Creating a Culture of Peace –
Workshop in Educators Conference

Dr. Budd Hall, Dean of Education at the University of Victoria

• Allow children to communicate with others about what they want in their life through art. He showed a slide show of children’s drawings from around the world.
  
  

Dr. Cora Weiss, President of the Hague Appeal for Peace

• To reach peace, teach peace. She told of a book called “Peace Lessons from Around the World.”
• She led us in a human graph lesson. The kids do the research on how much money certain countries spend on healthcare, education and military. The length of a colored ribbon for each country represents each of these expenditures. One foot equals 3 billion dollars spent. The person who had the military budget for the US kept walking around and around the room until the ribbon was completely unwrapped. A very visual lesson that was easily grasped.
• Peace education teaches how to think, not what to think.

Consuelo Dominguez, Cuban Educator

There are four dimensions of peace:

• Individual dimension of living in peace with oneself and knowing ones rights.
• Interpersonal dimension, family, schools, work and respect for the environment
• National dimension, comprehension of history and complexities
• International dimension, comprehension of world we live in.

Professor from University of Victoria (name unknown)

• Cooperatives promote peace, vs. capitalism, which promotes competition
• 800 million members in cooperatives in 200 countries now
• 300 different kinds of cooperatives, with the new order being Fair Trade and Electric Power.
• Questions teachers should ask: What are the cooperative resources in your community, how can teachers encourage students to take advantage of them, how can teachers use more cooperative methods?

Media and Peace Education Workshop

Presented by Metta Spencer, Editor of Peace Magazine and Rose Dyson, consultant in media education.

I didn’t get too much out of this workshop as it was mostly one person critiquing the others book. What I did get was:

         5/6 of the world’s population watches TV. Stories involving characters in episodic series have changed the culture, because people identify with the characters. For example: Designated drivers are an accepted norm since the concept has become part of regular stories seen on TV. If there were a way to penetrate TV producers towards developing a culture of peace, we would have a good tool.