Strengthening Teacher Professional Development for long-lasting peace in the digital age (UNESCO)

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Supporting Teachers to Curb the Polycrises through Education: Reimagining Teacher Professional Development for Peace and Socio-Ecological Justice

Proposal

The UNESCO Recommendation on Education for Peace, Human Rights and Sustainable Development was adopted by consensus by all 194 Member States in 2023. It is an affirmation of the multilateralism and global solidarity needed to address increasing polycrises – particularly the resurgence of armed conflicts and rising forms of hatred, polarization, discrimination, and racism – all of which are aggravated by climate change, some negative impacts of digital transformation. It further posits education as vital to advancing sustainable peace.

The Recommendation broadly views peace as both the absence of violence (“negative peace”) and the eradication of its root causes (“positive peace”). Consequently, it outlines the role of education as a system-wide mobilization to not only educate responsible, respectful and engaged citizens but also to critically engage and address these various societal root causes of conflicts, tensions and crises in order to build, protect, and sustain peace. It further recognizes the development of teachers and education personnel as one of the key policy action areas to be transformed, to help ensure the education system reaches its full peace potential. It calls for providing system-wide investments in professional development and learning opportunities that engage teachers through a coherent and integrated approach; cultivating educators’ own global citizenship, informed by their local contexts; ensuring the teaching workforce is diverse and mirrors the rich tapestry of the wider community; and supporting safe environments for educators, both with regards to their physical and psycho-social safety. To ensure these and other vital aspects are concretized in practice, specific actions to support teachers as key actors in transforming education into a force for peace have been compiled in a forthcoming UNESCO Implementation Guide for the 2023 Recommendation. This Guide has a dedicated section on teachers’ professional development, to be presented within the paper.

Moreover, to further unpack the conceptualization of education for peace and what this means in practice, UNESCO is developing new work tying together key affronts to peace, clarifying what is meant by education for peace, contrasting and synthesising it with existing conceptions and approaches, and extending them by examining the entire education system and its role in peace and conflict dynamics. The working paper will show how education for peace transcends individual, attitudinal, or behavioural change dimensions, by taking a broader systemic and institutional approach that engages power, inequalities, injustices, and historical silences and grievances that drive most conflicts. It also aims to provide a preliminary conceptual roadmap for designing and implementing comprehensive education for peace interventions before, during, and after conflicts, including teacher professional development.

In sum, this paper presentation will briefly introduce the 2023 Recommendation and its political process before highlighting how the implementation guide might be utilized by policymakers and practitioners alike, with a focus on TPD. The presentation will then highlight the new conceptual work and lay a firm political and theoretical foundation for the remaining three papers in the panel.

Authors: Chief of Section on Global Citizenship and Peace Education, UNESCO ,Cecilia Barbieri (c.barbieri@unesco.org), Jelena Zelenovic, Programme Specialist, Kuany Kiir Kuany, Project Officer

Authors

• Cecilia Barbieri, UNESCO

• Jelena Zelenovic, UNESCO

• Kuany Kiir Kuany, UNESCO