Project Executive Summary
Workable Peace is an innovative high school humanities curriculum and professional development project for teachers and students. Using new teaching materials and strategies, Workable Peace integrates the study of intergroup conflict and the development of critical thinking, problem solving, and perspective-taking skills into social studies and humanities courses. It provides academically rigorous training and tools for teaching the major themes and key events of history in ways that enliven the imagination, awaken moral reasoning, and impart social and civic skills that students can use throughout their lives.
Workable Peace is a response to the needs of teachers, teenagers and schools in communities across the country. To become constructive citizens, young people need to understand and respond effectively to racial, ethnic, ideological and economic conflicts in their lives and the world around them. Too often, however, popular and peer culture in the U.S. teach young people simplistic attitudes and aggressive behaviors that intensify these conflicts.
The high school experience is critical for young peoples’ development of social understanding, roles and skills. Cognitively, teenagers are able to explore and analyze complex social issues, and have the opportunity to do so in their social studies and humanities classes. Developmentally, they are seeking and being cast in their adult social roles, and learning how their membership in ethnic, economic and cultural groups will color those roles. Academically and socially, the high school is the key arena for this process of exploration and development. High schools therefore have the potential to provide a means for young people to acquire and practice the values and skills associated with tolerance, conflict management, and effective citizenship.
Despite the enormous potential of the high school as an arena for teaching social and civic skills necessary to become successful, participatory citizens, many high school teachers in the social studies and humanities lack the tools and opportunities to focus on these skills. Traditional curriculum rarely asks students to engage personally with history, or to assess critically the strategies that leaders and groups have used to deal with group differences and conflicts. Instead, intergroup conflict is often presented uncritically as a set of wars and revolts, with limited attention to underlying group identities, values and interests, or to alternative ways that contending groups could have managed their conflicts. Equally important, students are rarely encouraged to draw connections from their studies to issues in their own lives, and are almost never taught skills that they can apply to improving intergroup relations around them. Without an opportunity for critical and personal learning, students learn shallow lessons: that group identities are fixed, that conflict is usually zero-sum, and that violence is not only a common but often a "good" way to resolve intergroup conflict.
Workable Peace helps students learn deeper and more significant lessons. In the hands of a motivated and well-trained teacher, the Workable Peace curriculum can teach students to analyze and understand the complexity of conflicts in history and in their lives, and acquire and practice the values and skills associated with tolerance, constructive citizenship, and the peaceful resolution of conflict. Our strategy for reaching students is to provide training and curriculum materials to social studies and humanities teachers. A team from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education has favorably evaluated our impact on teachers and students.
Project Development, Implementation and Evaluation
In 1997, the Workable Peace project team created a Framework for understanding conflict, formed an Advisory Board, drafted and pre-tested the role plays, explored a number of possible collaborations with like-minded organizations around the U.S., gained financial support for a preliminary pilot test, and formed partnerships with teachers and administrators in public, charter and parochial high schools in Massachusetts, New York and Arizona to pilot test the curriculum.
The first curriculum pilot test began in the spring of 1998, when eight social studies classes in three high schools (Cambridge, Massachusetts, Rye Neck, New York and Cave Creek, Arizona) used the Framework and role plays. This "pilot of the pilot" included an independent evaluation of our work at the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School (CRLS) which concluded that "CRLS teacher and student experiences with the Workable Peace curriculum were quite positive...[they] feel that the Workable Peace lessons regarding intergroup conflict management are very valuable."
Over the 1998 summer, WP staff worked with teachers and students to revise and expand the curriculum at the first Workable Peace Summer Think Tank. Teachers received conflict management training and examined links to the Massachusetts Social Studies Frameworks. Students tested out new role plays and even designed their own. Together, teachers and students brainstormed ideas for civic learning projects which related to the Cambridge community.
During the 1998-99 academic year, Workable Peace expanded its pilot test at CRLS, and continued to work with our New York and Arizona partners. WP also collaborated with Our Place, a youth community-theater group in Roxbury/Jamaica Plains, MA, to dramatize positive ways of dealing with conflicts. In May 1999 WP collaborated with the State of the World Forum Emerging Leaders Program and Youth At Risk Program in Belfast to explore and examine the current situation in Northern Ireland.
Since 1999, Workable Peace has expanded our work to include teachers and schools around the country, including Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Iowa, Arizona, Maryland, Florida, and others. Since 2000, we have also been working with a growing number of Israeli and Palestinian educators in the Middle East, through our partner the Israeli-Palestine Center for Research and Information (IPCRI).
Workable Peace also works in partnership with organizations and other institutions to contribute training and materials on negotiation, mediation, collaboration, and dispute resolution for educators and youth.