Can Peace Education Be Angry and Activist? Reconciling Tensions

• In Event: Roundtable Session 45
  In Roundtable Session: Discursive Complexity and the Messiness of Curriculum Studies: Perversion, Falseness, Unreasonableness, and Anger

Abstract

Anger is implicated in nearly every social pathology from war to bullying to child abuse yet it is also the spark of reform for nearly every positive social movement. Anger is commonly pathologized education, and thus educators often fail to successfully integrate personal experiences of anger with their cultural, institutional, and political stimuli. This means that the personal elements of the political curriculum can be downplayed. Students are rarely instructed in ways to understand and reduce anger so that it serves as a political resource. This paper distinguishes peace education from other related approaches like and conflict resolution, mindfulness religious education, and critical education by its active and pragmatic focus on the relationship between anger and activism.

Author

• Elizabeth E. Heilman, Michigan State University