Pedagogy_of

Chapter Four
THE PEDAGOGY OF THE STRUCTURED EDUCATION FOR PEACE

Pedagogy can be described as “the art, science, or profession of teaching,
especially, the study that deals with principles and methods in formal
education.” In this section of my thesis, I hope to spell out as much as I
could, the pedagogy of the structured peace education being proposed.
This section will therefore deal with principles and methods of training that
would go into the structured peace education. The word “education” itself
has so many meanings, but for this purpose, I will choose the one that
meets the requirements of the structured peace education, i.e. “the
education of the will.” The mission of our structured peace education,
therefore, is the pedagogical task of educating the will of the African
peacebuilder.”

4.1.        Why Educate the Will?

A popular saying has it that “where there is a will there is a way.” If peace is
to be achieved on earth it will take the “entire will of humanity to make it
happen.” Our will needs a positive education for it to be nurtured and
directed. If the education received is wrong, like training people only in
violence and not in peace, the tendency is that the will of the people always
will be inclined to violence rather than peace.

I have listed a number of peacemaking and peacebuilding models in the
last section of this thesis. However, according to Bainton, “All of the
devices thus far considered for the elimination of war will be futile without
the will to peace.” It could be seen clearly from history that the Christians
had no justification to blame the non-Christians, especially the Turks and
the Muslims, for world unpeacefulness, because Christians had violated
Christians and Christian nations had fought other Christian nations several
long deadly wars. So also, Islam cannot blame all atrocities to the Christian
Crusades because the house of Islam had fought several wars within the
household of their faith. All men and women, boys and girls, children and
the adult, rulers and the ruled, are eligible for structured peace education.

4.2.        The Pedagogical Process
The pedagogical process will begin with the student and then the subject to
be taught. After the student and the subject have been thoroughly
understood, then we will look at the teacher and the environment. Having
settled down the issues of student, subject, teacher and environment, we
shall proceed to examine the method and praxis in that order.

4.3.        The Student
In this pedagogical approach, the student is the non-negotiable; he is the
function for which other parts of the pedagogy exist. This will assume both
theological and spiritual values since ethnicity and religion, for which we
hope to set our peace education around elementally, are both theological
and spiritual. If the man is redeemed, the society will be redeemed. If the
man is saved the universe will be saved. Redemption and salvation are not
found in men or what man has done, but in what God has done, what he is
doing, and what he will do. When the will of the student is educated to
embrace what God has done, it would be easy for him to participate in what
God is doing so that he could become what God wants him to be.

4.4.        The Subjects to be taught
This has to do with courses that would make up the curriculum for the
structured peace education. Though our subjects and courses will have
titles, names, topics and themes, what will be taught in each case would be
God’s Truth. In all probability, it could be assumed that our students have
the Truth of God deposited in them and that this Truth is only waiting to be
revealed, cultivated, grown and harvested. This will therefore be a teacher-
student-teacher enterprise, where with the help of the Holy Spirit, both
minds will be illuminated so that the glory of God could be revealed.
Revelation alone may not suffice, knowing and doing will be the goal.

4.5.        The Teacher
The teacher has an onerous task laid out before him/her. David P.
Nystrom, commenting on James 3:1-2 insisted that “the responsibilities of
teaching in the context of the church are serious, so serious that great
deliberation ought to accompany the aspiration.”   In addition to being a
catalyst for learning, a facilitator and a moderator, the teacher must
assume great responsibility for the subject being taught. Since the whole
idea behind the structured education for peace is to reverse wrong societal
values ascribed to violence and replace them with the truth and healing
power of peace and non-violence, the teacher might find himself driving
upstream instead of drifting downstream with general public inclination and
propensity for violence.   And since the boat of knowledge is powered by
God’s Truth, the chances for success are high when compared to the
fatality of drifting away into the high seas where the ship will be wrecked
and its occupants submerged and drowned in falsehood.

4.6.        The Environment
The environment in which this curriculum will be taught will necessarily be
multi-cultural and multi-religious. It ought to be recognized also that
practicing what is taught is equally essential. By environment therefore, is
meant both the physical and the spiritual. The student would be
encouraged to create personal learning opportunities by creating periods
of aloneness for reflective meditation, corporate Christian worship, and
interaction with the family, friends and the community at large.

