Building Cultures of Peace in Rwanda Schools - An inter-disciplinary network of research, policy and practice

The impetus for this research network derives from the premise that children and youth cannot learn the skills and values of peace, in a context of violence. This context includes perspectives often missing from academic research and scholarship on post-genocide education, such as: the 'everyday' physical violence young Rwandans experience in their homes, communities and schools, often in the form of corporal punishment; the symbolic violence and social embarrassment they experience and/or reproduce through various forms of stigma related to poverty, narrowly prescribed gender and sex roles, and ongoing ethnic tensions, stereotypes and divisions; and the structural violence, experienced in schools through educational inequality, constant competition, testing, ranking, and severe consequences for failure; as well as children and young people's sense of experiencing injustices, not being listened to and having unmet emotional and psychological needs.

Thus, there is a need to open-up and interrogate our understanding of 'education for prevention'; to look beyond simply the content and methodologies for teaching and learning about identity and citizenship, to the environment or context in which children and young people learn, mature and develop their identities and relationships with others.

This calls for an interdisciplinary network of researchers, whose individual work may be focussed on only one aspect of childhood or schooling and from only one disciplinary perspective, to learn from and build upon one another's work, towards producing a holistic framework for defining and evaluating cultures of peace in Rwandan schools. This would include topics such as curriculum and pedagogy, but also positive discipline; pastoral care and child protection; gender; inclusion, the role of the arts and humanities in developing critical thinking skills; the school's engagement with parents and the community; methods for including children and young people's voices in school governance; and extra-curricular learning. Such themes could be looked at from the disciplines of education studies, child and educational psychology, sociology, and leadership and management studies and by researchers who use quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods.

While these topics are well-explored in western contexts, the dominant paradigms shaping schooling practices in Rwanda are very different and require the development of new approaches based on local understandings and concepts. For this reason, while the network would include contributions from international scholars, it is to be Rwandan-led; underscoring the need for a network such as this, to enhance local capacity for research and dissemination of knowledge.
In facilitating collaboration and knowledge sharing - between researchers in the global north and south; between researchers, practitioners and policy-makers; and between different academic disciplines - the network will strengthen individual and collective capacity to address the education, health and peace and security challenges.

The network will address these various themes through five 'working groups', each of which would include researchers from Rwanda, the UK and elsewhere, as well as representatives from ministries and local government, local civil society organisations, international NGOs and any other interested stakeholders. Each of the five groups will focus on one of the following: 1) aspects of child mental health/wellbeing, personal and social development; 2) the use of cultural arts, literature and humanities to foster self-expression, respect and critical thinking; 3) issues of curriculum, pedagogy, assessment and teacher training; 4) aspects of school governance, including engagement with parents and the wider-community, and youth voice; 5) inclusion (including disabilities) and gender.

Positive social impacts of the network are:

1. The 'decolonisation of knowledge': developing distinctly 'Rwandan' insights to national challenges will lead to better, more context-sensitive proposals for intervention. By supporting Rwandan researchers to generate and communicate research findings to the global research and policy community, we also expect to see better-informed and more context-sensitive policy decisions and donor agendas, leading to better outcomes for Rwanda's school children.
2. Inclusion of grass-roots voices: the inclusion of grass-roots initiatives such as the Masharika performing arts for peace project, the Sana Initiative for mental health, or various youth-led community-based initiatives will promote a culture of research as 'learning from practice', and provide a means for Rwandan and international researchers to encounter and learn from experience and experimentation at grass-roots.
3. Empowering civil society and researchers in Rwanda to collectively bid for large grant funding: the intellectual work performed by the network, of breaking down disciplinary silos and developing a conceptual framework around the various aspects of schooling that contribute to a "culture of peace", will form the basis of collaborative applications for larger research grants. We hope future action research funding will not only generate new knowledge but help to fund socially-positive learning-based grassroots interventions.
4. Providing an evidence-base for global advocacy: network partner, Aegis Trust is forging a new partnership with the Jesuits of Africa and Madagascar aimed at changing attitudes and approaches to learning, towards more 'peaceful' child-centred approaches, first in the Jesuits own schools across the continent, then all Catholic schools and beyond. This will require changes at the levels of policy, leadership, and teaching. We hope the insights and connections generated from this network will contribute to this endeavour, in terms of improving concepts and evaluation methods and generating new practice guidelines.

The network will monitor the following:

1. The network will measure research and scholarship output of Rwandan contributors, both quantitatively (in terms of papers, conferences and reach) and qualitatively, in terms of how new insights challenge current thinking and generate new policy proposals or good-practice guidelines. These can be mapped from idea-stage, to being on decision-makers' radar, to uptake and inclusion, to implementation.
2. The network will monitor the level of inclusion of non-academic contributors at grass-roots, with particular emphasis on ensuring lesser-heard voices are given prominence. It will also conduct periodic skills audits and self-assessments to measure capacity-growth of civil-society and other grassroots practitioners.
3. The Network Management will identify specific policy asks and trace them through the policy process to compare with outcomes. In this sense, we should see where knowledge generated by researchers or those on the ground feeds into and shapes decisions of donors, ministries and local government.
4. The project will consider its role in supporting the acquisition of further funding for 'action research in schools', whether as a multi-member consortium receiving a large grant, or several smaller projects, as a major 'success factor' of this project. In addition, any socially positive outcomes from action research funding, such as 'improved child mental health' or 'decrease in incidents of violence against children' will be partly attributable to this initial phase.
5. The combined M&E data of action-research-based interventions will be recorded and reported.
6. Where insights generated from this network are used in the initiative summarised above, they will be properly referenced with due credit given. This will enable fuller outcome mapping of the social impact of this proposed network.