Higher Education Pedagogies for Peacebuilding: Developing Hubs in The Balkans, Latin America and The Horn of Africa
Lead Research Organisation:
Institute of Development Studies
Department Name: Research Department
Abstract
The role of higher education in conflict is an under-researched field, as is its potential to address the legacies of conflict and contribute to conflict recovery. While there are pockets of good practice in different parts of the world there has been no systematic exploration of ways in which university teaching, research or engagement can positively impact on aspects of conflict and peacebuilding. This networking grant will begin to address this gap by focusing particularly on the arts and humanities and sharing areas of innovation and creativity in higher education teaching between different conflict affected countries. It will employ an action research approach, working directly with students to collect images, texts and music that celebrate shared cultural memory, and examine the unifying and divisive way in which such images can be deployed. By building partnerships with local civil society organisations, higher education institutions will encourage direct student involvement in community facing issues, addressing questions of inequality, ethnicity and difference and exploring the value of experiential learning in personal and social development.
The project will work closely with researchers from Los Andes University in Bogota, Columbia; Sarajevo University in Bosnia and Herzegovina and The University of Rwanda in Kigali, Rwanda, each of whom are already involved in peace building initiatives within their own areas. The team will meet in three regionally based 5 day workshops and focus on sharing and developing approaches already used in their home institutions. Together they will look at possibilities for adapting these for use in other areas and build the images and texts created into a bank of module outlines and teaching resources. They will support each other to connect with community members in each location to form locally based partnerships working on issues of inequality, discrimination and citizenship, some of the drivers of conflict in each region. Through intensive but practice facing discussions the team will develop a theoretical understanding of the role a university might play in conflict and peacebuilding. Each of the three workshops will include a one day seminar for other members of the institution to identify how these materials and approaches might be relevant to other discipline areas and encourage senior management to take seriously their strategies for local engagement.
In addition, online discussions and webinars scheduled between the workshops will share developments with other colleagues in the region, building on existing networks to form a series of regional hubs, in the Balkans (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Latin America (Columbia) and The Horn of Africa (Rwanda). The project will establish a critical reference group formed from academics and civil society stakeholders working in this field who will contribute to these online discussions and critique materials and approaches developed during this project. It will also enable us to share resources beyond the three participating institutions.
It will use the opportunity of the Bosnia workshop to connect with the Why Remember Festival, (ww.warmfoundation.org); an international network of artists, photographers and journalists committed to recording histories of violence with excellence and integrity This will provide the opportunity to present to a wider audience in the field of history, violence and memory and further establish this as a viable research field and further set the agenda for future research in this area. Images and short clips taken by students recording artefacts and incidents from the different areas will be edited into a short film to be shown at the 2019 festival. The project will also explore opportunities for moving the festival to Rwanda in 2020 which will provide further opportunities for dissemination of project outputs.
The project will work closely with researchers from Los Andes University in Bogota, Columbia; Sarajevo University in Bosnia and Herzegovina and The University of Rwanda in Kigali, Rwanda, each of whom are already involved in peace building initiatives within their own areas. The team will meet in three regionally based 5 day workshops and focus on sharing and developing approaches already used in their home institutions. Together they will look at possibilities for adapting these for use in other areas and build the images and texts created into a bank of module outlines and teaching resources. They will support each other to connect with community members in each location to form locally based partnerships working on issues of inequality, discrimination and citizenship, some of the drivers of conflict in each region. Through intensive but practice facing discussions the team will develop a theoretical understanding of the role a university might play in conflict and peacebuilding. Each of the three workshops will include a one day seminar for other members of the institution to identify how these materials and approaches might be relevant to other discipline areas and encourage senior management to take seriously their strategies for local engagement.
In addition, online discussions and webinars scheduled between the workshops will share developments with other colleagues in the region, building on existing networks to form a series of regional hubs, in the Balkans (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Latin America (Columbia) and The Horn of Africa (Rwanda). The project will establish a critical reference group formed from academics and civil society stakeholders working in this field who will contribute to these online discussions and critique materials and approaches developed during this project. It will also enable us to share resources beyond the three participating institutions.
