Children’s Peacemaker Training
This is an opportunity to invite the Metta Center for Nonviolence to your classroom, school, or homeschool setting.
The skills of peacekeeping and peacemaking are not just for grown-ups. Children experience conflict as often, if not more, than adults because they are still navigating their own ability to understand the world around them.
Many adults do not notice this because we are too quick to intervene for the child in their conflicts, acting as judge, jury, and police. However, we can facilitate conflict resolution while empowering children to practice skills that will lead to solutions they feel good about.
The more children learn how to address and resolve their conflicts nonviolently, the more confidence they will have, the better they will do academically, and the more they will feel empowered to make better choices as adults when dealing with complex challenges.
Peacemaker training will be tailored to the age group involved. It will cover the following dimensions of understanding and resolving conflict:
- What is conflict? Whom does it affect?
- Active listening practice
- Centering skills
- Basic first-aid skills
- Restorative justice
- Cooperation and non-cooperation
- Nonviolence and how it works
- Information gathering and needs mapping
- Creative solution-making
- Empathy and compassion training
- Non-partisanship
- Conflict safety
Sessions range from 20 minutes to two hours, depending on the time constraints of the classroom. Each session includes centering practice, movement, storytelling, skill learning and practice, and art.
Our peacemaker trainer is Stephanie N. Van Hook, Executive Director of the Metta Center and author of Gandhi Searches for Truth: A Practical Biography for Children.
Contact Stephanie Van Hook for more info:
- Email: Stephanie@mettacenter.org
- Phone: 707-774-6299
