Tripta Batra — Women’s Feature Service, Delhi.

Today, there is an overwhelmingly strong opinion in the world – which says yes to peace and no to war. Over a period of about 15 years, a series of contextually designed workshops with teachers (of NGO-managed education programmes), education coordinators, and teacher-trainees have revealed several significant insights. For the teacher-trainees of the B El Ed (Bachelor of Elementary Education, a 4-year teacher education degree programme offered by 6 colleges of Delhi University) for instance, 6 one-day workshops were implemented during the course of the academic year. The workshops were designed to facilitate an environment within which the teacher-trainees could express themselves on issues that touched their daily lives, explore their inner selves, learn to listen attentively to themselves and each other, build their communication skills, and draw connections between their own learning (over the years) and that of a teaching/learning situation with children in a classroom or school. A key question that emerges out of these workshops is – What role could an adequately and sensitively designed practicum on self-development, relationships and communication, play in peace education? And when such a self-development process could be made a sustained part of teacher education programmes, what are the various benefits that could arise out of this - for children, for teachers and for the human community as a whole. This paper addresses these and other questions to present the links between peace education, self-development and teacher education.

Email the author: "Ms. Tripta Batra" <triptabatra@hotmail.com>