It will use the opportunity of the Bosnia workshop to connect with the Why Remember Festival, (ww.warmfoundation.org); an international network of artists, photographers and journalists committed to recording histories of violence with excellence and integrity This will provide the opportunity to present to a wider audience in the field of history, violence and memory and further establish this as a viable research field and further set the agenda for future research in this area. Images and short clips taken by students recording artefacts and incidents from the different areas will be edited into a short film to be shown at the 2019 festival. The project will also explore opportunities for moving the festival to Rwanda in 2020 which will provide further opportunities for dissemination of project outputs.
Planned Impact
The primary objective of the project is to explore the role a university can play in addressing the aftermath of conflict and contributing to peace. Its intention is to develop ways in which students and academics might impact on the broader community by developing the knowledge, skills and attitudes to deal positively with memories of conflict, to play an active role as citizens and to work with their communities to build peace. Universities are educators of the next generation, many of whom go on to be leaders or leading professionals, determining policy and strategy in their own organisations. By taking seriously the fear, bigotry or stereotyping that conflict invariably leaves behind and providing young people with the tools to address, these will enable them to have a significant impact on their homes, their communities and their future workplaces.
By employing an action research approach this project will impact on the wider community during its 18 months of activity as well as through its findings. Core network institutions will build stronger partnerships with civil society organisations, forming alliances with museums, galleries, local activist groups and public sector organisations. These partnerships are intended to be mutually beneficial and to involve those in the city but outside of the university in elements of teaching and research, primarily in the arts and humanities but also in different discipline areas. Organisations will benefit from the time and energy of students who will contribute to them as part of their curricula time. Students might, for example, help to curate an exhibition, source films or photographic images for a gallery or work with disability groups, homeless hostels, care homes or orphanages. Their connection with these organisations could result in smaller research activities undertaken on behalf of the organisation, or more complex research connections with their academic leads. Activist groups in Columbia have gained from spending time with students sharing images and artefacts and reflecting on their memories of the past. Schools in Bosnia have benefitted from student teachers bringing fresh approaches to familiar materials or introducing personal and social education activities. A clear objective of this project is to establish a more strategic relationship between hub leaders and public or civil society groups in Sarajevo, Kigali and Bogota, and university managers will be encouraged to include this in institutional missions.
Members of the broader network community, connected through online seminars to regional hubs will benefit from materials, photographs and images collected as part of this project and shared through teaching resources or module outlines. Hence new approaches developed through this research will further impact on community groups and individuals throughout each region.
Participation in The Why Remember festival will further reach out beyond the academic community to a broader public. The festival, part of the WARM foundation, attracts artists, musicians, film makers and writers and student involvement will provide a fresh and younger perspective on the events it covers. The project will share the edited student film during the festival and provide a platform to disseminate early findings. Many of those attending will work in the media or education and be able to reach publics in different parts of the world. The possibility to facilitate a future festival in Rwanda will provide significant contacts with peace building activists and organisations there.
Findings from the research will lead to a better understanding of the impact higher education might have on conflict and peacebuilding and determine agendas for future research in this area. More in depth work will be carried out in partnership with key civil society stakeholders and will ultimately benefit governments and policy makers at regional, devolved, national and trans-national level.
By employing an action research approach this project will impact on the wider community during its 18 months of activity as well as through its findings. Core network institutions will build stronger partnerships with civil society organisations, forming alliances with museums, galleries, local activist groups and public sector organisations. These partnerships are intended to be mutually beneficial and to involve those in the city but outside of the university in elements of teaching and research, primarily in the arts and humanities but also in different discipline areas. Organisations will benefit from the time and energy of students who will contribute to them as part of their curricula time. Students might, for example, help to curate an exhibition, source films or photographic images for a gallery or work with disability groups, homeless hostels, care homes or orphanages. Their connection with these organisations could result in smaller research activities undertaken on behalf of the organisation, or more complex research connections with their academic leads. Activist groups in Columbia have gained from spending time with students sharing images and artefacts and reflecting on their memories of the past. Schools in Bosnia have benefitted from student teachers bringing fresh approaches to familiar materials or introducing personal and social education activities. A clear objective of this project is to establish a more strategic relationship between hub leaders and public or civil society groups in Sarajevo, Kigali and Bogota, and university managers will be encouraged to include this in institutional missions.
