COMMUNITY EDUCATION SEMINAR ON PEACE EDUCATION at Haverford College, January 26, 2012

For those in the Philly area, this press release about my upcoming program might be of interest.  Since the publication of my book, I have presented at several national and local conferences this fall: Peace and Justice Studies Association/Gandhi-King Conference in Memphis, National Council for the Social Studies in D.C., Philadelphia Area Multicultural Resource Center, and several teachers-teaching-teachers workshops.  I am hopeful that Haverford College students as well as members of the community-at-large will attend this program:

Susan Gelber Cannon, Episcopal Academy teacher and author, will speak about her book: Think, Care, Act: Teaching for a Peaceful Future on Thursday, January 26 at 7 P.M. at Haverford College.  Cannon will connect ideas from the classroom to the living room as she invites teachers, parents, and community members to consider varied and effective ways to empower children to think, care, and act for peace and justice.  The Community Education Seminar, sponsored by Bryn Mawr Peace Coalition, is free and open to the public, with free parking on campus.  The program will be held in the Center for Peace and Global Citizenship Café, located in Stokes Hall, Room 104, on Haverford College’s campus at 370 Lancaster Avenue, Haverford, PA, 19041.  The College phone number is 610-896-1000.  Books will be available for sale and signing at the event.  More information about the book is available from the publisher at http://www.infoagepub.com/products/Think-Care-Act.

Committed to teaching for peace and justice, Narberth resident Susan Cannon brings to life a teaching approach that empowers youth:

·         to think critically and creatively about historical, current, and future issues,

·         to care about classmates and neighbors as well as the global community,

·         to act—locally and globally—for the greater good. 

Cannon is a peace and character educator with 30 years of experience in primary and secondary classrooms.  She has also trained pre-service and in-service teachers in China, Japan, Denmark, and the United States.  Her special fields of interest are character, global, multicultural, and peace education: developing teaching methods to help students think, care, and act honorably, locally and globally. Trained in moral development at Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cannon teaches history and English, as well as Model UN, peacemaking, and debate at The Episcopal Academy, in Newtown Square.  With her artist husband J. Kadir Cannon, she has created art and peace education events in Asia, Europe, and the U.S.A.  Her book, Think, Care, Act: Teaching for a Peaceful Future, was published by Information Age Publishing in 2011, with cover art by her husband. 

Think, Care, Act depicts Cannon’s methods for encouraging students to envision peace and gain tools to build a culture of peace.  Cannon articulates three imperatives—think, care, act—to infuse required curricula with peace, character, and multicultural concepts in daily activities throughout the year.  Topics include critical and creative thinking; media and political literacy; compassionate classroom and school climate; explorations of racism, gender issues, civil discourse, global citizenship, war, and peace; and school, community, and global social-action projects.  Cannon will discuss rationales, lesson expectations, and classroom “play-by-play,” making connections between home, school, and community.   Cannon’s Think, Care, Act framework will inspire teachers and families to educate youth to build a peaceful future.    

Founded as the U.S. headed to war against Iraq over 10 years ago, the Bryn Mawr Peace Coalition conducts monthly peace vigils and coordinates Community Education Seminars on peace-related topics held at various locations on the Main Line.  Members participate in numerous activities in the Main Line area and throughout the U.S.  Membership is free and open to all. 

TEACHING THE POWER OF NONVIOLENCE? Start with A Force More Powerful.

Daryn Cambridge teaches non-violent social change in Washington, D.C.  At the 2011 Peace and Justice Studies-Gandhi/King Conference in Memphis, we took each others' workshops and appreciated each others' work.  Based on my book, Think, Care, Act: Teaching for a Peaceful Future, my workshop demonstrated strategies for promoting critical and creative thinking, compassionate care for local and global others, and honorable and effective social action.  (Read excerpts from the book at http://www.infoagepub.com/products/Think-Care-Act .)

In his workshop, Daryn demonstrated strategies for teaching about nonviolent change.  He introduced numerous resources available at the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict website (http://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/ ) to help teachers teach about the successes of non-violent social change movements, a topic too-often overlooked in typical curricula. 

The site offers the following helpful definition:  

“Nonviolent conflict is a powerful way for people to fight for their rights, freedom, justice, self-determination, and accountable government.  When people wage nonviolent conflict, they withdraw their cooperation from an oppressive system by using tactics such as strikes, boycotts, and mass protests. These actions can disrupt the capacity of rulers to control events and can shift the support and loyalties of the system’s defenders to the side of the movement. Decisive, even historic, change has then often been the outcome.”

