The Japanese word for crisis 危= 'danger' 機= 'opportunity' / critical moment. 1.0 Introduction It is hard to imagine anything more important than peace education, whether in conflictaffected areas or in countries that are free from open fighting (Sen, 2011, UNICEF, 2011), and yet the field, and its related research, faces substantial crises of legitimacy, representation and praxis. Some of these emanate from critiques of social science more generally, and some from the field of peace education itself. There are questions about what is meant by peace, about structural and cultural violence in educational institutions, and about the colonizing and hegemonic narratives that lurk beneath peace research and practice. These are potentially fatal to traditional concepts of research and evaluation (whose values?) research participants (participation in what?) and authorship (whose voice?). There are questions about whom peace educators speak for, and where they get their mandate. Equally, there are questions about how people's lives speak, and about what everyday choices say about lived attitudes towards peace. If peace education research is indeed facing a crisis, it might be useful to reflect on the fact that in many cultures the word crisis contains the notions of both danger and opportunity. The ideogram for 'crisis' in Japanese (shown at the top of this article) is an example of this, as is the Greek word 'κρίσις' which has the idea of a decision or turning point at its heart. Are peace education and peace education research in the twenty first century facing danger, or are they facing a turning point, a time for decision, and an opportunity for change? The current article is inspired by the work of Ilan Gur-Ze'ev. In 2011 he called for a systematic reflection on the conceptions and aims of peace education and peace education research. This was in response to philosophical challenges presented by post-structuralist philosophers. He was critical of attempts to achieve ethnocentric cohesion, urging instead a more fundamental review of what peace education might mean in these post-modern times.
This article explores how pupils and teachers in an 11–16 mixed secondary school in an area of urban disadvantage in the UK experience pupil voice. It used visual methods to unpick some of the ways in which official and unofficial discourses of pupil voice, engagement, discipline and inclusion were played out in this school. A typology of pupils, based on analysis of school policy documentation was produced. Whilst these ‘types’ were expressed through pupil scrapbooks and interviews, they were not found to be related to individual pupils in the way that the school policy documentation suggests. Adults respond to pupil voice differently depending on how it is framed—the ‘types’ create discursive practices that determine the things that can be said, by whom and in what way. The visual methods used are reviewed here in the light of findings and are found to be useful in eliciting a range of pupil voices.
Peace and conflict studies (PACS) education has grown significantly in the last 30 years, mainly in Higher Education. This article critically analyses the ways in which this field might be subject to post-structural critique, and posits Bourdieusian second order reflexivity as a means of responding to these critiques. We propose here that theory-building within PACS education is often limited by the dominance of Galtung and Freire, and that, whilst the foundational ideas of positive and negative peace, structural and cultural violence, conscientisation, reflexivity and critical pedagogy are still relevant today, they nevertheless need to be combined in new ways with each other, and with Bourdieu's notions of habitus and field, to adequately respond to poststructural critique. Thus, we call here for greater field-based reflexivity in 21 st Century peace and conflict studies.
Questions about how best to deploy teaching assistants (TAs) are particularly apposite given the greatly increasing numbers of TAs in British schools and given findings about the difficulty effecting adult teamwork in classrooms. In six classrooms, three models of team organisation and planning for the work of teaching assistants -'room management', 'zoning' and 'reflective teamwork' -were evaluated using a repeated measures design for their effects on children's engagement. Detailed interview feedback was also gained from participating teachers and assistants about the perceived benefits of each model and possible adaptations to the models for future classroom use. All three models were found to effect significant improvements in engagement in all of the classrooms, and each was evaluated positively by participants, with useful commentary concerning adaptation.
Research into violence in schools has been growing steadily at an international level, and has shown alarming and increasing levels of violence. Given the seriousness of the problem, finding ways of dealing with this issue in schools becomes an imperative for educationists. In this article we engage with this problem by defending the view that whilst violence might be endemic in schools, there are also real possibilities for working towards a resolution of this problem. Firstly, we discuss Galtung's understanding of violence and peace, paying particular attention to his concepts of structural and cultural violence, peacekeeping, peacemaking, and peacebuilding. Secondly, we connect Galtung's notions of peacemaking to Buber's philosophy of dialogue, in order to make a case for an 'epistemological shift' which might enable individuals and communities to achieve 'peace'. Finally, we direct our argument to the education context and put forward some concrete proposals for peacemaking in schools.
Following the review of literature in the preceding article concerning the deployment of support staff, Hilary Cremin, Gary Thomas and Karen Vincett here focus attention on the classroom in their evaluation of three models of team organisation and planning for the work of teaching assistants — room management, zoning and reflective teamwork — in six primary classrooms. Readers will be interested in the detail of the methodological approach adopted and the general finding that all three models were evaluated positively by the participants.
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