Intercultural Education
ISSN: 1467-5986 (Print) 1469-8439 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ceji20
Peace education with refugees: case studies Hristo Kyuchukov & William New To cite this article: Hristo Kyuchukov & William New (2016) Peace education with refugees: case studies, Intercultural Education, 27:6, 635-640, DOI: 10.1080/14675986.2016.1259092 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14675986.2016.1259092
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Date: 19 January 2017, At: 13:20
Intercultural Education, 2016 VOL. 27, NO. 6, 635–640 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14675986.2016.1259092
Peace education with refugees: case studies Hristo Kyuchukova and William Newb a
Department of Social Work, Health and Media, Magdeburg-Stendal University of Applied Sciences, Magdeburg, Germany; bEducation and Youth Studies, Beloit College, Beloit, WI, USA
ABSTRACT
The authors suggest the possibility of using concepts and practices drawn from peace education to assist in the treatment and education of refugees suffering from post-traumatic stress. They introduce four basic principles of peace education, which permit students/clients to work through memory and present conflicts, and calls on therapists/ teachers to be flexible in their approaches. Three case studies are offered: Bosnian youth in a community center in Chicago, adult male Bosnian refugees in Berlin participating in a social integration project and recently arrived Syrian and Afghani youth living in a transitional setting in Leipzig. There is potential for work undertaken with refugees using principles of peace education to resolve ongoing internal conflicts, while helping to prevent the creation of new social conflicts in the process of integration.
KEYWORDS
Refugees; peace education; PTSD
Introduction Peace education could be defined broadly as education that promotes peace, or to put it the other way around, reduces conflict. We must begin by acknowledging that the meanings of both ‘peace’ or ‘conflict’ are highly contextual, and wrapped up in political, cultural and social relations. Peace education has usually been assumed to take place in schools, with teachers and students who are potential subjects of conflict – for example, Jewish and Arabic Israeli students sharing a classroom – or when students and teachers address a conflict outside the classroom. For example, peace education in this sense could engage students in raising awareness about domestic violence. We would like to refocus on the possibilities for using the principles and strategies of peace education outside traditional educational settings, where the participants are not defined as teachers or students, but whose work together is expressly educational, and where the focus of that work is on the reduction of conflict and the making of peace. Where might peace education, for instance, intersect with social work and psychotherapy? Specifically, we are interested in the situation for refugees, who are trying to come to terms with traumatic violence and loss, both (a) in the practical terms of managing the ongoing problems for themselves and family members, including making a new home in a foreign country where they are generally not welcome, and (b) in managing the psychological consequences of trauma and displacement. War without, and war within. We would suggest CONTACT Hristo Kyuchukov
[email protected]
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that peace education as philosophy and as a pedagogical approach can be a powerful addition to the traditional strategies employed in social work and psychotherapy.
The philosophy of peace education Peace education has a long history in the West, traceable to Dewey’s pragmatic thinking about how to establish harmony in classrooms, as a means of overcoming social conflict and cognitive confusion. Beginning in the 1950s, Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung ‘invented’ peace and conflict studies, an important part of which were the pedagogical principles that support peacemaking. Galtung’s and others’ ideas strongly influenced the development and formalisation of peace education, that by the 1990s had converged with multicultural and human rights education. According to Gur-Ze’ev (2001), these modernist conceptions of peace and conflict (or war) have tended to produce recipes for peace education that exacerbate, or at least misrecognise, the problems they are supposed to solve. ‘Peace’ and ‘conflict’ become essential rather than historic, negotiated categories; power dynamics and local contexts are not fully appreciated; and assumptions about universal human nature render peace education into a hegemonic strategy to reinforce inequalities. This has prompted the reinvention of peace education as a more critical, context-sensitive philosophy and practice. Space does not permit a full examination of the post-positivist turn in peace education. We will only point to the four principles of peace education developed by Zembylas and Bekerman (2013, 203), from their work in Cyprus and Israel. They recommend that peace education be grounded in four theoretical, and practical principles. • ‘Reinstating the materiality of things’ (that is, the meanings of peace and conflict, e.g. are not given, but are negotiated in the present by the participants). • ‘Re-ontologizing research and practice in peace education’ (that is, understanding the important things are not ‘in the details’, but rather what is important are the details themselves). • ‘Becoming critical experts of design’ (that is, there are no pre-packaged pedagogies good for all purposes, but rather teachers must develop the expertise to generate pedagogy from the details of the situation). • ‘Engaging in critical cultural analysis’ (that is, peace education itself becomes identical with uncovering the realities and illusions of situated conflict). Our contribution is to suggest that schools are not the only place – or even a particularly good place – to put these principles into practice, and offer some observations about what this might look like in doing social work or therapy with refugees. In these very concrete decisions, we notice the importance of personal, and shared, narrative as an important principle of ‘design’ that grounds the work between caregiver and client, and client and client, very much in the details themselves. Narrative therapies have been shown to be effective way to ‘re-ontologize’ life events in the treatment of individuals suffering from developmental and post-traumatic stress disorders (Van Der Kolk, 2015).
