also about engaging kids aesthetically,” said Lucas.

Write to a Hibakusha, compose an 'opinion continuum'

The UN portal offers tool kits for educators. Classroom activities that show teachers how to map, for example, an ‘opinion continuum’ among students in a classroom, and offer the chance for students to learn to listen to not only different opinions but varying intensities of feeling. There are printable photo workshops that offer material ceded through a UN partnership with Magnum.

The section of the portal dedicated to the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons offers apart from information, a connection with a group of people rarely heard from, the Hibakusha, or survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagazaki.

Peace is not always a simple topic to engage in the classroom, and that is foreseen in the tool kit offered. Curriculum designers are not going for a consensus; instead, the goal is to promote a greater understanding of the issues at stake.

Take small arms, for example, the three lesson plans comprise why there is a desire for weapons, how they are stockpiled and how they are transferred in a total of 15 lessons to go through the curriculum in the estimated period of a month.

“We are writing for educators here, not students, but educators are urged to freely pick and chose what elements best suit them,” said Lucas, stressing that it is not the goal of the curriculum to impose opinions. “If there is a child who begins these lessons feeling he or she has a right to own weapons, he can go through the entire curriculum and come out the other end still feeling the same way. It is possible however, that the child feels differently about the illegal trafficking in weapons and the violence associated with it.”

Since the 90’s, English is the language of NGOs

"English has become the idiom of civil society", believes Lucas, whose curriculum is so far, only available in English:  “Ever since the Earth Summit in 1991, when an unprecedented number of heads of state and members of NGO were brought together, English became the lingua franca of Peace and Human Rights activists.” Lucas explains, noting that it was in the 90s that human rights begins to leave the confines of law schools and that the use of films, photographs and new media took on new importance.

“If we are to think of the future, and the United Nations has this concern, it needs to reach educators, we need to help people understand the difference, say, between peace making, peace building and peace keeping,” said the peace educator.

From Comunidad Segura:

Positive Peace, a revolution of the mind

Read Further:

The United Nation's Cyberschoolbus (in a number of languages)

The Disarmament and Non Proliferaton Portal