Peace Education

The Concept, Principles, and Practices Around the World

Gavriel Salomon, Baruch Nevo

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN:
  9780415650762
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135636036
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie en psychologie

Peace Education:
* presents views on the nature of peace education, its history, and relationships to neighboring fields;
* examines relevant psychological and pedagogical principles, such as the contact experience, conciliation through personal story telling, reckoning with traumatic memories, body-work, and the socio-emotional aspects of reconciliation; and
* introduces an array of international examples from countries, such as Croatia, Northern Ireland, Israel, South Africa, Rwanda, and the United States in order to generalize lessons learned.

A "must have" for all those thinking, planning, conducting, and studying peace education programs, it is intended for scholars, students, and researchers interested in peace and conflict resolution in higher education and volunteer and public organizations. Its cross disciplinary approach will appeal to those in social and political psychology, communication, education, religion, political science, sociology, and philosophy.

III
The Practice

14
Belgium: The Triangle of Peace—Education, Legislation, Mediation

Johan Leman
Catholic University of Leuven

Based on my practical experience with multicultural education and antiracism training in Brussels, this chapter inquires into how these programs may be enriched by peace education and how peace education may find some support in them for its rationale. However, above all, I attempt to show that this practical experience demonstrates primarily that when one cultivates mutual understanding on a long-term basis, it is interesting to develop a triangle consisting of education, mediation, and legislation as a frame of reference. This applies not only to multicultural education and antiracism training but also to peace education.

However, before I go on to this and in order for the reader to better grasp the experiences described, I first briefly describe the Belgian interethnic and political situation.

THE BELGIAN INTERETHNIC AND POLITICAL SITUATION

Belgium is a federal state comprising three communities, those speaking Flemish, those speaking French, and those speaking German; and three regions, Flanders, Wallonia, and Brussels. Flanders consists only of citizens from the Flemish Community. Wallonia consists primarily of a French-speaking community but also has a small German-speaking community. Brussels, also the capital of Belgium, is largely made up of a French-speaking community (85%) but contains a small number of citizens of the Flemish community as well (15%). Nonetheless, the Dutch-speaking Flemish citizens constitute 60% of the Belgian population. In addition, approximately 10% of the Belgian population do not possess Belgian citizenship (immigrants and expatriates). Most of these people live in Brussels. In contrast, Belgium is known to have a procedure for citizenship acquisition that is both lenient and rapid and recognizes dual citizenship. This means that, in reality, the number of inhabitants of foreign origin is, in fact, much larger than one would suspect from the total number of foreigners, especially for Brussels.

In spite of all this, however, it is important to understand that the immigration of non-Europeans to Belgium is of a recent nature, dating from the 1960s continuing till today. Nevertheless, until the 1990s the colonial relationship between Belgium and the former Belgian Congo never resulted in large numbers of Congolese people coming to Belgium.

With regard to the institutional and political aspects important to our subject, Belgium is ruled by a federal government, within whose authority lie the official recognition of religions, antiracist legislation, and the decision whether or not to grant the right to vote in municipal elections.

However, there are two areas important to us, over which the federal government is not authorized: education, which belongs to the language communities, specifically the Flemish and French, and employment, which is in the hands of the regional government.

The programs discussed in this chapter take place in the Brussels’ Capital Region. Multicultural education comes under the jurisdiction of the Flemish community in Brussels (albeit quantitatively, more education is provided for the French community of Brussels), whereas police training for dealing with antiracism is a matter for the federal government. Moreover, since 1990, Belgium has had an Inter-Ministerial Committee on Immigrant Policy. This is a forum in which the various approaches to integration by the federal, regional, and the community governments are coordinated.

On the streets of Brussels, for the most part, one hears French spoken, although English does predominate in some neighborhoods and districts. However, Dutch, the language of the majority of Belgians, also has its place in Brussels. In economic and geographical terms, the capital region is oriented more toward Flanders than toward the southern part of the country. In Brussels, the labor market demands, as the norm, multilingualism (primarily French and Dutch) of employees.

Also typical of the streets of Brussels are the twilight zones, characterized by the large presence of low-skilled North African and Turkish foreigners (and recently also illegal aliens and newcomers from Africa and Eastern Europe), primarily residing in the center of town (and not on the outskirts as in other European metropolitans). The relatively strong presence of poorly educated, unemployed, and unmarried young men led to certain kinds of street crime, which, for a while, in turn led to an increased police involvement. This resulted in a mutually negative conceptualization by ethnic minority youths and the police.

It is in this setting that the two kinds of projects presented here are situated. For one thing, they try to convey a positive, multicultural attitude through education, and for another, they attempt to teach antiracism through specific training. It is our intention to examine these two programs from the angle of peace education.

MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION PROGRAMS FOR CHILDREN

In 1981, Flemish kindergartens and the primary school education system in Brussels, under the auspices of the Foyer, a Flemish Regional Minorities Integration Centre for Brussels, set up trilingual, bicultural education projects (Byram & Leman, 1990). Today, there are still seven schools that are actively and successfully involved in these projects. Three of the projects work mainly with Turkish children, two with Spanish, and a further two with Italian children. In each case, Belgian children from both the French-speaking and Flemish communities, as well as some Moroccan children, are involved. The projects are called bicultural, but nevertheless the intercultural dimension plays a fundamental role. Specific to these projects, but less important in the context of a discussion on multicultural issues, is the trilingual dimension (Leman, 1999a).

Thirty percent of the instruction in kindergarten and during the first 2 years of primary school is given in the child’s mother tongue. Then, in the years that follow, children are increasingly taught in the schools’ dominant teaching language (Dutch) and several hours per week in the dominant language of the street in Brussels (French).

The social-ethnic profile of the schools involved shows that the following categories of pupils can be distinguished: autochthonous Dutch speakers, autochthonous French speakers, autochthonous pupils from mixed-language families (French and Dutch), allochthonous French speakers, and depending on the school, also Turks, Italians, and Spaniards who speak or wish to learn their mother tongue.

The aim of the directors of this project is that the immigrant children from ethnic minorities have a relatively good trilingual command by the end of their primary school education, above all with a good academic knowledge of Dutch (because this is the language they will be using in their secondary school education), a reasonable conversational knowledge of the first language (or the so-called mother tongue), and an acceptable knowledge of written French for their age (a language that they will still often use as a lingua franca for interethnic contacts in Brussels).

For the development of an intercultural perspective, Foyer has divided the curriculum into five categories: language use, the strictly academic courses (mathematics and sciences), the world-orientation courses (history, geography, religion, and ethics), physical education, and the more artistic courses. In practice, the trend is to acquire the intercultural education by means of an adequate allocation of elements from the five areas: a hidden curriculum through the presence and the contents of mother-tongue education, an introduction to the world-orientation course in an intercultural perspective, though not limited to the cultures of the children present in the class, and a certain consideration for emotional and artistic enrichment by means of elements of several cultures. The differentiating approach to language is a way to perceive knowledge of group markers.

This chapter does not seek to discuss the success or the possible failings of this method. Important evaluation studies were made in the school year 1986–1987; evaluations were published in Danesi (1989), Fernandez de Rota, and del Pilar Irimia Fernandez (1989), Byram and Leman (1990), and Leman (1991), and they were later repeated, as late as in 1998 (see Leman, 1999a, 1999b). The aims of the evaluations were, among other things, to examine the change in the school culture from monoculturalism to multiculturalism, the position of parents of minority children, the processes of hybridization, and so on.

Assessments that were made, and which are probably also of consequence to peace education programs, concern the parents’ positions and those of the minority teachers in these multicultural projects. Non-Belgian and Belgian parents alike are affirmed in the important role they play generally and in running the school and, in particular, in their responsibility for the educational success of their children. As for the teachers, the vast teaching staff is always designed to include some minority colleagues. In multicultural, education programs designed for children, the status of parents and teachers of minority groups, not to mention that of other significant parties (such as peers), can determine the effectiveness of the program (Marchi 1991, pp. 201–207;1999b, pp. 127–134). When minority teachers do not enjoy the same status in a school as their “native” colleagues, the difference will soon be felt by both pupils and parents and a social-ethnic hierarchy is created (Smeekens, 1990).

However, peace education is also achieved by concretizing the multicultural perspective. The members of staff are encouraged, through various programs, to get to know their pupils’ social communities better. There are also courses, either integrated into the teaching curriculum or running adjacent to them, on specific topics, such as using humor as a weapon against racism or intercultural language considerations. The intercultural study of language is a moment of reflection (Ali, 1999). Visits to a children’s center, called “Normal-Foreign Palace,” are used as a teaching aid in addition to the more general approaches to diversity and difference. The aim of these programs is to teach both children and parents about creating a positive image of allochthonous and other minority groups. Some of the participants of the projects voluntarily attend language holidays, which are organized between children of the majority language group (not necessarily in the homes of parents who have children in the school) and children of the minority groups.

From these data, we may conclude that at this moment in these multicultural education programs, there are, in fact, various elements that are applicable to peace education and, as such, there are elements of actual peace education already present. An important research topic for 2002 and 2003 will show how this mutual relationship can be further explored and optimized. An additional qu...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• Contributors
• I The Concept
• II Underlying Principles
• III The Practice
• IV The Research
• Author Index
• Subject Index