Integrating Peace Education into Health Education and Promotion Training in Iran to Foster Personal and Community Wellbeing

• In Event: Fostering Peace Education, Countering Militaristic Education, and and Empowering Communities in Diverse National Contexts

Proposal

In many countries, the current over-emphasis in higher education and adult training on strictly utilitarian job skills preparation has leeched out several soft skills and social values that promote deeper goals like community wellbeing, social solidarity and peaceful co-existence. In settings experiencing high levels of social conflict and stress, and more generally in the new digital age where online interactions encourage reactive and impulsive behavior, building the foundations of social-emotional self-regulation and mindfulness is urgently needed. This set of presentations describes efforts to emphasize these values and practices in and around Iran through university-level health education courses and a regional, online, teacher training course on peace education.

Professor Zanjani has been training students at the Islamic Azad University in Iran in health education and promotion for a number of years. Dr. Zanjani is particularly interested in fostering approaches to health education that address the needs of vulnerable populations adversely affected by community conflict, social exclusion and trauma. These include experiments in the classroom with creative experiential methods to build social cohesion, foster inclusion and encourage collaboration among students.

Julia Bouchelle has worked as a community educator in rural Panama and Tanzania and is trained as a peace educator. Ms. Bouchelle helped co-design and co-lead a peace education course in a regional summer school for educators including Dr. Zanjani. The focus of the course was on concepts, principles and practices of peace education and was taught virtually by leveraging digital tools and platforms to connect with learners in highly restrictive political environments.

The multicultural nature of Iranian society, the high prevalence of violent behaviors, Iran’s geographical location in the volatile Middle East, and the need to develop relations with other nations make it necessary to establish peace studies (Sadoughi, 2023). One example of peace education in Iran is the Peace Education Manual produced by the Tehran Museum and Berghof Foundation in 2016 (https://berghof-foundation.org). What does peace education that strengthens social-emotional intelligence and promotes peaceful co-existence look like in practice? Both presenters will share ways they engage their adult learners using creative experiential methods so that they directly experience ways of building positive peaceful culture to address trauma, social exclusion and community-level conflict. This example of the "how" of peace education values-in-action demonstrates that this approach can be transformational, that is, galvanizing learners to take action as peaceful community members and peace educators themselves.


References
Berghof Foundation. (n.d.). https://berghof-foundation.org/

Sadoughi, Z. (2023). The necessity of establishing “peace studies” in Iranian universities. Journal of Peace Education, 20(3), 316–338. https://doi.org/10.1080/17400201.2023.2233269

Authors

• Julia L Bouchelle, American University

• Samaneh Zanjani