4.7.        Methods and Praxis
In her book - Learning Styles – Marlene D. LeFever presents us with the
opportunities mostly needed to reach out to students for learning to take
place. She reported on some studies carried out by Bernice McCarthy in
which four styles in the learning cycle had been identified as follows:

1.        Imaginative Learning – easily sharing from ones past experience,
thus providing a context for learning to take place.

2.        Analytic Learning – needing to learn something new in every lesson
by analyzing its component parts.

3.        Common Sense Learning – needing to see if what one is learning
makes some sense now and in the present.

4.        Dynamic Learning – finding creative ways to use what one has
learned.

The curriculum and teaching plans will be so constructed to ensure that
these four learning styles are respected.

Learning imaginatively will help the African who already had a store of
experience of past tribal hostilities and its direct and indirect narcissistic
effects upon him/her as an individual and the tribe to which he or she
belongs. Sharing their past experience by telling their stories could provide
some learning opportunities for the imaginative thinker and thus lead to
some form of learning experience that could transform the individual’s
personality and the state of his/her mind.

Since the analytic learner is looking for something new to learn, a thorough
analysis of the cause and effect of tribal hostilities could turn him or her on
and make him or her analytically responsive in different ways to conditions
that has continually generate tribal hatred in his or her community.

The role that public opinions play in the engineering of tribal hostilities
cannot be underestimated. Barash and Webel mentioned that “most
governments in modern times recognize that war requires the mobilization
of national sentiments, and so if real affronts to national dignity, honor, or
well-being are not available, pretexts are typically arranged.”

In his own book, Sharpening Conflict Management, Joseph G. Bock
explains that violent engineers can create flash points through rumor
spreading. He said “Flash points are when time and place intersect to
increase the likelihood of Ethnoreligious tension that is unusually
susceptible to manipulation into bloodshed.”   He went further to say that
“such violence occurs when that manipulation invokes emotions of hatred,
anger, frustration, fear, and insecurity, thereby overwhelming people to the
point of “mob psychology” in the direction of violence.”

One way to undermine adverse public opinion is to use the power of
common sense. Though the idea is to help our students see that what they
are learning makes sense, it would also empower them to proactively learn
how to evaluate the common sense in public opinions, and determine
whether or not the public are just being used, manipulated out-rightly
misled.

In this way also we can provide our dynamic and creative students with
learning opportunities that could help in the creation of new ways and
means to proactively stop tribal hatred and hostilities, promote love and
peace, and acquired greater level of justice in the community.

Bock describes this situation as ‘trigger events’, which according to Moyer
“are opportunities to foster structural justice when there is a coincidence of
a prepared opposition and a public outrage that creates general awareness
and indignation.”

LeFever believes that each person is given something to do that shows
who God is and when everyone gets this positively internalized, everyone
benefits. Our focus therefore to teaching proactive peacemaking and
peace building would follow the natural process, which LeFever outlines as
follows:

1.        Learners begin with what they know or need. What happened
before must provide the groundwork for what will happen now. “Real
learning cannot take place in a vacuum.” Dr. Paul Lederach affirms this
assertion when he says “Education cannot be neutral.”

2.        This real-life connection prepares them for the next step – learning
something new. This is why an aspect of the curriculum will introduce the
students into “Africa in Historical Perspectives”.

3.        In the third step, learners use the new content, practicing how it
might work in real life. Having understood the how of the past, and the why
of the present, our students will then be taught new ideas about peace
studies, peacemaking, peacebuilding, conflict resolution and
transformation, etc.

4.        The final step demands that learners creatively take what they have
learned beyond the classroom. In this way our students will be encouraged
to apply the new found knowledge to heal their community, religions, politics
and economics. This form of applied learning will help in creating the
desires to bring about the true African Renaissance and the Africa Future
Land of Peace.

LeFever consequently submits that teaching models that emphasizes only
knowledge acquisition may fail to deal with the developmental reality of the
learning styles of the students. She opined that when teachers understand
students’ learning styles and adjust their teaching to those styles, students
will learn. Consequently, “teaching to styles enables teachers to begin
reaching everyone God gave them to teach.”

