Decolonising Peace Education In Africa

Several African countries have been marred by decades of war, violence and conflict. Despite concerted peacebuilding efforts they have struggled to find stable, durable pathways to peaceful societies. Peace education can play a critical role in engendering the knowledge, values, skills and attitudes required to prevent and reduce conflict but so far it has had limited effects. Part of the problem lies in the pedagogies and curricula that underpin peace education which, much like the wider peacebuilding project, are grounded in Eurocentric and liberal values, principles and methods. There have also been increasingly insistent, even violent, demands to decolonise the wider African curriculum but this has largely remained at the level of critique. New materials generated within local communities and representative of their knowledges and values, including of peace, are yet to be embedded in teaching materials to support those most affected by conflict. This project will address that gap. It addresses the question: What are the different knowledges and values underpinning peace and how can these practices be connected and compared across countries to create curriculum content and mode of delivery in informal and formal, Secondary and Higher Education (HE), in order to decolonise peace education? The project will, for the first time, provide new data based on Arts and Humanities methodologies on how peace is understood within displaced and marginalised communities. Researchers, community workers and communities in conflict will connect to produce a state of the art of existing knowledge. These methods are often dialogic and can reveal long-held community perspectives in unique ways. This data will then be collated, compared and evaluated so as to draw out lessons of existing peace practices and their underlying knowledges and values. Teaching materials will be developed and delivered through 14 weeks of teaching to young people who have had interrupted study due to conflict and are aged 16-35. The peace materials will be embedded in locally desired teaching materials ensuring that the teaching is meaningful. It will be evaluated by the teachers and students. These activities will be done in 4 Proof of Concept projects in Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda and Zimbabwe as part of Strand 1. In Strand 2 further projects will be undertaken to enhance and expand these initial findings. The values and knowledges of peace will be compared to identify similarities in how they can be approached and understood. They will be synthesised and evaluated as part of Strand 3. A peace education framework will be coproduced collaboratively at a network meeting. Three Open Educational Resources will be hosted in order to provide a freely available that can influence peace education teaching for years to come. The framework will also be embedded in HEI's teacher training with an initial reach of a minimum of 12,000 trainees per year in Strand 1 and a further 8,000 thereafter. Training will also be offered to community-based organisations providing informal learning to ensure that we offer the benefits of the project to those who are vulnerable but hard to reach. The project also seeks to embed these learnings in education policy (as in Zimbabwe) where it will ensure long-term legacy of the key findings. Throughout the project we will adopt a gender-sensitive lens - concepts, methodology and beneficiaries - as women and men are differentially affected by conflict. The project will deliver at least 9 journal articles, 4 co-edited special issues of journals and an interdisciplinary edited book. In addition, the outputs from the arts and humanities methods will be showcased through exhibitions, performances and workshops. The project will also create a visible network of researchers, policy-makers and community organisations that work together to offer new meaningful knowledges, pedagogies and teaching materials for a decolonised peace education