Last Session

Our last session went pretty well. I thought that we managed to salvage the program as much as possible. It would have been really, really nice if Daniel had given us more details on the program: what he was expecting from us, from the kids, and his expectations for future offshoots for the program. Also, I felt that the most frustrating aspect of our program was the lack of consistency in the students we had in our class. We did the human knot in our second to last session, and I thought that we had managed to find a pretty good group of kids that would work well together. But, in our final session, we had only two of the same kids, and the rest were ones that we had never met before. How Daniel expected to get a peer mediation program off the ground, under these conditions, is beyond me and I certainly would attribute the lack of organization in multiple areas to the inability of our program to be a success. Regardless though, I felt that our group managed to pull our program together towards the end, to where it was salvageable. We took the cards we were given and did our best to instill ideas of nonviolence in some of those kids, and I think that that is something to really be proud of.

              In our last session, we adapted our conflict resolution program to contain mostly elements of conflict and peer mediation. The kids that we had this time were insanely enthusiastic. I think that their enthusiasm really helped calm us down, and helped make the last minute, makeshift program that we brought in, a successful session. We started the session by going over the basic rules for how to conduct a peer mediation session. It seemed at first that they didn’t really get it, but when they got up to do it themselves, they showed that they really grasped the overall concept, though the specific steps seemed to be elusive.

            I would say overall the program was a success. Maybe not in the way that was expected, but a success just the same. We had the opportunity to teach a really cool subject that is undervalued and underrepresented in American schools. We teach kids in school how to share or help each other, ways to avoid conflict, but when faced with actual conflict we leave them without a guide. In our atomistic culture, independence translates into self-help, bootstraps mentality of solving problems that leaves little room for a healthy conflict resolution and dialogue among peoples. We should be teaching children at an early age how to resolve conflicts, and really begin emphasizing the qualities of violence, so these children know “not only not to hit, but WHY not to hit”. Emphasizing this is an essential part of a child’s education, and without it, they are left to continue a pattern that has for so long dominated our common history. For so long, violence has been seen as the best way to handle problems. There needs to be a fundamental paradigm shift in the way we view violence. This should be accomplished at a legislative level in order to produce effective, efficient results; states should put as part of the public curriculum a mandatory section on conflict resolution skills. This admittance of non-violence principle into curriculum could help raise the legitimacy of it in the opinions of ordinary people, parents, and school officials. This would help shape a more accepting view of conflict resolution and non-violence in the public eye.

Student Works Symposium

I found the Student Works Symposium to be pretty interesting. I think the project that caught my attention the most was the project on torture. The project examined the practice of torture, looking at its efficacy, and other consequences. We had just talked about the subject in my History of Human Rights class, so it was cool to see the argument in another setting. The project was arguing against torture, emphasizing that the typical negative consequences of torture far outweigh the benefits. I agree with this assessment wholeheartedly. Torture can never be an effective, positive activity, because of its very nature; by condoning violence in our government, we help to legitimize violence as an effective policy tool. This is so inherently dangerous- violence is not something that is well controlled or managed in our world; violence tends to continue escalating until a point of abject, pointless violence emerges. Violence is not constructive in anyway, and by condoning it in our government, we are setting a deadly precedent for the rest of the world to follow. Also, I think that if we are ever going to reach a peaceful world, we must start stamping out violence. Many people construct a means-ends argument for why torture is acceptable (lose one save hundreds etc.), but this seems to be such a myopic view of our world. By using this argument, one is still placing oneself within the system, they are still part of the problem; we need to learn to remove ourselves from the system of violence, and start tying establishing different ideals in people’s minds, regarding violence.

            I know that I’m sorta ranting about violence a lot in these blog entries, but honestly, I cannot even begin to explain how important I think this subject is, and how much attention it needs from everyone. It’s time that we stop just addressing the symptoms of violence and start addressing the root causes; only by doing that will we be able to rewire violence’s role in our world. We need to watch where we get involved in the world, and for what reasons, so as to not harbor violent sentiments abroad, if they are avoidable. Also, we need to focus on the problem of poverty in our own country to address the problem of gang violence and poverty related violence.

            Overall, I found the Student Works Symposium to be interesting, and the food was delicious. I really like that there is a space for students to share their ideas like this, and I think it is a great opportunity for those involved.    

