Global Citizenship and Capacity-Building for Peace

Global Citizenship Education (GCED) aims to be transformative, equipping learners of all ages with the values, knowledge, and skills that reflect and instill respect for human rights, social justice, diversity, gender equality, and environmental sustainability. GCED is competence/capacity-oriented critical learning. It promotes respect for differences and diversity, being socially connected, transforming relationships, critical reflections on identities, skills for critical inquiry and analysis, and questions into underlying assumptions and power dynamics. Learning for peace is to acquire sensitivity of peace; violence and conflict; and capacities for conflict prevention, peacemaking, and peacebuilding.

Transformative Pedagogies for Peace Education

Transforming pedagogies in peace education will bring about a surprising transformation of learners and facilitators together. Learning in which the stories and experiences of the participants’ lives are central will create truly participatory processes. Mutual learning through and beyond dialogues, exchanging what body and mind promptly capture and convey will create a dialogical, mutual learning. Creating step-by-step "aha!" moments through theatrical, musical, drawing, mime, and other types of activities that arouse all six senses will transform education into artistic and cultural representations of the learners’ lives. Creating and testing together new things and thoughts, acts and interpretations, with question-posing and detail-observing will form a critical way of learning. The pedagogy of estranging involves drawing distance with the familiar, inviting and facing the unfamiliar, to raise and respond to deep questions about oneself and the surrounding world.