Creapeace Education: An East–West Framework for Connecting Creativity Education and Peace Education

• In Event: Educating for Peaceful Futures: Storytelling, Hopepunk Futures, and Social Cohesion

Proposal

Peace education and creativity education have often advanced in parallel but rarely in dialogue. Peace education emphasizes empathy, dialogue, and conflict resolution, while creativity education highlights divergent thinking, originality, and utility. Prior studies—such as arts-based peace initiatives or UNESCO’s integration of creative problem-solving—suggest links, but creativity is usually treated as an art-based activity or at best a supporting tool, rather than a coequal domain alongside peace education.
This paper introduces Creative Peace Education, which I call Creapeace education for short, as a new framework that theorizes and operationalizes the overlap between the two fields. The framework identifies three points of intersection: (1) cognitive—divergent thinking and especially originality joined with perspective-taking to encourage imaginative conflict resolution; (2) socio-emotional—openness and tolerance for ambiguity merged with empathy and dialogue to foster co-created solutions; and (3) action and result-based—project-based creativity combined with mediation practices, where even limited results are valued over inaction or daydreaming.
Unlike much of the existing work, this study goes beyond theory by suggesting rubrics that link creativity’s main characteristic (divergent thinking) and outputs (originality, usefulness) with peace capacities (dialogue quality, perspective-taking, conflict resolution). The framework draws on East–West perspectives, stressing that originality—often celebrated in Western contexts—and utility or harmony—often prioritized in Eastern traditions—are both essential in preparing learners for peacebuilding. This dual emphasis aligns with Galtung’s (2008) call to link the form and content of peace education more closely to everyday classroom practice.
By formalizing Creapeace education, this paper contributes theoretically by defining a new conceptual space, practically by equipping educators with tools for classroom conflict resolution, and globally by aligning with international policy agendas, including SDG 4.7 (United Nation, 2015) and post-2030 education frameworks.

Authors

• Ngoc Minh Ngoc Kim, George Washington University

• Kim Manh Tuan