GCRF Development award: Contextualising Peace Education

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This project uses storytelling as method to further a contextually sensitive understandings of everyday gendered peace in two countries facing conflict: Nigeria and Zimbabwe. The project has two foci: networking and contextualising peace. Networking: First, we focus on fostering partnerships and knowledge exchange between civil society organisation (NGOs, INGOs, research centres, arts organisations), local communities, government bodies and schools, including higher education; between local, national and international peace workers and educators and across countries to identify best practice in peace education. We will begin with networking meetings and early engagement workshops to deepen our engagement with stakeholders in each country and critically review the current local peace and intervention practices in Nigeria and Zimbabwe. Secondly, we will carry out three storytelling workshops in each country to explore how community based practices of peace are understood, created and inherited. The stories will be used to produce educational resources for peace education that we will trial in Global South and North. These 2 'proof of concept' projects will, later on, be connected across the network and compared through an international networking meeting in Nigeria and a local meeting in Zimbabwe to broaden knowledge about local peace building and to strengthen teaching materials. We will evaluate the networking methodology through interviews with stakeholders and with the community.Contextualising peace: The project particularly highlights the importance of understanding locally embedded peace practices. This contextualisation is essential to creating resources for learning materials that can disrupt hegemonic narratives of peace and to reverse the knowledge transfer from north to south. Peace can sometimes be seen as a Eurocentric project with the underlying knowledge and methods for peace arising from the West. There are, nevertheless, local meanings and mechanisms for peace but they are overlooked in peace education although demands to address this lacuna are growing. This is part of a wider trend to use African concepts and knowledge in teaching there, and thus to decolonise education. However, there has been no attempt to systematically collate, compare, evaluate and draw out lessons from these existing peace practices or to see how these can be incorporated into peace education. Likewise, there have also been limited initiatives to investigate gendered constructions of peace from a decolonial perspective. This project addresses these two gaps. The overall aim of the proposed research is to understand: a. what are the different meanings and mechanisms attached to peace, with particular attention to gender differences in creating everyday peace in our 2 case study countries - Nigeria and Zimbabwe; b. how can these practices be connected and compared across countries to create peace education content and mode of delivery in Higher Education in order to decolonise peace education? In responding to these questions, we will use the arts-based methods of storytelling to unearth the locally embedded stories and meaning of peace. Building on our previous funded projects, this network will offer an intersectional analysis of gender, religion and ethnicity to explore meanings of peace and how to embed this into peace in Higher Education through co- designing and co-producing two lesson plans and trialing it across the three countries: Nigeria, UK and Zimbabwe. We will later on collate the feedback from the students to assess the effectiveness of learning materials and make necessary improvements based on the experiences of student.