The Beautiful Risk of Peace in Education: an application of the Everyday Peace Indicators methodology in four English secondary schools

Abstract

Schools need peace and peace needs schools. Peace has the potential to re-engage increasingly hardening, standardising and commodifying English schools with the human dimension of education. The qualities and practices associated with peace have the potential to transform individual and thereby collective quality of life. Peace needs schools - the prime societal sites of learning - in order for its ideal to be made real. This study sets out to bridge the worlds of everyday school reality with high peace theory. This study investigates whether and how the ideal of peace can be made real in four English secondary schools. This study is motivated by the desire to contribute to peace practice by applying an innovative methodology for capturing everyday peace in schools. My original contribution to methodological knowledge is to offer a schools-adapted version of the Everyday Peace Indicators methodology that can potentially fulfil multiple research and praxis functions. Equally, this study is motivated by the desire to contribute to peace theory by providing empirically-derived conceptions of everyday peace in schools. My original contribution to theoretical knowledge is to offer an empirically-derived analytical framework for understanding what everyday peace means in the school context. In order to elicit and understand localised conceptions of peace, I develop an adapted version of the Everyday Peace Indicators methodology and apply it in four English secondary schools. The process within each school results in a set of Everyday Peace in School Indicators which are ranked and discussed by student and staff participants. Grounded in the notion of peace as contextual, dynamic and relational, the study explores what conceptions of peace emerge within each of the schools, how those conceptions are understood by the student and staff participants in relation to their lived reality and how the conceptions speak to existing peace and peace education theory. From a methodological perspective, the adapted Everyday Peace in Schools Indicators process was valued by participants for three main reasons. First, the open and engaging participatory nature of the process; second, for challenging them to think about the priorities and practices in their school afresh, through the lens of peace; and third, for translating high-level values into realisable actions. Participants identified ways to publicise, translate, practise and prioritise the conceptions of peace that emerged within their school. The implications of these findings are that the Everyday Peace in Schools Indicators process designed for this study offers potential uses as a research methodology, a peace-building intervention or as a peace education evaluation methodology. From a theoretical perspective, the conceptions of peace that emerged within the four schools contain common core elements, as well as local distinctions. The conceptions of peace from the four schools are synthesised into an analytical framework comprising three categories of peace. Personal peace contains the three dimensions of positive feeling, freedom to be oneself and connection with the teaching and learning function of school. Relational peace comprises the two dimensions of relationships and routine social behaviours. Institutional peace comprises the dimensions of the school environment, curriculum and systems. These three categories of peace are understood as being in dynamic and dialectical relationship with one another. In addition to this synthesised analytical framework for understanding everyday peace in schools, the study offers a synthesised definition of peace. The implications of these theoretical findings for future research in peace and peace education are threefold. First, the findings from this study suggest empirical support for recent peace theory that conceptualises peace in terms of engagement towards difference. Secondly, the synthesised analytical framework of peace can serve as a reference for ongoing definitional debates on the concept of peace. Finally, the study provides an empirically-supported rationale for the concept of peace to be understood as the dynamic process of imagining its ideal forms in actualised real forms.