At this juncture, I would like to turn to Palmer Parker for wisdom. Parker
had done huge work on the art of education, taking in his strides, the life of
the students, the subject and the teacher. Parker considers both the
student and the subject as large and complex as life itself, but
unfortunately, “the knowledge of the teacher about both of them is always
flawed and partial.”

This is exactly true for peace education packaged for the grassroots in
Africa. The student is complex, and the subject is complex, but the teacher
is limited in knowledge of both the student and the subject. The solution to
this problem would be one where the teacher maintains his/her identity with
a view to sustaining his/her integrity. By accepting that he/she is also a
learner along with the student, it would be possible for them to both
experiment with the truth of the subject together and discover for
themselves a lasting solution, the outcome of which they could jointly own.

This, in other words, is what Lederach has described as “popular
education.” According to Lederach, “popular education holds that
education is never neutral.” Popular education promotes change both in
social and educational systems because as a process of mutuality it helps
the teacher and the student discover and learn together through reflection
and action. Since people and their everyday understanding are key
resources to learning and transformation, posing problems relative to real-
life situations and challenges could become important pedagogical tool.

Though I have veered a little into a situation where the thoughts of the
teacher and the understanding of the student will jointly converge at a
confluence in order to create a common water that flows downstream and
become a large river, the quality of the waters of this newly formed river
must determinedly change, because of the mixture that had taken place.
Perhaps, this is what the education system in Africa and the whole of the
third worlds needs to overcome loss of identity and lack of integrity. Imagine
for a moment that of what use will an education be that could not mix with
the understanding of the student. Though the cost of creating this
condition might be huge and the experiment risky, yet it is worth trying when
compared with a situation where an education is presented with little or no
impact upon the student. Quantitatively, the ground covered may seem
little, but qualitatively, the impact would be long lasting.

Before returning to the role of the teacher in this pedagogical experiment, it
is necessary to address the subject of peacemaking in Africa more
generally. The fact is that fewer attempts, if any, had been made to
institutionalize peace education in Africa, especially at the level we are
contemplating to launch it. Generally speaking, peace education, as an art,
is believed to be relatively young, probably less than fifty years old, when
compared to other social sciences. Besides this, on going debates are still
discussing whether peace studies should be regarded as a liberal art of
social science. As could be seen from the academic catalogues of several
colleges, peace studies are more often than not attached to other social
science departments, such as History, Political Science, Religion or even
Music. Other practices had been to run courses as informal training or just
establish peace institutes where specific conflict resolution, mediation and
transformation skills are taught.

The question as to whether we should regard peace studies as an essential
part of moral or liberation theology, or as any other form of social science,
remains to be answered. However, what we know is that we want to make
an impact on the African tribal scene by introducing structured education
for peacebuilding that could guarantee a meaningful social change for
Africans.

Fortunately, this matter is not as hopeless as it seems. As much as war
and violence could be traced to antiquity, so also is peace and
peacemaking. Moral theology, if properly and effectively applied, already
provides humanity with means to achieve positive peace. In the words of
Bernard Haring, “The dimension for peace belongs to all parts of social
ethics, medical ethics, ecological responsibility, social economic life, and
particularly to the ethics of politics, the goal of which is a truthful politics of
peace, of co-operation for a healthy public opinion, and indeed to all facets
of human life.”

Whether we like it or not, a moral theology which gives the gospel of peace
its proper place will be better rooted in the Bible and in the dynamics of the
history of salvation. This suggests that prophetic messages coupled with
the gospel of peace, God’s promises and gifts in Jesus Christ, the Prince of
Peace, establish a hope that humanity can expect a future full of peace.

We are also blessed with a genre of peace literatures, peace audio and
visuals, peace movements, peace churches, as well as ideologies and
attitudes that promote pacifism and peaceful co-existence. By removing all
impediments to peace and providing the right peace education, people
could live a life of peace because they could collectively reject violence and
war as an aberration of life.

It is possible to also glean more wisdom from Palmer about pedagogy.
Through the right approach to peace education, we can draw out the truth
of peace education. The goal of the structured education for peace would
therefore be to draw out the truth that “war is an aberration; it has no right
to exist.” One sure way to achieve this goal is through a re-oriented
pedagogy, one that departs from objectivism and subjectivism, but that
helps us to use “the truth that lays the claim of community on our individual
and collective lives” to overcome the challenges of the realities of our
differences and to embrace plurality that enhance peaceful co-existence.