Members of the broader network community, connected through online seminars to regional hubs will benefit from materials, photographs and images collected as part of this project and shared through teaching resources or module outlines. Hence new approaches developed through this research will further impact on community groups and individuals throughout each region.
Participation in The Why Remember festival will further reach out beyond the academic community to a broader public. The festival, part of the WARM foundation, attracts artists, musicians, film makers and writers and student involvement will provide a fresh and younger perspective on the events it covers. The project will share the edited student film during the festival and provide a platform to disseminate early findings. Many of those attending will work in the media or education and be able to reach publics in different parts of the world. The possibility to facilitate a future festival in Rwanda will provide significant contacts with peace building activists and organisations there.
Findings from the research will lead to a better understanding of the impact higher education might have on conflict and peacebuilding and determine agendas for future research in this area. More in depth work will be carried out in partnership with key civil society stakeholders and will ultimately benefit governments and policy makers at regional, devolved, national and trans-national level.
Publications
Kasumagic Kafedzic
(2023)
Peace Pedagogies in Bosnia and Herzegovina
Millican J
(2023)
Peace Pedagogies in Bosnia and Herzegovina
Millican J
(2021)
Pedagogies for peacebuilding in higher education: How and why should higher education institutions get involved in teaching for peace?
in International review of education. Internationale Zeitschrift fur Erziehungswissenschaft. Revue internationale de pedagogie
Millican, J
(2021)
Pedagogies for Peacebuilding in Higher Education: How and why should higher education institutions get involved in teaching for peace?
in International Review of Education
| Title | A series of photographs taken by students from all four countries and organised into an exibition |
| Description | A series of images, created by students in Bosnia, Rwanda, Colombia and the UK depicting objects that represent cultural unity. The objects were selected by the students themselves as things that transended division in their own context. They carried out a small research project in their own area, asking people of different generational and social groups their reaction to the images. They then constructed a short narrative to accompany the image explaing what it meant for different groups of people. The images formed a travelling exhibition, displayed in Colombia, Rwanda, Bosnia and the UK to accompany different project workshops and to illustrate how similar objects and images might be used to inform pedagogic approaches. |
| Type Of Art | Image |
| Year Produced | 2019 |
| Impact | The process of selecting the images and taking the photographs drew the attention of students in the different areas to aspects of unity and of difference as well as the importance of culture and cultural heritage in reconciliation. The time spent in forming a small research project from this connected them to social and generational groups other than their own and exposed them to different narratives of both pre and post conflict times. The porject hosted a student webinar enabling students from the different countries to discuss the process with each other and to begin to understand conflict, the build up, experience and aftermath, abstractly and as something beyond their own immediate context. The exhibition also generated significant discussion among universities teachers about the value of engaged and experiential approaches to teaching in a university context and how research could be used for affective ends. There will be a further exhibition of these to accompany the UK based seminar at the end of March. The pictures and the text describing student findings will be uploaded onto our webpages as an example of a pedagogical approach. This is currently under development |
| Description | While the history of conflict is very context specific as is the management of post conflict reconstruction, there are clear patterns in the processes that communities pass through. This research has identified a number of areas where higher education can make a specific contribution and that while many post conflict contries teach 'about peace'. there is a need to shift to 'teaching for peace' to make a clear societal difference. Learning that relates to values, emotions, attitudes and behaviours, is best delivered through experiential, reflective and analytical processes, providing opportunities for students to develop these for themselves . As a result local partnerships, with peace actors, civil society organisations, self help groups or those which might mean reaching out beyond a familiar comfort zone, are all important, regardless of the history of the conflict or the distance from it. This team, from different regions of the world, shared and compared some of these approaches, building an electronic resource base with materials and frameworks that might be shared in Higher Education Institutions across the world. |
