Bringing narrative psychology to school improvement for peace: Some implications for the role of the educational psychologist in social conflict

Abstract

Staub remarked that psychology had important contributions to make to our understanding of how to create peaceful, harmonious and caring relationships between groups. This paper reports on the school improvement phase of an ongoing programme of practitioner research. It illuminates the potential for practitioner educational psychology to contribute towards building a culture of peace and to counter hegemonic school discourses which detract from the task of addressing inter-communal conflict. The work was underpinned by the argument that school-based efforts to overcome ethnopolitical conflict could be transformed through a perspective that gives a central role to the storied nature of human conduct; that is, through narrative psychology. This stance is a special case of the wider perspective called social constructionism, itself a movement which draws sustenance from and has links to a range of disciplines and intellectual traditions including Vygotskian theory and sociocultural perspectives on learning. Peace poems were elicited from children and young people and a sample of these were then discussed interpretatively by groups of experienced teachers and educators supported by practices from the organisational development approach called appreciative inquiry. Narrative thinking and methods were found to have great potential to help teachers generate alternative ‘richer descriptions’ of schooling for peace and consequently construct more inclusive and democratic social worlds. I argue that school improvement for peace requires the development of an alternative epistemology of professional practice based on a relational redrawing of psychological processes.