After our workshops, Daryn interviewed me about how I use A Force More Powerful, the documentary about non-violent social change movements.  Based on the book by Jack DuVall and Peter Ackerman, the powerful movie details Reverend James Lawson’s trainings preparing students for anti-segregation lunch counter sit-ins in Nashville, Gandhi's march to the sea to obtain independence for India, and other non-violent movements in Poland, South Africa, Denmark, and Chile.

Our students need to understand how nonviolent social change works!  As they try to understand the day-to-day development of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, for example, our students will find explanations of historic nonviolent social change movements helpful.  They also need guidance understanding unfolding events in the Middle East arising from the so-called Arab Spring.  I even use such materials as this film to help students understand Colonial American boycotts of British goods in the 1770s!  I hope my 4-minute video interview inspires teachers to use the movie in classes from elementary to university.

View my interview at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDJDnSV1IUI&feature.  

Daryn can get copies of A Force More Powerful (movie) to interested teachers.  Contact him (and read more about his work) at his professional blog: http://daryncambridge.com/.    

Violence is Down: The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker

Today, at the copy machine I heard a colleague whistling the Beatles' "I heard the news today, oh boy," and I just had to laugh.... I was photocopying an article about Harvard's Steven Pinker, who says the news may be bad, but violence is LESS of a problem today than it was in the past. Pinker's assertion is that fear of violence pervades our culture due to media focus on violence.  Media’s insistence on “If it bleeds, it leads” coverage gives us a biased anticipation of danger and violence in the world.  Further, Pinker’s research indicates that we CARE more and differently about violence today, and that rates of bloodshed relative to population are actually down. 

What are some of the reasons for this dramatic development over time?  Pinker cites the rule of law, travel and trade, education, and the empowerment of women, among other forces affecting the decline of violence in today’s world relative to the past.

His work will make provocative reading with students in history and math classes!

Here is the link from the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Scroll down for entire 5-page article at http://articles.philly.com/2011-10-14/news/30279505_1_violence-twentieth-century-human-nature

Don’t miss this pearl at the end:
Q: Will we stop caring if we become convinced violence is overestimated?

Pinker: I think that the exact opposite is the case.

What encourages intelligent activism is the realization that some things do work.

Let's figure out what they are.

“Turn the bus around!” Remembering the inspiration of Wangari Maathai

Listening to BBC news early this morning, I heard the announcer mention Wangari Maathai, 2004 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.  Expecting to hear of a new initiative of hers to help the environment, instead I was saddened to learn of her death at age 71.  It is hard to believe that the energetic Wangari Maathai is dead.  Whenever I think of her—even now—I see and hear a woman full of life, laughter, and an endless energy to work for peace and justice for her beloved Kenya and all of humanity.

I met Wangari Maathai in 2002 when she spoke at a conference at Haverford College in Pennsylvania.  There, she gave an impassioned talk about humanity’s plight.  “We’ve boarded the wrong bus.  We’re going in the wrong direction.  We’ve got to turn the bus around.”  Exhorting us in her melodious Kenyan accent, Maathai made us believe we could reverse backward foreign policy and misguided environmental policy.  In doing so, we could put humanity back on course to create a more just and peaceful world. 

With my middle school students, Wangari Maathai’s message resonates as well.  We study the lives and impact of those who have helped change the world, examining their steps in doing so.   I plaster my walls with inspirational photographs, posters, and quotations and frequently refer to Nobel Peace Prize winners such as Wangari Maathai. 

In her memoir Unbowed and in numerous radio and TV interviews, Maathai described her childhood, education, and family, as well as the political, moral, and ecological awareness that inspired her to found Kenya’s Greenbelt Movement.  Recounting jailings, beatings, and ridicule at the hands of corrupt and dismissive government officials, Maathai wrote, “What I have learned over the years is that we must be patient, persistent, and committed.”  Comparing peace to a traditional African stool, whose three legs represent human and ecological rights, sustainable management of resources, and cultivation of cultures of peace, she reminded us that the trees we plant today benefit others in the future.

In my classes, we use her advice in our daily academic, athletic, and social endeavors as well as when we take action to help others—in our classroom and beyond.  My history class “final exam” is a social action project.  Students working alone and in small groups identify something wrong in the world and work to make it better. I further invite each student to consider how the problem on which they will work fits into the global picture. Studying Peace Prize laureates allows students to meet leaders who use critical and compassionate thinking about root causes of local and global problems in active service to the global community.   

