Abstract
Humanity's traditional approach to social problems, inequities, and abuses has been a deficit approach, using force, largely reactive, taking recourse to legalistic action, protests, or demonstrations. Social problems, inequities, and abuses continue despite efforts at building peace and resilience. Experts say that society knows very little about what peace is, and what it is not, because it studies peace only in terms of war, violence, aggression, and conflict. They advise that power (love) accomplishes with ease what force (fear, separation – legalistic action, warfare, protests, etc.) even with extreme effort cannot. This chapter introduces the universal language of and the underlying processes for sustaining quality peace and resilience as the means for affecting the necessary change from the deficit approach to power-based approaches. Teaching and learning the language of sustaining quality peace and resilience at all levels of education will contribute to quality education and education equity significantly.
TopIntroduction
About this Chapter and its Objectives
Education is a core building block of peace. It is a key enabler of resilience in modern society.
The world has been beset with destructive conflict and its problems for eons. The United Nations (UN) was established with a mandate to address the diverse global challenges and build universal peace together with its Member States. Yet, peace has been elusive and problems, persisting and evolving.
In 2015, the UN adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as “an urgent call to shift the world onto a more sustainable path” (UNDP, 2022). However, Nature (2020) reported that the SDGs “were already off course” and that (the scare of) the COVID-19 pandemic has put them out of reach. One year later, in 2016, the UN also adopted a new approach of “Sustaining Peace and Resilience” and decided to turn it into a meta-policy for itself and its Member States. Nonetheless, the approach was also criticized for vagueness – for not being specific and being difficult to operationalize (de Coning, 2018) – and peace remains elusive. Inequality in education contributes significantly to the absence of peace and the many problems of society (UNICEF, 2015). Addressing equality in education, contributing to making the teaching and learning of science for second language teachers and learners easier may be done more effectively within the context of strengthening peacebuilding processes.
Clearly, this world needs something major to help society to cultivate and carve a truly sustainable path; keep it on the path and focused on the path; develop and adopt specific and coherent (meta-strategies and their) meta-policies; and develop and apply the essential occupational intelligences – competences and volitions to complete specific tasks to agreed standards (Schultz & Buys, 2013) – to sustain the SDGs and Peace and Resilience effectively. The UN is aware of this need: The UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA) is running a Global Policy Dialogue Series on “The Future of Trust in Government” that is intended “to help the world navigate towards a sustainable recovery”. Trust on government and education systems that address inequality in education in real terms and effectively will improve significantly.
Enduring-peace is about the way people think and behave; it is about their habits and their enduring-culture. It is about how well and how meaningfully they learn meaningful stuff. The author of this chapter reviewed and augmented the Institute of Economics and Peace’s (IEP’s) “Pillars of Peace” into “10 Pillars for Sustaining Quality Peace & Resilience” to make the criticized new approach of the UN specific, meaningful, and actionable. Sustaining quality peace and resilience requires that each citizen gets adequate opportunity and support to excel in the areas of their choice; when second-language teachers and learners get proper opportunities and support to excel in science when they have chosen science as a discipline they pursue. This chapter bases itself on the “10 Pillars for Sustaining Quality Peace & Resilience” to propose “The Language of Sustaining Quality Peace & Resilience”. Sustaining quality peace and resilience is action and must be accompanied with processes that ensure the desired way of thinking, learning, acting, behaving, habits, and the enduring culture. Building the “10 Pillars for Sustaining Quality Peace & Resilience” is based on building groups, organizations and society into sustainable civil learning communities – humane citizens of high achievement.