| Exploitation Route | While online resources are still under development these will be available by the end of the project. The team is also applying for follow on funding to further develop these, for a grant for student mobility, to allow students to travel between countries and analyse and understand conflict from an outside perspective. In addition we have been offered the opportunity to apply for a Global Partnership award through an 'uplift' grant. if successful this will enable us to properly establish hubs in the region with clear partnership exchanges between neighbouring countries. |
| Sectors | Education,Government, Democracy and Justice,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |
| Description | The three in country workshops and the webinars included community partners. These shared ideas and experience for including civil society groups in student learning and research opportunities in ways that would be mutually beneficial. ZFD, a German NGO is now part funding the Peace hub in Sarajevo while partners in Rwanda have signed different MOUs with the university of Rwanda of ways in which they might work together. The student projects undertaken between the three countries were exhibited in local galleries and new relationships and agreements set up with museums and arts centres on ways in which they could work together using cultural heritage as a mechanism for learning and understanding peacebuliding. Presentations were also made at The Why Remember Festival, which further solidifed understanding of the role that universities could play within heritage institutions. Plans were in hand for a student film, a presentation workshop in the UK with collaboration with the Participation Hub at IDS and their broader network of organisations and universities, and more work in Rwanda. While Covid 19 has prevented these, the lack of any response from the funding council regarding a no cost extension beyond the Covid Pandemic has prevented us from realising them at all. |
| Sector | Creative Economy,Education,Government, Democracy and Justice |
| Impact Types | Cultural,Societal,Economic |
| Description | Development of new modules in the University of Sarajevo and influence of teaching approaches used across different faculties |
| Geographic Reach | Europe |
| Policy Influence Type | Influenced training of practitioners or researchers |
| Impact | The University of Sarajevo are responsible for teacher training and developing teacher training material in a country where education is still ethnically divided. By developing new teaching modules and new approaches to learning in different disciplines they are encouraging teachers in a divided society to rethink attitudes to 'the other' and they way in which they prepare students to build relationships across ethnic boundaries. Many of their graduates will go on to become school leaders and school managers. By introducing these teaching approaches and new modules into their courses they have the opportunity to influence policy decisions and teaching approaches in their future careers. They have also strengthened their relationship with and use of partner collaborations, including those with museums, galleries and local and regional cultural organisations. They are in the process of reaching out to other universities in the region through university networks in order to share these modules and approaches. |
| Description | The development of new modules for post graudate courses in Rwanda, and encouragement to other faculties to adapt existing curricula to incorporate new teaching methods. |
| Geographic Reach | Africa |
| Policy Influence Type | Influenced training of practitioners or researchers |
| Impact | The workshop held in Kigali brought together academics from across the unviersity of Rwanda, and raised questions about the approaches used in the university and specifically in the Centre for Conflict Management. The Centre offers post graduate and PhD qualifications and delivers a cross university module on conflict and citizenship. As a result of the project the following impacts have become apparent 1) Redesign of Conflict and Citizenship module to incorporate new teaching approaches, including teaching for peace rather than teaching about peace 2) Inclusion of peacebuilding and engagement with civil society organisations into modules in other discipline areas, inculding IT, graphic design and literature 3) Development of new modules geared towards understanding mediation, peacebuilding and conflict prevention in the Centre for Conflict Management 4) Partnership with University of Somaliland explored, with possiblities for student exchange and mentoring in relation to their postgraduate modules and future course development. |
| Title | International student photographic project |
| Description | The team devised a visual method of using students as researchers in each of the three county contexts and integrating this research project into existing curricula. Students photographed cultural objects that represented cohesion, community or collaboration between them, aiming to select something that transgressed conflict differences. They discussed the images with people from different ethnic, generational and class groups asking them what the images meant to them. They tabulated and shared their results as part of a classroom exercise, which generated much discussion around the role of cultural heritage in peacebuilding and how meanings can differ between or transcend ethnic, class or generational divides. Students then hosted an international webinar to share results between themselves and draw conclusions about image, meaning and identity. The objects formed part of an exhibition that travelled between the three countries. |