My students are awestruck at Wangari Maathai and the Green Belt Movement of Kenya.  Maathai started this movement with and for women, to help them organize their communities and reclaim their lands from land grabbers and deforestation.  When students hear how this small movement grew until it has planted over 45 million trees, pairs of students look at each other and exclaim, “We’re going to plant trees! It’s good for the environment, and that’s good for peace!”

Introduce your students to Wangari Maathai.  Her message and inspiration are timeless. 

For middle and upper school students, this 3-minute YouTube excerpt is suitable.  Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5GX6JktJZg .  The excerpt is from a PBS Independent Lens production.  Background information on Maathai’s life and work (as well as additional interviews) can be found at http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/takingroot/ .  The Nobel Peace Prize website has biographical information and videos of Maathai’s Nobel acceptance speech and an interview as well: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2004/# .

For elementary school students, consider reading one of several illustrated children’s books, such as Wangari’s Trees of Peace.  Or, share “I will be a hummingbird,” a 2-minute animated video excerpt from Dirt, the Movie.  Live and with colorful animated images, Maathai cheerfully compares herself to an energetic and ever-hopeful hummingbird, bringing drops of water to put out a forest fire: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGMW6YWjMxw .

“I will be a hummingbird,” Wangari explains.  “I will do the best I can.”  Let’s keep the message and work of Wangari Maathai alive by sharing her legacy with our students.  We can turn the bus around.

Peace education book combines theory and practice:

Think, Care, Act:
Teaching for a Peaceful Future
New release from Information Age Publishing!

Greetings, Fellow Educators,

Thinking critically and creatively…  Caring for classroom and global neighbors…  Acting effectively and honorably for the common good…   My new book presents rationales and resources for teaching students to think, care, and act.  With its reader-friendly combination of theory and practice, readers will find it both practical and inspiring.  It is suitable for college and university peace education classes as well as all-school reading for teachers and parents in elementary, middle, and secondary schools.  Community groups will find it useful as well.  Kindly spread the word to everyone you think will find this book of interest.  Content and ordering information are below.

Thank you,
Sue Cannon

By Susan Gelber Cannon  (Edited and Foreword by Ian Harris)

THINK, CARE, ACT: Teaching for a Peaceful Future

“Peace can be taught in practically every discipline if teachers truly concerned about the fate of this planet and its inhabitants have resources like this book to guide them…. [Cannon’s] sophisticated understanding of how to address these complex issues will help other teachers choosing to grapple with these difficult challenges.  If more teachers follow the guidelines she provides in this book, every student can learn about peace.” 

Ian Harris, Author of Books, not Bombs;
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; from the Foreword

“The writing is excellent: passionate and personal, blending serious content with an engaging,
reader-friendly style.  This is an important book—for character education and all of education.”

 
Thomas Lickona, Author of Character Matters; Director, Center for the 4th and 5th Rs;
Co-Director, Smart & Good Schools Initiative; State University of New York-Cortland

· Purchasing Information: 1-866-754-9125
http://infoagepub.com/products/Think-Care-Act

àSpecial Sale Price of $30.00 per book (paperback) within the U.S.

(àFree shipping if you call and place your order by October 15^th.)

Bulk Discounts & eBooks available.

• Paperback 978-1-61735-426-7 Web Price: $39.09
• Hardcover 978-1-61735-427-4 Web Price: $73.09

The author uses three imperatives—think, care, act—to infuse required curricula with peace, character, multicultural, and global concepts in daily activities throughout the year.  Committed to teaching for peace and justice, the author brings to life a teaching approach that empowers youth:

• to think critically and creatively about historical, current, and future issues,

• to care about classmates and neighbors as well as the global community,

• to act—locally and globally—for the greater good.

Chapters address critical and creative thinking; media literacy; compassionate classroom and school climate; explorations of racism, gender issues, civil discourse, global citizenship, war, and peace; and school, community, and global social-action projects.  Chapters include rationales, lesson expectations, and classroom “play-by-play.”  Students’ feedback about the impact of lessons is also featured.  With its combination of theory and practice Think, Care, Act is inspiring and unique. 

SUSAN GELBER CANNON is a peace and character educator with over 25 years of classroom experience.  Trained in moral development at Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cannon teaches history and English, as well as Model UN, peacemaking, and debate at The Episcopal Academy near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A. 

