Workable Peace Curriculum

Workable Peace is a humanities curriculum and professional development project designed by CBI for secondary school classrooms, and used in high schools, colleges, and post-graduate education programs. This curriculum integrates the study of intergroup conflict and the development of critical thinking, problem solving, and perspective-taking skills into social studies and humanities content. It gives teachers and professors academically rigorous tools for teaching the major themes and key events of history in ways that enliven the imagination, awaken moral reasoning, and impart social and civic skills that students can use throughout their lives.  

In its evaluation of the curriculum, a team from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education found significant improvements in students’ tolerance for different points of view, understanding of conflicts and strategies for resolving them, and listening and perspective-taking skills. In addition, students demonstrated deeper learning about the historical content, and a stronger ability to connect this with other conflicts, ranging from historical to interpersonal contexts.

Young people need to learn ways to understand violence and conflict, and to develop appreciation for alternative perspectives, tolerance, and an understanding of global affairs. Teachers and schools have been seeking ways to teach about the clash of interests, values, emotions and identities that underlie conflicts between groups, and to help students understand the range of strategies used to respond to these conflicts – from violence and coercion to negotiation and cooperation.  Workable Peace is an effort to fill this unmet need in social studies education.  

Conflicts in history and current events – between peoples, states, and social groups – have too often been presented strictly in terms of facts and events, in a way that overlook complex, underlying dynamics. Workable Peace was designed to correct this tendency. By inviting students to examine history and current events from multiple perspectives, Workable Peace develops students’ abilities to think about the sources of intergroup conflict, and to practice skills for resolving conflicts without violence. 

Read on for more on this groundbreaking program.

The Curriculum

The curriculum consists of units centered around a different geographic or temporal theme.  These include Ancient Greece, the Middle East, Guatemala, Northern Ireland, Rwanda, American Labor History, and American School Desegregation. Each unit includes: 

The Workable Peace Framework 

At the heart of the curriculum is the Workable Peace Framework, a summary of conflict management concepts and skills that the curriculum aims to teach. The Workable Peace Framework is an attempt to synthesize and distill 40 years of knowledge from research and practice in intergroup conflict management. It incorporates academic and practitioner insights from fields of political science, social psychology, and multi-party negotiation. 

The Framework is a one-page graphic map of the curriculum’s core concepts. To assist educators in introducing these concepts to students, there is a detailed Teacher’s Guide for teaching the Workable Peace Framework. For further reading, there is a bibliography of resources related to the Workable Peace Framework.

Activities for introducing the content and skills

These activities are designed to familiarize students with some of the history and context of the conflicts in the unit, as well as to provide an opportunity to practice analyzing the sources of conflict. Teacher’s Guides provide details on how to use these activities in the classroom.

Full-length historical role plays

Role play is a type of experiential study that allows participants an opportunity to develop direct experience with critical content and skills. The role play is the core of the Workable Peace Unit, each set in historical and current “hot spots” of intergroup conflict. Each unit centers on a major historical conflict and challenges students to resolve the issues at stake in the conflict.   

It is one thing to know how to manage conflict, but quite another to act on this knowledge, particularly in difficult situations where your own needs are at stake, your core beliefs challenged, and your emotions intense. Practicing conflict management behaviors within a realistic role helps students to confront the psychological and interpersonal responses that are most difficult to manage in situations of real conflict. At the same time, role play provides a safe setting that allows students to experiment, reflect, and give and receive feedback. 

At the end of the role play, teachers lead students through a debriefing. Students reflect on how well they met their own group’s interests and upheld their values and identities, how well they did at reaching an agreement meeting the interests of all parties, how well they worked as a negotiating group, and what they would do differently next time. A skillful teacher can generate an enormous amount of learning about conflict and conflict resolution through the debriefing, drawing on examples of specific moments in the negotiation process.

For each role play, the materials provide in-depth background history of the conflict, setting and instructions for the negotiation, and Confidential Instructions for each role.  Worksheets and rubrics for student preparation and assessment are also included. The Teacher’s Guide offers step-by-step instructions on how to set up, implement, and debrief the role play, in addition to suggestions for trouble-shooting challenges. Assessment suggestions ensure that teachers can fully integrate the Workable Peace curriculum into their assessment and grading rubrics.  

Annotated bibliographies

Each unit includes a list of additional resources about the content areas for additional research and study. They suggest sources for more in-depth information about the conflict and the roles, for increasing teachers’ knowledge and/or for supplemental research by students.

Additional resources and connections

After completing a role play, teachers are encouraged to apply the conflict management skills to current and local conflicts in student’s lives. Units include an activity drawn from the themes of the role play and applied to local and current issues, and a teacher’s guide to Civic Learning Projects, with suggestions on developing extended projects for responding to local conflicts. This approach is consistent with research on effective civic education, which shows that making explicit connections between historical and current situations is more likely to affect student behavior. 

Workable Peace Teacher Trainings

Workable Peace provides a wide range of teacher training and professional development options, from 2-hour workshops to 3-day intensive trainings. These workshops are tailored to fit the specific needs of districts, schools, and teachers, to prepare and support teachers as they:

• acquire knowledge to teach in-depth historical case studies; 
• learn concepts to analyze the sources of conflict and strategies used to manage it;
• develop and practice conflict resolution skills such as perspective-taking, emotion-management, active listening, public speaking, creative and critical thinking, and negotiation;
• perform Workable Peace activities and role plays in preparation for teaching them;
• review and practice methods for assessing both core academic competence (understanding of facts and themes, ability to use evidence to reason critically about causes and consequences) and social and civic skills (perspective-taking, active listening, negotiation and consensus building); and 
• develop individual lesson plans to integrate the Workable Peace curriculum into their classes.

The trainings are designed to address content, skills, and pedagogy, and generate new ideas and competencies that teachers can apply to all aspects of their work. There is also a focus on implementation, as participants and Workable Peace staff brainstorm ways to integrate the new concepts and skills into their courses. 

Publications

Project Directors Stacie Smith and David Fairman have also published several pieces on Workable Peace, including a chapter in Educating Citizens for Global Awareness, published by Teachers College Press, (which has been adopted for use in 49 college & university courses and has just been translated into Chinese); an academic article on the theory and use of Workable Peace in New Directions for Youth Development: Negotiation: Interpersonal Approaches to Intergroup Conflict, published by Jossey-Bass; and a journal piece by Stacie on using negotiation role plays in the classroom published in Social Education, the magazine for members of the National Council on the Social Studies.

Learn More

You can watch videos from the Workable Peace Teacher's Guide here.

The Seven Workable Peace Curriculum Units Include:

• Civil Rights and School Integration in the United States
• Managing Conflict in the Middle East
• The Rise of Organized Labor in the United States
• Religion and Nationalism in Northern Ireland
• Indigenous Rights and the Environment in Latin America
• Ethnic Conflict and Genocide in Post-Colonial Africa
• Ancient Greece and the Peloponnesian War

Read What Others Have Said About Workable Peace

“Workable Peace is a program that really does work! My students were involved until the very end and they learned a lot.”

“Performing in this role play gave me a chance to speak in class, and allowed me to have an opinion on what we were working on, which I find I can’t do a lot in my classes.”

“It is imperative that people learn how to deal with conflicts, and how to resolve them appropriately without violence… This simulation is one of the best things that we do in school.”

“Not only did this unit teach me about history, culture, and politics, but about peaceful negotiations and what it takes to create a society in which all members feel accepted and independent.”