| Type Of Material | Model of mechanisms or symptoms - human |
| Year Produced | 2020 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | This tool generated impacts for a) the understanding of the value of cultural heritage in affirming or empasising difference b) national and international similiarities c) ways in which different communities understand and articlate peace d) ways in which students best learn about people building e) curriculum and teaching approaches used in each country context |
| Description | Developing an International Network to research peace and trust |
| Organisation | University of the Arts London |
| Department | London College of Communication |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | Paul Lowe, Prof from the London College of Communication and an advisory member of our team, has receivevd an AHRC network grant to work with museums and other related sites of memory in recent post conflict environments and fragile states, exploring strategies for how they can contribute to peacebuilding, reconciliation and civic resilience. This network builds on a number of existing established relationships developed as part of our project and his AHRC funded Art and Reconciliation programme. This network will posit a central research question: what is the role of museums that deal with memory and conflict, and how can they more effectively promote tolerance, resilience, inter-group and inter-ethnic cooperation?. The network will include partners from our P4P projet, from both the Peace hub in Sarajevo, the musesums we collaborated with and the University in Rwanda. This new network allow stakeholders from these communities and institutions to reflect on their experiences and acquired knowledge, to share best practices, and to learn from, and with, each other with the objective of developing innovative strategies for public engagement. The initial focus will be on developing links between Bosnia and Herzegovina, Lebanon, Rwanda and Colombia and a range of networking activities will be undertaken including a major conference on 'Museums and Memory' to be held in Sarajevo in July 2022 to mark the 30th anniversary of the outbreak of the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It will build further on our research and presentations at Lowe's Why Remember? event at which we all presented during this project. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Larisa Kasumajic Kafedzic and Francois Masabo both presented at Paul Lowe's Why Remember event, and worked with him in involving the Museum of Sarajevo and the Museum of History into university activities. Masabo facilitated contacts between Lowe and the Genocide Memorial is Rwanda and began conversations with the memorial on collaborative research with the university. Monica Almanza contributed to the project through her doctoral research on pedagogies of memory and ways of using memory in peacebuilding. |
| Impact | This award has only just been announced as successful, we are waiting for further network activities to commence |
| Start Year | 2019 |
| Description | Peacehub Sarajevo and Summer Schools |
| Organisation | Forum ZFD |
| Country | Germany |
| Sector | Charity/Non Profit |
| PI Contribution | Contribution to a series of webinars on pedagogies for teaching peace. Joint preparation from reseach team into further online workshops • Getting Started with Holocaust and Human Behavior • Choices in Little Rock: An Approach to Teaching the Civil Rights Movement Summer School, Peace Education Hub, Sarajevo. |
| Collaborator Contribution | The peace hub, formed in the University of Sarajevo, was a collaboration forumZFD. There had been some collaborative work for almost a decade as the university participated in a lot of their projects and initiatives as teachers and educators with extensive experience in peace building, reconciliation, and pedagogical work. A more strategic approach of involving them in our Peace Hub concept discussion was initiated as a part of the workshop run in Sarjevo under our Peace pedagogies Project. The joint webinar, the workshop in Sarajevo, and meetings with their staff and representatives to articulate the vision of Peace Hub and to present them our long term goals, all motivated them to recognize the importance of building peace alliances and to further pursue this collaboration by making our partnership more systemic and sustainable at the institutional level. Formalizing the partnership was marked by signing the agreement between our institutions sometime in June 2020, after we officially received the support by our Teachers and Research Council at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Sarajevo (which was in February 2020). There were three departments involved in this initiative: Department of English language and literature (Teacher Education), Department of History (Teacher Education) and Department of Pedagogy (Intercultural, and Comparative Education) from the Faculty of Philosophy of the University in Sarajevo. The representatives of these departments comprise the core team that facilitates, coordinates and plans different activities. They envision expanding the scope