peace school & peace education

The project "Peace School" was first established in the late 90's to meet the requirements that arose from Finnish school children. Teachers felt a need for a student based and participatory way of dealing with issues of war (at that time especially the Bosnia war) and peace. This was a challenge for the Peace Union of Finland and the Peace Education Institute. The actives and the volunteers developed the project called the Peace School. Soon the ways of drama were introduced as a method for giving tools to understand peace and deal the arrising issues. Since the start of 2008 the funding for the two-year projects mainly comes from the development fund of the Ministery for Foreign Affairs of Finland.

Peace School offers peace education with participatory drama methods for school and student groups of all ages. The headquarters for the Peace School is located at the Peace Station in Pasila, Helsinki. Peace School is a work-shop based peace work project, which the Peace Union maintains together with the Peace Education Institute.

At the Peace School students participate in activity days, which deal with peace education themes such as conflict prevention, non-violence, human rights, environmental issues, disarmament and refugeesism. The working methods are participatory drama, role play and other participatory methods, which are intended to awaken the students' own critical thinking and to increase their sympathy and dialogue skills as well as their respect for diversity.

Participatory methods at the Peace School includes discussion, creative expression, drama and role play. They help students to step into someone else's shoes for a while, to experience inequality and being different, and to realize how important it is to respect other people and their rights. With the aid of drama, the nature of violence and its effects on the victim and the perpetrator can be studied. The aim is to find the causes underlying different conflicts, to understant different points of view and to learn non-violent ways to resolve conflicts.

In 2009 the Peace School was visited by 95 classes, i.e. about 1900 students. The workshops are held in 4 different cities in Finland: Turku, Tampere, Vaasa and the capital region.The working languages are Finnish, Swedish and English.