“To act in a world whose problems seem overwhelming requires being able to use the powers of critical and creative thinking and compassionate and inclusive care. 
Employing these tools, adults and youth alike can act effectively and conscientiously to solve problems big and small, global and local.”
Susan Gelber Cannon

Healthy Relationships with Technology: Building real and virtual relationships

As the school year begins, we might offer information about healthy relationships with technology to the families of our students.  How does this connect with teaching students to think, care, and act?  We strive to promote good relationships at home to support the children we teach, and strong families contribute to a culture of peace.  We also aim to help students develop media literacy—to develop what Noam Chomsky calls “intellectual self defense.”  We accept that new technologies are crucial to our lives and teaching today.  We have seen the role of technology in non-violent social change as well.  However, we also need to help our students, families, and ourselves pay attention to the inner life, to the immediate, to the truly alive, to the real person in front of us, and to making true—as well as virtual—connections.

Sherry Turkle directs the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self and has written numerous books on human interaction with technology, including Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other.”  In an interview on the radio show On Being, Turkle shares ways—and whys—parents should model healthy relationships with technology for their children.  The following is a summary of her findings, including quotes from the online transcript of the interview. 

Ms. Sherry Turkle:  “I don't have a crazy nostalgia for, you know, an unplugged life…   I'm just saying that we have to ask ourselves really what is served by having an always-on, always-on you, open-to-anyone-who-wants-to-reach-us way of life?  Because in my research, I've found that it actually cuts off conversations as much as it opens out conversations. So, for example, you can be too busy communicating to think...”

She deals with issues of personal time, interpersonal and inner connectedness, “aliveness,” intimacy, and privacy issues.  Can we really tune in to nature’s tranquility, for example, when we walk along the beach with our earphones in, texting?  Does it matter that children no longer care if a thing is truly “alive?”

She says we are living with an immature medium, and in a sense, WE have become ITS killer app.  How?  Because we are always on. 

Turkle explains a line from her book, “‘Just because we grew up with the Internet, we think that the Internet is all grown up.’ That is that we think that we have a mature Internet in front of us, and we don't. We don't have a mature Internet in front of us. We're in the baby stages, and that's good because that means we can make it right.”

Turkle explains that while parents worry their children are too connected, their children report feeling the loss of their parents’ connection as well. 

She was surprised at her research findings: “It ended up that it was a story of parents — as much a story of parents leaving their children feeling lonely and alone and modeling the very behavior that then they came to find irritating in their children…..  In psychology, it says, ‘If you don't teach your children to be alone, they'll only always know how to be lonely.’ "

For healthy relationships, she encourages us to find times for being fully with each other:

“To make our life livable, we have to have spaces where we are fully present to each other or to ourselves, where we're not competing with the roar of the Internet and, quite frankly, where the people around us are not competing with the latest news off the Facebook status update.” 

Her rules for setting limits, based on decades of research with new media and technology, are simple: Make moments to truly be with each other.

“It's dinner, it's sharing meals with your family, it's that moment at school pickup when your kid looks up and is trying to meet your eye. You know, you're looking down at your smartphone and your child is trying to meet your eye.  I have enough data from children who're going through this experience to know that it's a terrible moment for them.  It's on the playground…. I mean, be in the park. Be in the park with them….  Make it a moment. These are important moments.”

n  Sherry Turkle was interviewed by Krista Tippett on the American Public Media program On Being (formerly Speaking of Faith).  The full interview and rich resources (including podcasts, transcripts, and blogs about the show, entitled “Alive Enough?”) are available at http://being.publicradio.org/programs/2011/ccp-turkle/.

Peace education as an umbrella concept for our best educational aspirations

I envision peace education as an umbrella, encompassing education’s best efforts to empower youth to change the world for the better:  critical and creative thinking education, civics education, character and moral education, multicultural and antibias education, gender-equity education, conflict resolution and antiviolence education, social justice and global education, service learning, environmental education, and 21st century education to name major strands of teaching for the greater good.

In my website, www.teachforpeace.org I provide rationales for teaching peace along with an annotated list of peace education resources.  Organized in the think, care, act framework, visitors can find useful links to promote critical and creative thinking, compassionate care for local and global communities, and social action for the greater good.   As I update and revamp the site, I will list new links that are helpful to peace, character, global, and multicultural educators.  Here is an example:

                             
Human Rights Resource Center (University of Minnesota) http://hrusa.org/ 
This deeply linked site provides resources and rationales for teaching about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and human rights in general.  Useful questions, lessons, and downloadable files are available to connect literature, current events, history, and other curricula to the consideration of human rights.  Browse around to find resources for ages K-adult!

·         This is my Home http://www.hrusa.org/thisismyhome/project/about.shtml
Examples of resources available as pdfs are K-2 (Caring School Climate) or 6-8 (Justice or Injustice).  Lesson plans, rationales, and handouts are provided.  Social action steps are outlined, including sample letters and action plans.  Invaluable!