Bosnian parents and children in Chicago In 2000, the second author worked for two organisations that served recently arrived Bosnian Muslim refugees. Some had come directly from the former Yugoslavia and refugee camps
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in Europe, and others had spent up to three years living in Germany before emigrating to the U.S. under the threat of being sent back to Bosnia. Many of the parents were highly educated professionals, and finding employment or certification to work in the fields of expertise was very difficult. The children were placed in local public schools, many of them in transitional bilingual classes with native-speaking Bosnian teachers and assistants. We can focus on two narrative aspects of the work with these refugees. The second author worked individually with adult refugees, in the combined role of English teacher and lay counsellor. The conflicts for these individuals were sometimes overwhelming: they included traumatic and incompletely processed memories from the war, and anxieties about their current lives. The teaching of English, in these sessions, was done through reading fiction, and this narrative format provided a context for these two women to tell their own stories, i.e. ‘materializing’ internal and external conflicts, in the interest of imaging and working towards a less conflicted future. Compared to their experiences during the war, life in Chicago was ‘peaceful’, but that peace was also fraught with internal conflicts related to resolving past trauma, with external conflicts related to adapting to life in a very large, often unwelcoming American city, and with issues relating to their already Americanised and English-speaking children. With the children, the work of the film group focused on eliciting narratives, both visual and auditory, of not only displacement, but of realising their identities as ‘global youth’. The conflicts of war, for nearly all of them, were mediated by their parents’ memories, rather than available from their own experiences. However, being mostly not very affected – at least in accessible memory – by the events of war, all of them re-experienced the war through their parents’ words and behaviour. If we conceptualise the work done with these youth as ‘peace education’ – and this was the explicit framework of both the community and arts-based organisations – one critical aspect consisted in its faith in narrative to bring out the material, fully ‘ontologized’ details of the conflict they experienced. One could argue, as well, that using the arts (whether it was the children’s fiction in language classes for adults, or the collaborative film/photography project) demonstrated some appreciation of the importance of expertise in pedagogical design.
Bosnian refugee men in Germany In 2014, the first author employed a form of narrative therapy, in the context of group therapy, with a group of Muslim refugee men from ex-Yugoslavia who had come to Germany some 20 years ago, through an organisation in Berlin. These men had arrived in Germany in the 1990s, either during or shortly after the war in Bosnia. Many had lost family members and homes during the conflict, and their communities had been devastated. Even after 20 years in Germany, the men still re-experienced the initial trauma, as well as the trauma of dislocation, and experienced difficulties expressing their feelings. They could not forget or forgive. These clients met with social workers, counsellors and volunteers in a group, on a regular basis. Treatment employed the following approaches: • Reading books and book discussions. • Watching films together and engaging in discussion. • Visiting museums and cultural events. • Going to concerts.
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For some of these men, visits to museums and historical places, going to cinemas, concerts and cultural events were their first such activities since their arrival to Germany years before. The activities were used to make the men comfortable to speak about their feelings and emotions using the methods and approaches of narrative therapy. After reading a book, watching a movie, or visiting a museum, the men were able to speak about their own feelings and emotions, and to imagine their future in Germany. Imagining a future rather than dwelling on an internal representation of the past is one of the prime objectives of narrative therapy. Likewise, and furthering the ‘peace’ objective, these conversations were crucial to overcoming negative emotions towards Serbians, and Christians in general. On one occasion, the staff recommended that the group attend the showing of a Serbian film at the annual Berlin Film Festival followed by a discussion after the film with the film’s production team. However, the Bosnian men refused to go to the film because, they said, they could not watch a film in the Serbian language, even though it was their native language, having grown up in a Yugoslavian environment in which no distinction was made between the Serbian and Bosnian variants of ‘Serbo-Croatian’. In this case, the limits of narrative therapy were reached, showing – the counsellors felt – that the men need more one-to-one treatment to work through negative feelings towards Christian Serbians. The event also pointed to the failure of whatever efforts towards adaption to the German environment to effectively address the problems of internal conflicts, i.e. of the failure to enact appropriate ‘peace education’.
