Teaching Peace: place-making for digital curricula

The poster presents research aligning with the strategic theme "Praxis of Digital Transformation".

The event was held to launch the new UNESCO Inclusive Policy Lab's E-Team for Education and Digital Skills.

We adopted a communication framework (process language) called Non-Violent Communication. NVC was introduced by Mahatma Gandhi (Ziegler, 2014) and developed later by Marshall Rosenberg in the 70s. Marshall Rosenberg is known as a pioneer in nonviolent conflict resolution. In his career he developed and applied nonviolent communication for 40 years helping communities, disadvantaged groups and individuals to focus on partnership, caring and empathy. NVC focuses attention on:
The feelings and needs motivating each person

What actions might best meet their needs at no one else’s expenses (Rosenberg, Eisler 2003).
The research project focuses on the areas students and staff engage the most have a common denominator: improving themselves and their condition of life. The approach that led to students’ satisfaction improvement from 50% to 90%.

This forged a new level of resilience both for staff and students which shows how embracing uncertainty as an opportunity and not as a challenge has scope for community growth. Forging direct collaboration with the students bought the development of an adapted pedagogy model, assessment adjustments, inclusive practices, attention for mental health issues and renewed engagement. The fact that students can contextualise requests for changes gives them the responsibility and the right level of engagement that is required for this course. Members of staff reported feeling part of the growing community and remained flexible as students' requests were reasonable and open to be discussed looking for compromises.

• https://ordo.open.ac.uk/articles/poster/...