The processes of building sustainable civil learning communities themselves include processes like Appreciative Inquiry (AI) (Srivastva and Cooperrider, 1986; Watkins and Mohr, 2001) and Community Making and Peace (Peck, 1987) for the social healing necessary for cognitive and social coherence, high achievement, healthy relations and social cohesion. AI continues to be practiced, taught, and updated at Weatherhead School of Management, the HeartMath Institute and David L. Cooperrider Center for Appreciative Inquiry; and Community Making and Peace continues to be encouraged at the Foundation for Community Encouragement (FCE). The processes are also based on the Geodesic Learning Model and Mind Mapping Approaches (Leaf et al., 1997) that are based on how the brain learns and stress higher thinking and learning how to learn plus Self-Directed Learning (Goleman et al., 2002) that helps to entrench ownership and fosters value-adding collaboration. The former activates learners’ potential for high achievement and thus contribute to alleviating the challenges of language in the teaching and learning of the sciences. Sustaining quality peace and resilience proposes a greater focus on transforming the individual within the context of the collective and together with the collective. Consciousness-Based Education facilitates this process by targeting the individual’s consciousness. The objectives of this chapter and teaching and learning the language of sustaining quality peace and resilience at all levels of education and for every citizen are, thus, to contribute significantly to quality education and education equity; and to contribute to making the new approach and meta-policy of the UN of “Sustaining Peace and Resilience” specific, meaningful, actionable, and more effective.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Quality Education: UNICEF (2000) provides a very comprehensive definition of quality education that includes healthy learners who are well-nourished, are ready to participate and learn, whose learning is supported by their families and communities; healthy, safe, and supportive environments; content that includes the foregoing elements and peace; inclusive child-centered processes that are facilitated by competent self-driven teachers; and actual outcomes that encompass life-supportive knowledge, skills and attitudes, and are linked to national goals for education (equity) and positive participation in society. Particularly critical (for sustainability) is UNICEF’s statement that effective and appropriate stimulation in a child’s early years influences the brain development and is necessary for emotional regulation, arousal, and behavioral management.
Appreciative Inquiry (AI): System-wide approach that seeks, identifies, and enhances the “life-giving forces” that are present when a system is performing optimally.
Mind Map: A tool that organizes thinking. It is a diagram in which a central idea or concept is drawn in the middle of the drawing surface and the associated ideas are drawn and arranged around it as branches. It resembles the way the brain works and enables its user to optimize their thinking and learning.
Geodesic Learning Model: An alternative non-traditional learning model that targets the whole brain and stresses higher thinking, learning how to learn and self-directed learning.
Optimum Health: In “This is the Water”, psychiatrists Thomson and Tasman (2022) point out the growing awareness that health care currently has a very limited role in the production of health. They urge the health fraternity to be more proactive with respect to the social determinants of mental health. To support their call, this chapter emphasizes optimum health to refer to health that includes the social determinants of mental health and physical health.
Morphic Fields: Underline the abilities of plants and animals to regenerate and heal after damage. They also coordinate the activities of the nervous system, and are closely connected to mental activity ( Sheldrake, 2015 ).
Health Equity: Means that everyone has a fair and just opportunity to be as healthy as possible. This requires removing obstacles to health such as poverty discrimination, and their consequences including powerlessness, inadequate opportunities for meaningful employment, and lack of access to good jobs with fair pay, quality education and housing, safe environments, and health (RWJF, 2017 AU61: The in-text citation "RWJF, 2017" is not in the reference list. Please correct the citation, add the reference to the list, or delete the citation. ). Nall (2020) provides some guidelines on how to improve it. Be that as it may, it has been argued that a common understanding of what health equity means is lacking (RWJF, 2017 AU62: The in-text citation "RWJF, 2017" is not in the reference list. Please correct the citation, add the reference to the list, or delete the citation. ).
Education Equity: McDermott, Frankenberg, and Williams (2013) say that education equity, also called educational equity, in education is a contested notion. This chapter is particularly interested in the equity commitment that is delineated in the preparation of all students for the 21 st century: High-quality academics, high-quality staff, broader community and family supports, research-based accountability, and aligned resources championed and orchestrated by well-developed leaders who can transform institutions by eliminating inequitable practices and cultivate the unique gifts, talents, and interests of every learner to enhance possibilities for the success of every learner (the author’s own positive twist). It follows, therefore, that strengthening every mother-to-be, mothers’, and caregivers’ relevant occupational intelligence for unlocking their babies’ potential would be a significant contribution to education equity.
Learning Company: An organization that facilitates the learning of all its members and consciously transforms itself and its environment.
Civil Learning Community: A group of individuals with consciously motivated behaviour that is ethical in submission to a Higher Power that is more knowledgeable, more objective and caring; who together facilitate the effective holistic learning and growth of all their members and consciously transform themselves, their enduring culture and their context; and who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure, and who have developed some significant commitment to rejoice together, mourn together and to delight in each other, make others’ conditions their own. Members of civil learning communities become responsive servant leaders; they do things they did not know they were capable of; learn more easily, become eager to learn, and become more intelligent because they tap more from the universe; exude energies from reserves they did not even know they had; and have no energy for destructive behaviours ( Peck, 1987 ; Pedler, Burgoyne & Boydell, 1997 ; Spiritual Resources, 2020 ).