Peace and Planning

So you might be wondering, what courses does a PhD student in peace and conflict resolution take? What does one do in those classes? Admittedly it’s still early in the semester, but I figured I’d share a bit about my experience thus far to shed some light on this, and also provide some context before I start writing some more-in-the-weeds posts!

I’m taking three classes this semester – an intro course for all new PhD students that provides an overview of the field (and I thought planning was broad and interdisciplinary…), a class on identity and conflict, and a class on peace and conflict pedagogy.

While I’ve only been in each class twice at this point, they’ve all been FASCINATING and are truly opening my mind to a ton of ideas – some that perhaps I intuited but never had the words to articulate, and some that are entirely novel. While many of my classmates have studied or worked on conflicts abroad, I only have the U.S. context to reflect on when I’m reading my 800+ pages per week. Initially, I wasn’t sure how much I’d be able to pull from the readings – at first glance, the U.S. context seemed so different than, let’s say, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the war in Bosnia. There are indeed some meaningful and not insignificant differences, but I’m starting to see that quite a lot can be applied to the U.S. context, for better or worse.

I’ll share more about the intro and identity courses in future posts but in the meantime wanted to share some tidbits I’ve taken away from my pedagogy course. We started by reading a chapter of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and it rocked my world. Freire takes a critical look at our education system and finds it resembles the transactional processes that happen at a bank: students are empty vessels filled with deposits of “knowledge” from all-knowing teachers, with no room for dialogue, inquiry, curiosity, or creativity. He poses a radical idea of shifting roles to a more egalitarian system so learning flows in both directions. He also describes an ideal world in which our education system recognizes our humanity and in turn, casts its gaze upon preparing students to solve problems that confront humanity (rather than contribute more to our productive-capitalist society).

Then we watched Colman McCarthy, bell hooks, and Bettina Love give compelling arguments about why our education systems need an overhaul, and the importance of moving from a culture of war to a culture of peace in our classrooms. How often do we talk about wars that have been won, generals and presidents who have lead and directed armies, and brutal acts of violence that have been carried out in the name of patriotism and security? What if we talked about the peacemakers constantly striving to find diplomatic means to resolve issues, knowing that the next war will never be the last? What if we prepared students with skills needed to seek more peaceful solutions rather than lauding the arrival of ROTC programs at schools across the country? Rather than coming from a perspective of deficit, what if we instructed about Black excellence? What if we trained teachers to be historians who understand the contexts in which they are working and the students they are teaching?

How does this all relate to planning? Well, one of the assignments I’m excited about this semester is to create a lesson plan for a specific audience…and I’d love to create one suited for folks working in the realm of urban planning around concepts like conflict resolution, community engagement, and social justice. What would you teach? What was the most impactful activity you’ve experienced in the classroom? What learning did you get on the job but would have been better to encounter in your training or schooling? What do you currently see missing from how urban planners approach community engagement or social justice? I’d love to hear your thoughts!