Workable Peace Curriculum
We are in the process of publishing the Workable Peace curriculum as 7 stand-alone units, in parnership with the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School and PON Books! More information on this soon.
The Workable Peace curriculum integrates the study of intergroup conflict and the development of critical thinking, problem solving, and perspective-taking skills into social studies and humanities content. It helps teachers and students understand and make connections among conflicts around the world, in the U.S. and in their own schools and communities. The curriculum provides teachers with an academically rigorous framework and a rich set of materials for teaching about conflict as a major theme in history and current events. Using a unique combination of content and skill activities, it enables students to learn about history in ways that enliven the imagination, awaken moral reasoning, and impart social and civic skills that they can use throughout their lives.
Our
curriculum embodies the goals of National and State standards by inviting
students to see history from the points of view of the people involved, making
connections across time and space and among disciplines of knowledge, and developing
and practicing skills of reading, speaking, listening, analyzing, and interpreting.
The Role Plays are designed to meets content standards for US and World History
courses and other social studies electives.
Workable Peace is designed to be integrated into the traditional scope and sequence of middle and high school humanities and social studies classes. All Workable Peace activities are student-centered and experiential, leading to greater interest and engagement among students.
The Workable Peace curriculum has three parts: a Framework, role plays set in hot spots of intergroup conflict around the world, and civic learning activities on local intergroup conflicts in the United States. Please click on the links below to learn more about each part of the curriculum.
The Workable Peace Framework presents key steps that group members need to take in order to build a workable peace. These steps synthesize academic research and practitioners' experience to make patterns of intergroup conflict and strategies for peacemaking accessible and intelligible to teenagers.
The Framework helps students understand how divergent or competing interests, values, emotions, and identities can lead to conflict between groups, and how different strategies can be used to manage these conflicts. It includes a variety of activities that can be applied to a broad range of humanities content areas. These activities teach students to distinguish among and identify the sources of conflict, and to build their skills in particular areas, such as exploring the needs and concerns of others, managing strong emotions, and negotiating effectively.
Role Plays make up the heart of the Workable Peace curriculum. These historically accurate, in-depth activities are set in historical and current areas of intergroup conflict in the US and around the world. Workable Peace Role Plays apply the concepts from the Framework to real contexts, challenging students to examine in historical situations from multiple perspectives while building crucial skills such as creative thinking, problem-solving, and negotiation. Participants must voice their characters' needs, understand those of others, and seek ways to meet their needs while respecting the needs and interests of others. The role plays encourage participants to find routes to peaceful coexistence, but also raise hard questions about trade-offs between peace and justice.
Civic learning activities allow teachers and classes to make connections between history and local issues that students face in their own schools and communities. Projects can range from short scenarios taken from the themes of the role plays, to historical research on a current conflict in the community, to surveys of how members of different groups in the school perceive each other.
To facilitate classroom work on civic learning, Workable Peace develops a regularly updated series on current conflicts, which is posted on our web-site in the section WP Now.