Some teachers may be unfamiliar with peace education, while others worry about having “something else” to teach. Cheryl Duckworth wrote about this issue in her June 20, 2011 blog: http://teachforpeace.blogspot.com/2011/06/you-might-already-be-teaching-peace-if.html

Irwin Abrams on Working for the Unseen Harvest

Recently, an online conversation among members of the Peace and Justice Studies Association began with responses to this quote posted by a member.  Author, poet, and activist Alice Walker was asked, “What good is the antiwar movement if it has failed to stop war?”   

Walker responded, “Sometimes you can’t see tangible results. You cannot see the changes that you’re dreaming about, because they’re internal…. But what we’re doing as we try to stop war externally, what we’re trying to do is to stop it in ourselves. That’s where war has to end. And until we can control our own violence, our own anger, our own hostility, our own meanness, our own greed, it’s going to be so, so, so hard to do anything out there. So I think of any movement for peace and justice as something that is about stabilizing our inner spirit so that we can go on and bring into the world a vision that is much more humane than the one that we have dominant today.” (quoted in Static by Amy Goodman, p. 295)

Her words remind me of Gandhi’s: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” 

A few years ago I asked a similar question about the effectiveness of peace education.  I was doing a program in Yellow Springs, Ohio, with Irwin Abrams, renowned peace education scholar and biographer of Nobel Peace Prize winners.  After our presentation I asked Irwin what I should tell people who complain that peace education is a process that is too slow to be effective.  I really wanted to know what to tell myself.

In his nineties, Irwin did not miss a beat.  He spun around and assured me, “We work for the unseen harvest.  There are consequences” of the work we do.  This promise of the “unseen harvest” has soothed, inspired, and kept me going in the years since. 

I guess it pays to be a historian.  Irwin took the long view, seeing the work of peace educators as having lasting effects, over generations of students, many of whom will take action for peace and justice.  Historian Howard Zinn’s long-term perspective of history also helps me see humans as ultimately good—striving for a better world as best we can, and our work as ultimately effective.  I am also inspired by the events portrayed in the film and book A Force More Powerful.  Thus, I am teaching students whom I feel will be better equipped to think, care, and act to build a peaceful world.  The harvest may be unseen, but our duty is to sow the seeds. 

Coming soon: A new book by Susan Gelber Cannon

Think, Care, Act: Teaching for a Peaceful Future

Committed to teaching for peace and justice, the author brings to life a teaching approach that empowers youth:

• to think critically and creatively about historical, current, and future issues,

• to care about classmates and neighbors as well as the global community,

• to act—locally and globally—for the greater good.

Think, Care, Act: Teaching for a Peaceful Future is readable, practical, conversational, and intimate.  It will inspire readers to build a just and peaceful world.

Think, Care, Act depicts the daily successes and struggles a peace educator undergoes in encouraging students to envision peace and gain tools to build a culture of peace. The author uses three imperatives—think, care, act—to infuse required curricula with peace, character, and multicultural concepts in daily activities throughout the year.  Chapters address critical and creative thinking; media and political literacy; compassionate classroom and school climate; explorations of racism, gender issues, civil discourse, global citizenship, war, and peace; and school, community, and global social-action projects. Chapters include rationales, lesson expectations, and classroom “play-by-play.” Students’ feedback about the impact of lessons is also featured. With its combination of theory and practice Think, Care, Act is unique. It will motivate teachers, education students, and scholars to employ “think, care, act” frameworks to empower students to build a peaceful future.

“Peace can be taught in practically every discipline if teachers truly concerned about the fate of this planet and its inhabitants have resources like this book to guide them…. [Cannon’s] sophisticated understanding of how to address these complex issues will help other teachers choosing to grapple with these difficult challenges.  If more teachers follow the guidelines she provides in this book, every student can learn about peace.”

Ian Harris, Author of Books, not Bombs;
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; from the Foreword

 “The writing is excellent: passionate and personal, blending serious content with an engaging, reader-friendly style.  This is an important book—for character education and all of education.”

Thomas Lickona, Author of Character Matters;
Director, Center for the 4th and 5th Rs;
Co-Director, Smart & Good Schools Initiative;
State University of New York-Cortland

A volume in Peace Education from Information Age Publishing
Series Editors Ian Harris, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee,
Edward J. Brantmeier, James Madison University, and Jing Lin, University of Maryland

IAP - Information Age Publishing, PO Box 79049, Charlotte, NC 28271    Web and bulk discounts available: http://www.infoagepub.com/products/Think-Care-Act