Community Building

• Finding things that unite and bind us together as a group, while at the same time respecting and celebrating our differences.  Embracing the interests, experiences, and goals of the community to shape the learning environment and gain ownership of the learning experience.

Enabling Multiple Intelligences

• Balancing the learning experience by engaging learners in ways that play to their strengths while also challenging them to develop other intelligences.

Nurturing Emotional Intelligence

• Acknowledging the emotions, feelings, and experiences that each learner brings to the learning environment and helping them find ways to cope with those emotions.  Also, nurturing compassion and empathy among students in ways that allow them to be sensitive and aware of each other’s emotions.

Exploring Approaches to Peace

• Breaking the ideal, overarching concept of peace into manageable bites and methods of actualization.

Reframing History

• Challenging the dominance of violence and war in the narratives of cultures, countries, and peoples.  Changing the lens through which we look at major historical shifts, construct heroes, and develop cultural norms.

Transforming Conflict Nonviolently

• Embracing the inevitability of conflict by practicing nonviolent ways to wage it, manage it, and resolve it.

Skill Building

• All these pillars are held together and buttressed by the end goal of building, practicing, and adopting life skills that empower individuals to bring about peace in the world around them – interpersonal skills, intrapersonal skills, analytical skills, conflict resolution skills, organizing skills, and learning skills.