of work and our team by further developing other sections in the Peace Hub in order to have specialized professional orientation towards research, internationalization, practice teaching, curriculum in peace education, professional development of teachers in peace pedagogy, community engagement, institutionalization of peace education, and the whole school approach to implementing peace learning and teaching. They have full support from the dean's office and our international cooperation office, and our Hub is now associated with our Center for Scientific Research and Cooperation. http://ff.unsa.ba/index.php/bs/o-centru-nirsa Further collaborations were built with international partners from Facing History and Ourselve (US), Leiden University (Netherlands), University of San Francisco (US), Wergeland Center Oslo (Norway), Auburn University (US), Georg Eckert Institute (Germany) and our main community partner is forumZFD with whom we have also formalized the partnership through the Agreement between our institutions. In terms of community engagement they have been working closely with forumZFD and, with their support and assistance managed to involve community practitioners and teachers from Kosovo and Macedonia in addition to our teachers from BiH. This diversity of participants enabled university teachers to look beyond their classrooms and to critically think about some community issues that could be integrated into their lessons or teaching. The experiential learning and practice teaching was shared through the hub's educators and teachers modelling these online and in meetings. Encouraging teachers to apply these methodologies in their work and build a forum or a platform for sharing and discussing their reflections gave the overall learning experience a more transformative effect. Part of the vision for the hub was to reach out from schools into community engagement. In one of their projects they closely collaborated with Wergeland Center and implemented the teaching of the course on Democratic education and peace pedagogy in teacher education. One important segment of this project was having students design and plan for their own modules which they implemented with schools but only as a part of their teaching practice with students. Project initiatives, engagement with communities, or the work with schools directly, are some of the activities planned for subsequent years. While it is still too early to properly measure the effects of project work on the work of our departments, we envisage some substantial analysis of this effect could be measured in 5 years time. What is evident in terms of the influence of the Peace Hub is that some teachers who have been invited to get involved in this project feel less inhibited to cross the borders and overcome the constraints of their own subjects and disciplines and more encouraged to look for the linkages of their fields with peace pedagogy. That is in itself a very progressive move within the very traditional and hierarchical structure of the university, where scientific fields and research areas have clearly been defined by rigid lines, This is indeed unique in terms of developing a nucleus project that values an intercultural, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approach to understanding different forms of knowledge and experiences and could be used as a model for other initiatives and curriculum. The sensitivity to such a different approach to knowledge development and open mindedness to acknowledging the contribution of different disciplines and fields has been missing as a structural framework in the university and the Peace Hub provided one small scale example of how this could be implemented in practice. The summer school held to launch the estabishment of the Peace hub lasted over five days with a mix of online webinars, background reading and face to face meetings where possible. In collaboration with Facing History and Ourselves partners emphasised some of the pedagogical approaches developed and trialled in our research project. The syllabus included ideas for teaching related to corona virus pandemic and the subsequent upsurge of discrimination and xenophobia as well as difficulties/challenges of online teaching. New ideas and lesson plans emerged during the pandemic crisis in order to directly tackle some of the issues related to the incidents of racism and discrimination. I Examples were provided of different types of classes in which thesemethods and resources could be implemented (literature, culture etc.). An interdisciplinary team of educators provided some links to examples of how literature and culture could be adapted. These included examples of poetry and the ways literature has been integrated into those recourses as integral to the course and methodology provided a window to this approach and part of the conceptual framework of peace hub methodologies. A final session on experiences of dealing and working with school teachers brought participant experiences to the fore. A second summer school was held in 2021. |
| Impact | https://youtu.be/0hQixP-lxBY https://youtu.be/pcuR1QVkmNU https://youtu.be/Hu6VvKmvAWk https://youtu.be/4ySECFWJjFU https://youtu.be/hUZ2VLldk1k https://youtu.be/w0lZZ331Eck https://youtu.be/vcVZe7TtoqQ |
| Start Year | 2020 |
