Spotlight Project: MasterPEACE: Young Artists Making A Kinder World
MasterPEACE: Young Artists Making A Kinder World
MasterPEACE: Young Artists Making a Kinder World. MasterPEACE Workshops are a model for students in resolving conflicts with peers, family, friends in school, in the neighborhood, at home and in the community. The lessons instruct and build skills with a unique mix of art projects, real-life improvisation and spoken performance.
29 Pieces’s (f/k/a Today Marks the Beginning) artists and educators adapted several of the lessons from the curriculum ofJeremy Gilley’s successful initiative in the United Kingdom. Jeremy wrote the book, Peace One Day, about his search to find a way toward world peace and TMtB co-founder Karen Blessen’s beautiful illustrations help tell his story. Jeremy Gilley is the man who inspired the UN to declare September 21, World Peace Day.
The program is geared toward 3rd through 8th graders to give students specific strategies to help them “increase the peace.” 29 Pieces designed the lessons to help students discover creative solutions to conflict. Students learn about the world’s Great Peacemakers by creating their portraits. They discover how to create a personal place of peace at home in the Sanctuary lesson. And they take part in real-life improvisations that show them how to resolve conflict without resorting to violence. The continuing goals of the curriculum include the following:
• teaching children specific strategies and techniques for practicing conflict resolution, addressing bullying, and using nonviolence;
• using art as a vehicle for specific action to advance peace during and after the course;
• establishing “world peace” as subject of academic study and a necessary skill to learn alongside reading, history, and mathematics.
The participating pilot program schools were: Irma Rangel Young Women’s Leadership School, J.W. Ray Learning Center, Maple Lawn Elementary, Parish Episcopal, Rice Elementary, S.S. Conner Elementary, William Brown Miller Elementary, and Hotchkiss Elementary.
As of Autumn 2011, MasterPEACE has developed 14 lessons for the curriculum. We have completed a beautiful manual for the lessons, so that even more teachers will have access to the MasterPEACE curriculum. We have now served over 2400 Dallas students, in 12 DISD schools, and one private school. In the summer of 2011, we did a series of workshops with Dallas ISD teachers to "road test" our manual, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. The next step for MasterPEACE is to pilot the MasterPEACE curriculum system wide in a school system here in Texas. Then beyond!
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