Building Coalitions: Schools and Communities

Learning Communities for Peace is a project initiated by the Evens Foundation as part of Building Coalitions: Schools and Communities.
It was conceived as a European project involving different partners working alongside each other in different realities sharing the same overall goal: improving relationships and bolstering togetherness within school communities in a participatory way.

Learning Communities for Peace proposes an alternative, bottom-up approach to foster inclusion and social cohesion adapted to different European realities, building on the wisdom present in the (wider) school community.

To achieve the overall project goal, we sought to shift the trend away from thinking in terms of universal, pan-European solutions and acknowledge the uniqueness of each and every school context and the importance of ownership of the main actors involved in the school community.

This implied that there were no ready-made strategies, tools, methods that could be implemented as such to achieve the overall project goal. It also meant that the overall goal had to be redefined locally to correspond to the lived reality in each school setting.

The six project partners (Belgium, Sweden, Croatia, Greece, UK and Spain) that formed a consortium to run the project, offered a combination of unique expertise in peace education and community- building strategies, and in research and higher education.
Four of the partners (Sweden, Croatia, Greece and the UK), the so-called operational partners, searched for a pilot school to cooperate with. As the UK found two schools a total of five primary compulsory schools were linked to the project.

With this project we wanted to examine our assumptions, understand whether and under which circumstances this way of working is feasible, realistic and efficient, how it relates to the teaching/learning processes and what is transferable.

The project was launched in November 2016, with the first partners’ meeting in Sweden, and lasted until 31 of August 2019.
The operational work, steered by the 5 pilot schools in Croatia, Greece, Sweden, and the UK in close collaboration with the partners from these countries, formed the core of the project. This phase, which lasted a school year on average, was monitored by researchers from the University of Cambridge.
In each case, a specific context analysis and community consultation process was carried out, with the aim of creating context-specific projects. This process was based on an ongoing and responsive Action Research methodology allowing for successive cycles of reflection, planning, action, and observations to be undertaken by the pilot schools.

After this experience, the project partners worked together to write an action research report on the operational work conducted with the schools, and developed an online toolkit and a workshop (online and offline) to share the project experience with policymakers and other schools that have an interest in becoming a Learning Community for Peace. In addition, the impact evaluation report was finalised. Everything can be found on a dedicated project website www.lcpeace.eu.

This project was co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union and the Evens Foundation.

Learning Communities for Peace is a project initiated by the Evens Foundation as part of Building Coalitions: Schools and Communities.
It was conceived as a European project involving different partners working alongside each other in different realities sharing the same overall goal: improving relationships and bolstering togetherness within school communities in a participatory way.

Learning Communities for Peace proposes an alternative, bottom-up approach to foster inclusion and social cohesion adapted to different European realities, building on the wisdom present in the (wider) school community.

To achieve the overall project goal, we sought to shift the trend away from thinking in terms of universal, pan-European solutions and acknowledge the uniqueness of each and every school context and the importance of ownership of the main actors involved in the school community.

This implied that there were no ready-made strategies, tools, methods that could be implemented as such to achieve the overall project goal. It also meant that the overall goal had to be redefined locally to correspond to the lived reality in each school setting.

The six project partners (Belgium, Sweden, Croatia, Greece, UK and Spain) that formed a consortium to run the project, offered a combination of unique expertise in peace education and community- building strategies, and in research and higher education.
Four of the partners (Sweden, Croatia, Greece and the UK), the so-called operational partners, searched for a pilot school to cooperate with. As the UK found two schools a total of five primary compulsory schools were linked to the project.

With this project we wanted to examine our assumptions, understand whether and under which circumstances this way of working is feasible, realistic and efficient, how it relates to the teaching/learning processes and what is transferable.

The project was launched in November 2016, with the first partners’ meeting in Sweden, and lasted until 31 of August 2019.
The operational work, steered by the 5 pilot schools in Croatia, Greece, Sweden, and the UK in close collaboration with the partners from these countries, formed the core of the project. This phase, which lasted a school year on average, was monitored by researchers from the University of Cambridge.
In each case, a specific context analysis and community consultation process was carried out, with the aim of creating context-specific projects. This process was based on an ongoing and responsive Action Research methodology allowing for successive cycles of reflection, planning, action, and observations to be undertaken by the pilot schools.

After this experience, the project partners worked together to write an action research report on the operational work conducted with the schools, and developed an online toolkit and a workshop (online and offline) to share the project experience with policymakers and other schools that have an interest in becoming a Learning Community for Peace. In addition, the impact evaluation report was finalised. Everything can be found on a dedicated project website www.lcpeace.eu.

This project was co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union and the Evens Foundation.

News

The Evens Foundation hosts School Communities in Action, a European exchange seminar in Brussels on 26 August 2019.