• Bridge the local and the global. Make connections to students’ lives.
  Teaching any international issue can be difficult, as it may seem very remote to students. They may think, “How does this relate to me?” or “Why should I care?” By making connections to students’ own lives, it becomes possible to unearth the inherent connections between what happens locally and what happens globally. When we build such bridges and connections for our students, international issues take on a new significance and a greater resonance.

• Emphasize multiple perspectives
  Conversations on difficult topics allow us to experience and learn different perspectives. It is, therefore, important for our students to develop the capacity to listen to one another and truly hear what each other have to say. In the process of conversation, disagreement may occur, but this can provide students with an opportunity to clarify their own perspectives and consider how other people’s views can inform their opinions. Disagreement is natural and should be considered a healthy part of conversation. Learning to manage conflict is often about effectively dealing with disagreement before it can escalate to violence.

• Dialogue vs. Debate
  Debate is a useful educational exercise and has its place in the classroom when discussing complex topics. However, the process of dialogue can contribute significantly to the classroom climate, encouraging an open mind and developing active listening skills. Unlike debate, which concludes with a winner and involves a process of listening for holes in the opponent’s arguments, dialogue assumes there is no winner or loser in conversation. In the process, of dialogue, listening is for the sole purpose of enhancing a student’s own understanding of a topic.

• Focus on individuals. Translate statistics into people.
  Statistics can be very powerful, but when talking about issues that seem incredibly remote to our students, we want to get beyond the numbers, to humanize the topic, to make it personal and, therefore, more real. For example, if you hear from one source that there are an estimated 300,000 child soldiers in 30 countries around the world (Source: Council on Foreign Relations), it is easy to become overwhelmed by the numbers and feel that nothing can be done. But when you learn about the experience of individual child soldiers in Sierra Leone trying to find their families after the war, and about what is being done to help them, you can begin to understand their plight and learn about ways to help.

• Share real stories
  One of the ways to humanize statistics is by sharing real stories. It is important that students hear the voices of people whose lives have been affected by conflict, and that they move beyond the abstract to the concrete. They also would benefit from hearing stories about what the U.S. Institute of Peace does and how it engages the military and non-military in resolving international conflicts.
  
  Stories can create bonds by illustrating shared experiences. A student in a school in the United States might be surprised to hear the hobbies and interests of a young person in a conflict zone – surprised because their interests are so similar. Suddenly, the world becomes smaller. That other person seems less foreign, less remote. Stories can also help clarify concepts that may otherwise seem elusive, making the abstract suddenly very real. At a deeper level, real stories bring home the impact of international conflict on individual lives by tapping into students’ empathy. With stories, the answer to the question, “Why should I care?” becomes more evident.

• Leave Students Feeling Empowered
  Difficult topics like international conflict, which involve human suffering, can be overwhelming for any individual. Often when students learn about a new topic, such as an outbreak of unrest in the Middle East or a refugee crisis in Africa, they receive a wealth of information that leaves them feeling a sense of despair, feeling that the situation is so much bigger than them and nothing can be done to ameliorate the problem. Educators must think carefully about how they can assure students that people around the world care about international issues and are taking action, and that solutions exist and are being pursued. These concrete and positive examples can alleviate the feeling of despair. But, more importantly, educators must work with students to leave them feeling empowered, knowing that they, too, can take action as an individual or as a community of young people, and they can make a difference.

Our Peacebuilding Toolkit for Educators is a living resource––we value input from educators as we seek to create the most useful lessons to engage the next generation of peacebuilders. Submit your suggestions and best practices for using (or supplementing) the themes and lessons of the Toolkit.