Berghof Foundation: 50 years of conflict transformation

Voices
of peace
educators
Interview
Dr Hanan
Madanat and
Dr Leban Serto
Dr Hanan Madanat is Acting
Dean of the Faculty of
Languages and Communication
at the American University
of Madaba and partner in our
project “Civic and Nonviolent
Education in Jordan”
Why is peace education important?
Dr Hanan Madanat: If we want to change
the world, we need to start with ourselves and make
peace education a priority in our homes and in the
educational institutions where our children and youth
spend most of their time. Peace education helps
young people increase their knowledge about peace,
improve their skills in the area of peace, and form an
attitude about the meaning of peace in human life. It
can have a positive transformative power on students
and children.
I experience this first-hand at the American
University of Madaba, where I have seen peace
education activities strengthen the students’ role as
peacebuilders as it provides them with effective tools
to resolve conflict through dialogue. It also promotes
values of respect, tolerance and acceptance,
and reduces prejudices and stereotypes. This is
particularly relevant for us at the American University
of Madaba with its student body representing
around 28 nationalities. Through peace education
workshops and training, students changed their
conceptions of “self” and of “other” and have started
to internalise a collective identity, which I believe to
be one of the main reasons why our campus is free
of violence.
Dr Leban Serto is a peace
researcher and peace education
activist in Northeast India.
He was a partner in the Peace
Counts exhibition (see page 102).
After ten years of working together, how has the
collaboration with the Berghof Foundation influenced
your peace education work?
Dr Leban Serto: I think two experiences
stand out in particular. The first one was my
participation at the Peace Counts training of
trainers in Delhi in 2009, which brought together
peacebuilders from Mumbai, Northeast India and
Orissa. Working with stories from around the world
in an experiential and didactic way brought freshness
and vigour to our peace education movement in India
and opened up new opportunities for our work. We
returned home energised and immediately started
reaching out to teachers and communities and
created a network around the Peace Counts stories.
From 2013 to 2015 and with the support of
the Berghof Foundation, we conducted 25 workshops
in different territories and also across the border
in Thailand and Myanmar. We also managed to
establish a peace education course for MA students
at the Martin Luther Christian University, where I
teach, that includes material and methods from the
Peace Counts project.
The second experience was my visit to
Germany to the Berghof Foundation’s Georg Zundel
House in 2011. During that visit, I learned more
systematic ways of doing peace education and got to
know a rich archive of multimedia materials, cartoons
and CDs, which have greatly enriched my workshops.
After the experience in Tübingen, I felt empowered
and more confident when I reached out to people,
especially community leaders, who are often critical
at first. But when I ask them to narrate their own
stories they open up.
At times this can be very emotional, when
people connect their own life to the stories in the
Peace Counts exhibition. I once had a participant
who just stood there and looked at the pictures for
a very long time with tears in his eyes. The stories
really touch people.
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