Peace Education Curriculum

Abstract

Peace education is an umbrella term used to describe a variety of programmes with the common goal to reduce direct and indirect forms of violence. Peace is an elusive concept that has been studied from an array of perspectives and values. Due to the context-dependent nature of peace education, the curricula of peace education programmes in numerous countries vary considerably in different regions of the world. The diverse array of approaches to peace education can be examined in two groups: ‘education for peace’ and ‘education about peace’ (Reardon, 1999: 8). Content, form, and contextual conditions are among vital components of any curriculum, and they cannot be considered in isolation. However, in the case of peace education curriculum, these three vital components are particularly interrelated and interdependent (Haavelsrud and Stenberg, 2012). Peace education curriculum designers would do well to not underestimate these mutual relationships among content, form, and contextual conditions for effective results of any peace education initiative. In peace education, learners frequently remember the informal and hidden lessons, not from the overt or stated curriculum, but from the attitudes, values, and actions of the teachers themselves within and outside of the classroom. However, the implicit curriculum of peace education remains overlooked in the related literature.