Summer Peacebuilding Program
Peacebuilding II: Professional Practices in Peacebuilding
(1 credit)
This one-week course provides opportunities for students to build on the awareness and skills developed in Peacebuilding I. Students much choose one section from the options available that year. Each section focuses on a different topic.
Current sections are:
Peace building and Development
Instructor: Tatsushi Arai, Ph.D.
In 1998, four years after the war and genocide of 1994, I was working in Butare, Rwanda as a university lecturer and NGO representative. One day a poorly-dressed young mother holding a baby visited my apartment from a local village nearby and started pleading desperately for help – to buy her sick baby food and medicine. The young mother's outcry has never left my mind, and urges me to ask a question: How can we create a society free from war and abject poverty? The objective of this elective is to jointly explore possible answers to this question.
Throughout the five-day intensive learning experience, the participants will be introduced to a broad range of useful frameworks of thinking and practical skills for transforming communal conflict and working for – and with – people deprived of access to basic human needs. As in other CONTACT courses, this elective draws heavily on the instructor's and participants' personal experiences, inspiring cases of social change from different parts of the world, small-group discussions, hands-on simulation exercises, and various techniques of experiential leaning. Anybody seeking to understand how peace building and development can be aligned and strengthened is most welcome.
Leadership and Community Building
Instructor: Kenneth Williams, EdD
An important aspect of working toward successful organizations and communities is adopting a leadership approach that is non-coercive and that values others as significant partners in a shared relationship. When leaders take on responsibilities with intention and commitment to service, there is more likelihood of building trust, managing conflicts, and creating harmonious work groups, institutions, and public events.
This elective is built on the assumption that everyone has leadership potential. The course will provide frameworks, skills, and practices to enhance one’s leadership skills, drawing on the instructor’s and participants’ personal experiences, videos, case studies of excellent leadership, small group discussions, and simulation exercises. Throughout this intensive learning experience, participants will be exposed to collaborative and inclusive leadership styles that favor shared decision-making, open processes, and inclusion of all stakeholders. Collaborative leadership, with its focus on full engagement and collective problem-solving, changes the ways communities, organizations, and even political entities operate, resulting in more effective solutions and more engaged populations. Special attention will be given to practicing leadership approaches that are appropriate for working with people from diverse backgrounds, utilizing the diversity of CONTACT as a learning laboratory.
Training in Direct Education for Peacebuilding and Social Change
Instructor: George Lakey
"Direct education for peacebuilding and social change" is built on the foundation of popular education, adding insights from new adult learning theory, group dynamics, and the latest in anti-oppression practice. Direct education brings creative new tools for leadership development, high performance teams, and cutting edge social movements. Its empowering theory and practice evolved in the last fifteen years from training in over 20 countries on five continents.
In this course participants will experience direct education, reflect on it, and figure out how to apply it in their own cultural setting. For experienced teachers and facilitators it provides a chance to take their next growth step into a new level of leadership skill and effectiveness. For participants who are new at teaching and facilitating it provides a chance to catch up on the state of the art in adult learning. For all participants the course invites you to an adventure that includes fun, risking, learning new things about groups, and learning new things about yourself. The methods of the course are hands-on, awareness building, and practical. Expect to work hard, stretch yourself, and meet a more powerful you at service to justice and community.
Instructor George Lakey is the Eugene M. Lang Visiting Professor for Issues in Social Change at Swarthmore College. He has been an activist in social movements for fifty years, published seven books, and founded and led a number of nongovernmental organizations. First arrested for a civil rights sit-in, George has worked with labor unions and poor people's groups as well as peace activists and environmentalists. He has led 1500 social change workshops on five continents. He was an unarmed bodyguard for human rights activists threatened with assassination in Sri Lanka, and was smuggled across the border to work with pro-democracy insurgents in the Burmese jungle. George's book Grassroots and Nonprofit Leadership(also published in Cairo and Belgrade) is available on the website of the organization he founded and led for fifteen years: Training for Change. Through a recent grant from the US Institute of Peace, George researched and published a training manual on third party nonviolent interventions in zones of conflict.
Phone:
877.257.7751, extension 3433
802.258.3433
TTY:
802.258.3388
Fax:
802.258.3320
Mailing Address:
PO Box 676, 1 Kipling Road
Brattleboro, VT 05302 USA