Refugee youth from Syria and Afghanistan and refugee children from East Europe in Germany We turn now to two recent example of institutional work with refugee youth in Germany, where the principles of ‘peace education’ are mostly absent, with the potential consequence that these youth can potentially be alienated from their host nation, and from themselves. In Berlin, two groups of refugee children – Christian Roma from Moldova and Albanian Muslim Roma, whose families have migrated because of economic hardship and discrimination – are housed in a camp-like situation in Berlin. The children are all learning German in the camp, where volunteers have organised ‘school-like activities’ for young children, and ‘preparatory classes’ for school age children. But during these educational activities, the children are divided, with separate classrooms for the Roma and Albanian children, and there is no attention given to addressing any psychological issues related to their dislocation or their current situation. The status of these children and their families is unsettled: there is little discussion of this issue or the issues of discrimination against Roma in Germany itself, with the danger of ‘re-traumatization’. In Leipzig, close to one hundred unaccompanied adolescent boys who have escaped war zones in Syria and Afghanistan have been housed in a residential education facility, under the care of a German social service organisation. Many of these youth have lost members of their families, as well as their homes, and the surviving family is dispersed across Turkey, Greece, and other countries. Some have contact with their families and some do not. The agency provides daily care and supervision, sports and leisure activities, and information about adapting to German society. The boys attend German schools during the day, but most of them do not speak German well enough to participate fully. In the public schools, the refugee boys are expected to ‘integrate’ themselves in the education system and in
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German society as a whole. There is minimal information about why refugees are coming to Germany, or about the ongoing conflicts in Syria and Afghanistan. Issues of empathy and cooperation with those in need are not the focus of the contemporary educational system of Germany. While the staff working with these children are caring and compassionate, they do not systematically employ strategies – like peace education – to ameliorate the effects of trauma that their clients show in their daily lives. Additionally, the staff themselves experience high degrees of stress and burnout, from dealing with the strong emotions and sometimes unpredictable behaviour of the refugee youth. The goal of both institutions is: (a) to provide temporary shelter and supervision before the kids move on to another setting, and (b) to provide some help – in the form of language instruction, and immigration information and advocacy – in the adaption of the refugee youth to German society. In these cases, as in others across Germany and throughout Europe, the philosophy of peace education is missing. That is to say, there is little attention devoted to the necessary tasks of helping refugees make sense of their past experiences, rather than to only relive them internally, or to understand that the important things are not ‘in the details’, but rather what is important are the details themselves; in becoming critical experts of pedagogical or therapeutic design; or in providing a venue for critical analysis of the current and past situation for refugees.
Conclusion It is our belief that in most cases, social workers, educators, psychologists and therapists working with refugee children and adults can benefit from learning about, and putting into practice, the philosophies of peace education. As suggested by Zembylas and Bekerman (2013), this does not mean delivering all-purpose pre-packaged pedagogies, but rather enabling caregivers (teachers, social workers, counsellors, psychologists, et al.) to obtain the education and the agency necessary to develop the expertise to generate pedagogies and treatment modalities from the details of their own situations. Educating for peace is not relevant only in those places where armed conflict is ongoing. It is relevant wherever the memory and trauma of those conflicts persists – that is, wherever there are refugees from war, disaster and injustice. Such places are now the scene of an unresolved conflict. Leaving these conflicts to fester, believing that adaptation and integration and forgetting will happen ‘naturally’, is neither compassionate, nor is it good policy. It is time when the ideas of peace education have to be taken into account in a new context – where the receiving country has to learn to deal more effectively with post-war traumatised people, as well as with economically disadvantaged and discriminated refugees.
Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors Hristo Kyuchukov is a visiting professor at Magdeburg-Stendal University of Applied Sciences, Magdeburg, Germany. He is a professor of General Linguistics. His research interests are Romani and Turkish spoken in the Balkans, psycholinguistics, bilingualism and bilingual education, Roma and minority children education in Europe.
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William New is a professor of Education and Youth Studies at Beloit College, in Beloit, WI, USA. His research interests include Roma education policy and history, philosophies of multicultural education, minority and migrant youth, and qualitative research methodology.
References Gur-Ze’ev, Ilan. 2001. “Philosophy of Peace Education in a Postmodern Era.” Educational Theory 51 (3): 315–336. Van Der Kolk, Bessel. 2015. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Penguin Books. Zembylas, Michalinos, and Zvi Bekerman. 2013. “Peace Education in the Present: Dismantling and Reconstructing Some Fundamental Theoretical Premises.” Journal of Peace Education 10 (2): 197–214.
