The Teacher in Action
Wings of Change Leading to Schools of Change: Creating Inclusive Communities as a Response to a Tragedy
December 14, 2012 was a fateful day – it witnessed the massacre of twenty elementary school children and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut. The perpetrator was twenty-year-old Adam Lanza, with a history of social adjustment issues and severe anxiety. He was later diagnosed with autism, among other mental conditions.[1] Within ten minutes of the shooting commencing, Lanza shot himself. That day, amongst the twenty children that died, one of them was a 6-year-old boy with special needs named Dylan Hockley. He was special, determined ...
The Aarhus Way of Combating Radicalization in Communities
The series of terrorist incidents that affected France and other parts of Europe in 2015, starting with the Charlie Hebdo massacre led governments, security agencies, and people to take notice of a seemingly strange phenomenon – one of “homegrown terrorists”. The Charlie Hebdo massacre started with two gunmen attacking the office of the French satirical weekly magazine – Charlie Hebdo - for the cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed on the cover of their November 3, 2011 edition of the magazine. The attack spread across three days from January 7, 2015 to January 9, ...
The Teacher: Respect in Lucknow
In 1992, thousands of people died in Hindu-Muslim riots triggered by the destruction of a mosque at Ayodhya by a group of Hindu militants, yet in the state capital of Lucknow, only forty miles away from Ayodhya, there was not one casualty. The reason? In part, it was the influence on the local culture of the largest private school in the world, the City Montessori School. Founded in 1959, the school has over twenty thousand students from kindergarten through twelfth grade. Influenced by the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, it seeks to embue its Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim students ...
The Teacher: Heavy’s Transformation
"I don't know how smart Heavy was," says Michael Lewis, who taught him conflict resolution in a course given in a maximum-security prison. "He was just a moose of a guy who apparently had a very quick temper, and who in his earlier days had been very quick with his fists.
Sometime after Heavy got the training, a fellow prisoner told us, 'I can't believe it. Yesterday Heavy got into an argument and I thought he was going to drop the sucker right in his tracks. Heavy just kept talking to him!' The fellow prisoner was attributing it to the fact that Heavy had learned that ...
The Teacher: Fishing in Sierra Leone
By Phil Bob Hellmich
A trail of dust settled ahead of our rickety Toyota taxi as we chased a pickup truck along a dirt road through the bush of central Sierra Leone. The elephant grass gave way to rice paddies, and we drove slowly through a village as the taxi driver navigated between the chickens. I waved to a mother feeding her baby by one of the huts. She waved back with an enthusiastic smile that helped to assuage my apprehension about what we might find in Masongbo. We were on an assessment trip for Search for Common Ground, hoping to set up a reconciliation ...
The Teacher: Teaching Through Actions… Walking in Peace
February 08, 2004
By Barry Davis
The Middle Way – Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King would, no doubt, have approved.
While politicians on both sides of the seemingly interminable bloody Middle East conflict remained entrenched, a small but growing group of Israeli Jews and Arabs have decided to take matters into their own hands. Actually, "into their own feet" would be a more accurate description of their peaceful protest.
Over the past couple of years hundreds of Jewish and Arab Israelis have taken part in silent peace walks in various regions of the ...