There are some realities of our existence that we must overcome with the
truth of our existence. We may not look alike, our colors may not be the
same, we may speak different languages, but the truth is that we are all
human beings. We are created in the image of God. We are assigned to
live together on earth. We have the common blood flowing down through
our veins. We feel and communicate pains in the same way, universally.

4.8.        Having Faith Enough to Labor for Peace and Justice in Africa
Bernard Haring, in his book, the Healing Power of Peace and Nonviolence
insists that “to be Christian is to be an eschatological peacemaker.” It could
be garnered from this statement that peacemaking is an integral part of the
end-time obligations of Christians. The question to ask therefore is: “Why
has the Christian Church failed to champion the cause of peace and justice
in Africa all these times?

Dr. Daniel Schipani helps us to find an answer to the question raised above
when he says “the practicing way of knowing God includes a particular view
of Christian faith with a strong emphasis on the practice of justice.”   It is
one thing to profess faith in God and what God can do, but it is another
thing “to know God enough to want to participate in God’s vision for equality
and justice for humanity.”

Psalm 94:20 asks an important question, one that is more theological in
language and which should challenge Christians who participate in corrupt
and unjust regimes to re-examine their conscience. “Can a corrupt throne
be allied with you – one that brings on misery by its decrees?’

People who chose to stand for justice in Africa and elsewhere expose
themselves to great harms, risks and danger. In Africa, there are several
forces, natural and unnatural, physical and spiritual, that are opposed not
only to the promised reign of God, but also to those who are actively
participating in its reality.

While the Africans of the 20th century can claim that they have shaken off
the derogatory labels of “dark continent, backwoodness and
backwardness,” statistics conducted on any subject still put African nations
at the bottom of the scale of all good things and at the top of the scale of
things considered bad. A cursory look at issues such as education, human
rights violations, child and gender abuse, corruption, poverty, AIDS/HIV,
economic and political decadence would support the truth of this statement.

Africa is still in the dark in spite of the presence of abundant opportunities
that could have qualified her people as enlightened. Cynicism, frustration,
hopelessness, inordinate ambitions, religious intolerance and economic
inefficiency are some of the conditions that are precluding true
development in Africa. Whether by design or accident, commission or
omission, Africans and their leaders still allow themselves to be taken
advantage of politically and economically.

It is a common sense fact that a price must be paid for development of any
kind to take place. However, Africans are paying a price, but not for
development. They fought wars and battles but not for true freedom. They
piled up educational laurels and degrees but not for advancement.
Africans are religious but not for collective liberation. Africans have lost
their golden attributes of being their brothers’ keeper and they are rapidly
becoming their brothers’ killers instead. There are so many ways by which
Africans are killing one another instead of keeping one another.

The governments are killing the citizens economically, socially and
religiously. Governments that neglect to promote the wellbeing of her
citizen through lack of functional economic programs good health care
systems, and sustainable educational programs are killing their own people.
African governments are famous for ruining the economic initiatives of the
ordinary citizens by their failure to provide the minimum economic enabling
environment that could make business grow. Incessant power outages,
lack of water supply, damaged roads and inadequate transportation
systems, are some of the evils that plague economic development at the
grassroots in Africa.

To overcome this situation calls for cooperation on the part of the Africans
themselves. One form of solution that philosophers, theologians and
educators like Paulo Freire and Daniel Schipani had recommended is the
“blending of Christian education by making the focus of moral theology a
means to conscientization, liberation, and creativity and by accommodating
a social reformation that is conscientious enough to produce positive
change.”

Conscientization, as explained by Paulo Freire, and in the sense used
above, means, the inner desire to change things including ones own life
styles, with the determination to break-off any form of external yokes that
hinders true emancipation. No one could start to talk about this without
having faith in God’s liberative work and a readiness to participate in that
work. The faith in God for re-educating Africans to cultivate new lifestyles
which could enhance both negative and positive peace is liberative faith
and must be both objective and subjective.

While our objective faith liberated us individually from the bondage of sin,
justified and gave us the assurance of our salvation through our faith in the
finished work of Jesus Christ, our subjective faith should empower us to do
the work corporately for the good of our society, beginning with justice.
Proverbs 3:27 says “Do not withhold good from those who deserve it, when
it is in your power to act.” This is talking about justice. Justice,
righteousness, and holiness are the good work for which we have been
recreated by the grace of God, (Ephesians 2:1-10). According to Dr.
Schipani “faith that does justice corresponds to the mission of building God’
s reign [kingdom of righteousness] which is “evangelization in the fullest
sense of the term.”   He explained that “to evangelize, therefore, is to
present the Good News that is becoming Good Reality.”

Our first and foremost task of faith must be the conversion of the young
militant African men and women to peace. Then we can begin to ask for
ways to train them to become peacemakers. This will be in consonance
with the method that Jesus Christ engaged in his work as savior of
mankind. He will first preach the kingdom of God to the people, and
depending on their profession and expression of faith, he will deliver them
from whatever demonic powers oppressing them. Those who cooperate
with Jesus by having faith for their being set free and made whole also
exhibit the desire to become his disciples. They were the ones who
engaged themselves in the service of their Lord and Savior. But those who
rejected to be converted lost the opportunities for their deliverance and
instead of becoming his disciples and followers, they became his accusers
and judge and killer.
We can see from the above prognosis that subjective faith is exhibited by
those “active Christians who responded to and participated in God’s work.”
That is to say, “one becomes a Christian disciple in the very process of
concrete participation in constructing a Christian’s (i.e. God’s pleasing)
reality.”   These sets of people have usually caught a glimpse of God’s
heavenly vision and became absolutely convinced that such glorious vision
is possible on earth and therefore worth their pursuit. And like Apostle
Paul, they cannot be disobedient to the heavenly vision, (Acts 26:19). And
Moses, having encountered God in the burning bush, could not stop until
he had led the Israelites out of bondage of Egypt. And for the 16th Century
Anabaptists, even in the face of the executioners, they maintain a total
gellasenheit to him who had revealed his glory to them.

Essentially speaking, therefore, peacemaking is a faithful pursuit. Both
Psalm 34:14 and Hebrews 12:14 confirm the imperativeness of this pursuit.
The Psalmist says “whoever wants prosperity and good life must depart
from evil, seek and pursue peace. Similarly, the Hebrews writer was
teaching his audience that pursuing peace and holiness is the only way to
see God. And concluding his teachings on the two kinds of wisdom, James
in
Chapter 3 verse 18 asserts that “peacemakers who sow peace raise a
harvest of righteousness.”

Having faith enough to labor for peace in Africa would therefore mean more
than just “intellectual assent and hope in what God will do without us,” it is a
form of “faith that was present in spiritual and physical exodus, in which the
people themselves must participate.” It is mere wishful thinking for men to
continue to be violent and thinks God will bring peace. We must develop a
faith that participate in the present in what God is doing, namely the “task of
bringing God’s shalom.” As emphasized by Schipani, participation in God’s
redemptive activity is transformational in nature. Such participation includes
“trust, loyalty, belief, commitments, and especially actions that consist in
finding a new life and following a new way that God has given to us and
made possible in Christ Jesus, his begotten Son,” (John 14:6).

Having faith enough to labor for peace in Africa calls for the preparedness
to do whatever it takes to achieve this desirable goal. Since one essential
dimension of the overall aim of Christian religious education is the
appropriation of the gospel of the reign of God by promoting social
transformation for the increase of freedom, justice and peace, all the
resources that have been made available to the Christian Church ought to
be marshaled for achieving a future peaceful Africa.

If properly interpreted, one will realize that Psalm 85, the greatest grace
psalm, emphasizes in verses 10 and 11, the participation of the heaven and
the earth for earthly peace, the fruit of justice, to be harvested on earth.
That is for peace to reign on earth, righteousness and justice must grow on
earth. Compare this to James 3:18.

My conclusion, therefore, is that the Church has to be in the vanguard of
cultivating the faith that would make the peaceful reign of God happen in
Africa. By all implications, therefore, the Christian Church must
demonstrate that it can generate such participating faith; both in what God
will do without us and in what God will do through us.