A Pedagogy of Howling: Testimonies of Pedagogies for Peace From the University for Peace
An article is born, and an addendum
Dear beloved community,
As a surprise birthday gift, an article that I wrote with students nearly a year ago was born into the world yesterday - which happened to be my birthday! I would love for you to celebrate with me by reading it - you can find it here:
A Pedagogy of Howling: Testimonies of Pedagogies for Peace at the University for Peace
The process of writing the article together, and the editing process, is a story in itself and a true labor of love and an attempt at disrupting hierarchy in education. When I saw the call for papers, it was over the winter break of 2023, and I quickly pulled an abstract together. As soon as it was accepted, I thought, “I can’t have to write this alone - I have to write it with students!” Five agreed, and we engaged in a rich collaborative process of weaving our experiences together. We later presented about it at both the Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies author talks and the Ecoversities Re-imagining Education Conference (insert healing howling here).
The publishing process was not without its challenges. When we received peer review feedback, we were asked to expand upon some of the theoretical foundations we were drawing from, which we did. After we resubmitted with revisions, we were told we had to cut it significantly because of the word count! It seemed there had been a miscommunication between the peer reviewers for the special issue and the main journal editors. It was some of the most painful editing I have ever had to do.
The heart of the article is still here, but I am going to share the unedited introduction below (only a paragraph of which lives in the published version), for its chance to live in the world. I suggest reading it, then returning to the manuscript for the rest of the article, which is its heartbeat - the testimonies of the students and our poetic conclusion!
The intro that (mostly) did not see the light of day follows:
Stephanie: Pedagogies for peace as every step
“Every breath we take, every step we make, can be filled with peace, joy, and serenity…Peace and happiness are available in every moment. Peace is every step. We shall walk hand in hand.”
-Thich Nhat Hanh (1992, p. 5-6)
“...peace is the wholeness created by right relationships with oneself, other persons, other cultures, other life, Earth, and the larger whole of which we are all a part.”
-The Earth Charter (2000)
My teacher, peace activist Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, taught in his words and his living example, how we can embody, cultivate, and enact peace in everything we do, from the most mundane and seemingly trivial aspects of our lives to our work in the world and our life’s purpose. The expression of peace in every step encapsulates the notion of pedagogies for peace, raising the question: how can every aspect of our pedagogy, from the most mundane choices and actions we make in the classroom, to our relationships with students and colleagues, to the activities we facilitate and the curriculum we develop, to the structures we teach within, be an expression of and contribution to greater peace at all levels, from the inner to the interpersonal to the communal and beyond? This is the question that guides my work and pedagogical praxis as resident faculty and coordinator of the peace education master's degree programme at UPEACE, of which I am also an alumna.
At its heart, the field of peace education is concerned with understanding and disrupting the root causes of violence, and envisioning, practicing, and educating for nonviolent alternatives toward more just, peaceful, sustainable worlds (Reardon, 2012; Harris, 2008; Hanzoupolous & Williams, 2017; Hantzoupolous & Bajaj, 2021). As such, pedagogies for peace seek to understand, uproot, and dismantle the violence that exists in the world, and create alternatives to violence through ways of knowing, being, doing, and living that are nonviolent, life-giving, and life-affirming. Pedagogies, in this sense, refer to how we teach, and also include the structures and institutions we are teaching and learning within, and the cycles of theory, reflection, and action in which our teaching, learning, and unlearning are situated (Freire, 1970; Walsh, 2018).
At the root of violence are notions of separation, hierarchy, domination, and supremacy. Within the fields of peace studies and peace education, violence is often conceptualized as having direct (physical), structural (institutional and systemic), and cultural dimensions (Galtung, 1969, 1990), the totality of which can be described as a culture of war. An aspect of a culture of war that is of particular relevance to education is epistemic violence, which refers to the domination of one knowledge system over others, which in the context of modernity (Machado de Oliveira, 2021), means the overvaluation of Western knowledge and the devaluation and erasure of other ways of knowing.
Pedagogies for peace must attend to both learning and unlearning. On one hand, pedagogies for peace involve unlearning cultures of war, violence, and oppression, which is to say, unlearning ways of being and acting grounded in separation, domination, and supremacy. Another hand of pedagogies for peace involves (re)learning ways of being, knowing, doing, and living that offer alternatives to violence, that help us remember our interconnectedness with one another and the earth, and which nurture, as the Earth Charter (2000) vision of peace articulates, right relationships at all levels, from the inner to the interpersonal to the intercultural and beyond. To address epistemic violence, peace studies and peace education must seek to engage in epistemic justice, such as through decentering Western knowledge, and embracing transrational ways of knowing such as the embodied, affective, and metaphysical (Cremin, Echevarria, & Kester, 2018). These pedagogies for peace help us to unlearn separation and (re)learn our interbeing, a term Thich Nhat Hanh (2012) coined to describe our existence which is beyond interconnected (a word that still implies some degree of separation). Seen in this way, pedagogies for peace are fundamentally about relationships, whether unlearning violence and separation or relearning interbeing and connection.
Pedagogies for peace must be responsive to both the local and global context. All knowledge emerges from a place and time, what scholar Donna Haraway (1988) refers to as situated knowledges, and the pedagogies for peace we share with you today are emergent from the diverse, multicultural setting of the University for Peace (UPEACE) at the edge of the Central Valley of Costa Rica, which was founded by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) as an international graduate institute dedicated to the study, teaching, and research of peace (UNGA, 1980). The master’s programme in Peace Education, one of the few of its specializations in the world, focuses on educational pathways for promoting cultures of peace in formal, nonformal, and informal settings. We hope these testimonies ground this theory through the lived experience of our learning community.
Now please jump back to the article to read the rest!
You can find the unedited references in this GoogleDoc (references from the cut intro do not appear in the published doc).
I leave you with our concluding poem:
We make our offerings but we don’t ask them to be perfect.
We embrace the messiness of creating a more peaceful world from within the violent one we are currently hospicing (Machado de Oliveira, 2021).
We stay with the trouble (Haraway, 2016) of what that entails, and commit to not giving up on each other.
We operate as vines within the cracks of the colonial architecture of the Westernized university (Grofoguel, 2012),
planting seeds of possibility amidst the crumbling ruins-in-the-making of these institutions.
We conclude our class with healing howls, an act of rebellion and release.
Like bells of mindfulness, our howls echo across campus and into the valley,
into the cracks to create more space within them for revolutionary love, healing, and collective care to grow.
With love and care,
Stephanie