Jesse Daniel Ames Lecture

I thought that the Jesse Daniel Ames Lecture was fairly interesting. The transgendered population is one that is characteristically underrepresented, and it was incredibly interesting to hear an usually quiet perspective. When people talk about equality, usually the groups that come to mind are women, children, gays, not necessarily the rights of transgendered groups. I can see how it would be more difficult to categorize and assign rights to the transgendered group, simply because of the nature of their situation. I think though, that this conflict of established groups and rights is something that can potentially be incredibly beneficial. By not categorizing a group by sexual orientation, gender or any other binary that presents an idea of the “other,” we can start to break down many of the walls of intolerance; rather than labeling people, hopefully we can begin to establish a pattern of looking at people as people, rather than overly simple categorization.   

The idea of state sponsored violence is interesting, because the idea of state sponsored violence indicates a problem at both the governmental and cultural level. To expand this idea outside of the United States, I think that one can look to the situation in Darfur. The government in Darfur essential orchestrates the violence occurring there, perpetuating an all out genocide; the Janjaweed are a mercenary group hired by the government to perform a sort of ethnic cleansing. The government even sends planes in to bomb villages before the Janjaweed arrives. The motive behind this is part economic, part cultural, and part racial, but the racial aspect is what often justifies the ethnic cleaning. This idea of intolerance in the United States is so inherently dangerous because of the myriad of potential, and no doubt harmful, ramifications. In the name of racism and discrimination all kinds of acts of violence and all manners of hatred can be perpetrated.

The idea of a political solution to the problem of discrimination is troublesome, but I feel that it is one of the only persuasive options. Both cultural and political reform must work in tandem to overachieve racism and discrimination; I don’t believe that there necessarily is a particular order to how these levels change, but it is far easier to create political “legal” change, than to change the ideals of a society. That can be seen with the anti-discrimination laws concerning African-Americans and the civil rights movement; the legislation passed far before people’s minds changed. I think that passing legislation is an important first step in acting as a catalyst for cultural change.

I also like that the lecture focused on the physical aspects of discrimination; I think that until we start being open about the differences of the juxtaposed groups (male and female, etc.), we can’t establish any sort off dialogue for fixing the problem.          

First Session of Conflict Resolution

So, our group had our first session at the Boys and Girl’s Club yesterday. I thought that although it could of gone better, it also could have gone much worse. Overall, I thought it was a successful visit, which is doubly impressive considering our subject material. There were about 8 kids in all, and we started pretty promptly. 

They responded really well to the wants and needs activity. I started that activity by asking them what made them happy, which garnered responses at first like break dancing, and basketball. Eventually though, they started saying some really cool intangible concepts, like loyalty, honesty, and respect. They also said various people, such as family and friends. We then differentiated between the concepts of needs and wants. As a group, we determined that needs are something that everyone has a right to, while wants are not necessary for everyone. Following this, we categorized the things on the list into wants (i.e. basketball), and needs (i.e. food, sleep, respect, love), and looked at how common needs play an important role in conflicts. 

Following this, Brady introduced the concept of conflict resolution, and then we focused on various situations in which conflict was present, and how they typically handled these conflicts. We then tried to introduce different ways of handling conflicts, with an emphasis on respecting your feelings as well as the feelings of the other person. At that age, and with such a (fairly) abstract topic, I knew that we would have some trouble. They seemed to grasp pretty quickly the “how”, but I think that the “why” is something that takes a while to sink in, and I think as our sessions progress, it’ll get easier. 

Conflict Resolution can be a pretty corny topic when presented in a certain way, so I really tried hard not to sound too preach-y during the session. I found that when I talked about conflict in my own family, specifically with my little brother, they all seemed to connect with that. I could tell that most of them had siblings that were older, and who they really looked up to, or younger, who they loved and felt protective of. I feel that that could be a good way to approach some of the trickier topics in our next sessions. Also, I really felt that these kids responded really strongly to sincerity; if I was being bogus on anything, they could totally see through it, but when I talked to them as equals, with sincere respect, I felt that I connected much more with them. I think that we will continue to make a lot of progress, and this will be a pretty successful program overall.       

We had a few problems with talking and cell phones, but I think that that can be addressed pretty effectively in our next session, and function as an example of conflict resolution.