| Description | Exploring the potential of university based Peace Hubs |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | The event constitued a panel presentation from the team to the WARM festival held in Sarajevo in July 2019. The team shared images from the student project and approaches to teaching and learning identified in the various working groups held during this project. The audience included photographers, designers and film makers involed in the work of recording memories of war. It also included media reporting on the event who included findings from the project in their documentation of discussions. Images from the panel presentation and key points from the discussion were written up in the festival post event briefing. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
| URL | http://www.warmfoundation.org/warm-festival-2019 |
| Description | One day workshop in Kigali for faculty members, students and local community partners |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Third sector organisations |
| Results and Impact | This activity brought together academics, students and community partners in a one day workshop to discuss how young people 'learn about peace'. It shared experiences from Rwanda, Bosnia and Colombia and sought the views of students themselves, community organisations on how they worked at community level and academics who might ammend their teaching and curricula to include conflict sensitive approaches. It gave rise to the idea of creating a student project between the three countries in which students interviewed friends and neighbours about objects or images that for them represented cultural solidarity and unity. The findings of their work would then be shared between countries and with university lecturers as an example of they way in which cultural objects and student active engagement can be used in their curricula. The workshop also discussed how collaboration between university and community members could be mutually beneficial and they ways in which local partners could contribute to and benefit from student leaning and student engagement. A draft MOU between the APEX NGO and the University department was signed as a result. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
| Description | Participation in a university based workshop in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzebovina leading to the establishment of the first Peace Hub. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Third sector organisations |
| Results and Impact | This was the second university based workshop and included an exhibition of the student project, presentations from students on the impact and value of the project to their learning and presentations from staff at the univesity on innovative teaching approaches. It included a significant number of voluntary organisatins and school representatives who are currnetly working closely with the department for Teacher Training. It also included the Dean and Vice Dean of the faculty. It led to a formal agremeent with the faculty to establish a peace hub in the department of Philosophy as a centre for continued work in the area across the region. It also led to an MOU with ZFD, an international NGO working in Sarajevo to partner with them and to contribute to start up costs. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
| Description | Reflections on the Role of University in Peacebuilding, through Peace Education Hub |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | This research seminar, hosted as soon as it was possible to travel after a long break caused by the Covid Pandemic, served to share the findings from the research with colleagues and senior management from across the University of Rwanda. With new management coming into place since the bulk of the project ran between 2018-2019, provided an opportunity to discuss the potential for a long term peace hub at the Unviersity of Rwanda, set up on the basis of our research findings and with the support and experience of the hub established in the University of Sarjevo. The PI made a five day visit to Kigali in order to meet with the dean of the Centre for conflict management, colleagues working in the centre, commnity organisations that the centre would enagage with and students who had studied here and who were since working with comunity groups. We hosted a seminar/workshop as a culmination of this visit, which, while taking place in person and with colleagues from the department and across the university, also includedd presentations on line given by colleagues from the university of Sarajevo. The workshop was attended by the Vice Chancellor who spoke with some encouragement about the important role a university can play in peacekeepng and the need to rethink pedagogy and curricula across the board. An agenda for the event is included below Reflections on the Role of University in Peacebuilding, through Peace Education Hub • Prof Masabo, University of Rwanda, - context of the seminar on peace pedagogy in higher education, through a peace education Hub, • Dr Juliet Millican, Institute of development studies, University of Sussex, UK - The Role of Universities in Peacebuilding through a peace education Hub, • Prof Larisa Kasumagic Kafedžic, Sarajevo University, peace education hub in Sarajevo University, experience sharing, • Debate on the opportunity for a peace education Hub at CCM Closing remarks: Way forward in building peace education hub in CCM |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |