Peace Education Hub (Faculty of Philosophy in Sarajevo) in collaboration with forumZFD (Representation of Forum Civil Peace Service in Bosnia and Herzegovina) organised the second Peace Pedagogy Summer School from 14-16 June 2022. This year’s Summer School brought together peace educators from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Germany, Poland, USA, Sweden and Japan. The sessions on June 14 and 15 were held online, while the sessions on June 16 were held both virtually and onsite. The three keynote speakers were Randall Puljek-Shank from the Peace Academy, Sarajevo, Professor Judy Pace from the University of San Francisco and Professor Nadia Sonneveld from Leiden University (Law Faculty), the Netherlands. The speakers shared examples and experiences from their teaching practice and their civil society engagement in order to provide the participants with practical teaching tools and strategies for teaching peace.

In his session From Peace Education to Peace Writ Large: Reflections on Building from Individual to Social and Institutional Change Randall Puljek-Shank discussed his experience with three different models of peace building – Education for Peace, Alternatives to Violence Project and the Nansen Model of Education – with the aim of highlighting the pros and cons of each model. Apart from discussion, this session also included exercises such as concentric circles, which enabled the participants to gain a shared sense of understanding and emotional connection, while promoting their speaking and listening skills.

Judy Pace’s session Democratic Discussion Pedagogies focused on understanding what democratic classroom discussion involves and why it is so important; how to create high quality classroom discussions; exploring different pedagogical approaches to discussion; and analysing classroom discussion dynamics and facilitation. The participants were introduced to a variety of discussion methods that they can adapt to their specific educational or civil society context with special emphasis on the difference between authentic questions and test questions in planning democratic discussions. Through identifying authentic questions in their own classrooms/contexts, the participants reflected on the possibility of applying various discussion methods in dealing with controversial issues.

This year’s Peace Pedagogy Summer School included an International Student Panel as an onsite event at the Faculty of Philosophy. Students from the Netherlands (Faculty of Law, Leiden University) and Bosnia and Herzegovina (Faculty of Philosophy – Department of History, Department of Pedagogy and Department of English) presented their research in peacebuilding and peace pedagogies in education, which was followed by a lively discussion and many thoughtful remarks.

Nadia Sonneveld’s session Promoting the Culture of Peace by Rethinking the Concept of Justice was held in a hybrid form – at the Faculty of Philosophy and via Zoom. It focused on Nadia Sonneveld’s online Honours Course “Using the Rule of Law to Close Dark Chapters of History? The Case of Bosnia and Herzegovina” which was given for the first time in 2021 and included students and speakers from Leiden University and the University of Sarajevo (Faculty of Philosophy – Department of English and Department of History). The course explored the meaning of justice and rule of law in a post-conflict society by asking students to (1) reflect critically on their own understandings of justice and rule of law, in general, and in the specific context of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and (2) to compare their own visions to those of war and genocide survivors. Students conducted meetings and interviews with Bosnian survivors in the Netherlands and Bosnia, all of which was reworked into a short documentary In Search of Justice by a Bosnian filmmaker Ado Hasanović and screened during the final session of the Peace Pedagogy Summer School.

Three days of engaged discussion, learning and valuable feedback helped the organizers to identify relevant topics and issues to be tackled in the future and reinforced the necessity of promoting the culture of peace in education and society in general, bearing in mind the increasingly dominant culture of war on the global level.