'Students Can Change a School': The Role of Youth Leadership in Building a School Culture of Peace

Much has been written on the need for education that improves social and intercultural relationships between students. Yet how much do we understand about student perceptions of such curriculum, and the impact on peaceful school cultures? This has been notoriously difficult to assess and measure (Bar Tal 2002, Salomon 2011). This study contributes to our quest to understand the impact of a specific kind of peace education, namely interfaith and intercultural dialog in schools, by assessing student views of the program and employing participant observation to assess the impact of the dialogs and subsequent youth-led peace projects on the students’ self and school. Did students gain peace building skills? Did they develop as young leaders? Did they grow in their ability to engage in intercultural dialogue?

Over academic year 2017-2018, I partnered with Broward Co. Public Schools to design and facilitate three youth interfaith dialogues. After each, we collected qualitative and quantitative data on student assessment of the dialogs. Yet this study also moves one step further, in challenging students after the dialogs to design and implement peace projects at their school sites. This is because we note that too often, students are viewed as recipients of these sorts of peace education programs, rather than as possible leaders (Duckworth, Williams and Allen 2012).

A key finding of ours was that students needed the opportunity to use the skills that we introduced in our dialogs. The challenge to create and implement peace projects in their schools after the dialogues, which they did over the rest of the academic year, proved to be a powerful praxis for them, enabling the skills we introduced in the dialogues to become personal and contextualized in their real worlds. A second key finding is that students intuitively echoed some key peace education theorists (Montessori, Freire), expressing their view that these sorts of programs should be offered much more, that learning to build peace should be central to anyone’s education and that curriculum should be relevant to their daily lives.

We will present data from said quantitative and qualitative student assessment, as well as observational data from the student-led peace projects which our participants designed and implemented, to produce insights that can assist student leaders, teachers, practitioners and scholars as we continue to develop, mainstream, improve and expand our youth interfaith/intercultural dialog work. Given that ethnic and cultural conflict has escalated considerably since the 2016 elections in the U.S. (CAIR 2018, Hossain 2017), this is more urgent than ever.