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Association for Communal Harmony in Asia (ACHA) Article of the Month
*Teaching Peace through Fun: 17 Years of a Peace Camp for Kids, J. Jody Dempsey, Peace Psychology, Volume 18, Number 2, Fall/Winter 2009, Pages 22-25. “WE NEED TO DO MORE THAN GIVE PEACE A CHANCE. WE NEED TO GIVE IT A PLACE IN THE CURRICULUUM.” (Coleman McCarthy, circa 1990, Binghamton, NY) “TEACH THIS TRIPLE TRUTH TO ALL: A GENEROUS HEART, KIND SPEECH, AND A LIFE OF SERVICE AND COMPASSION ARE THE THINGS WHICH RENEW HUMANITY.” (Buddha, date unknown) “I PROMISE TO TRY TO NOT HURT OTHERS BY MY WORDS OR ACTIONS; TO RESPECT OTHERS, EVEN IF THEY ARE DIFFERENT FROM ME (BOYS & GIRLS, ALL COLORS AND RACES, ALL COUNTRIES, ALL RELIGIONS.) I KNOW THAT EVERYONE DESERVES TO BE TREATED THAT WAY. I WILL TRY MY HARDEST TO KEEP MY PROMISE OF PEACE." “IT IS IMPORTANT TO TEACH PEACE BECAUSE IT IS A LOT MORE FUN WHEN EVERYONE IS GETTING ALONG.” (Sean, Peace Camp Counselor, 2009) Clinical/Empirical Basis for Logic of Teaching Peace Why teach Peace? Who should it be taught to? Who should teach it? And finally, how should it be taught? The logic of reaching out to teach Peace to children is supported not only by the face validity of such a concept, but also by a number of reports and studies. For example, in January of 2001, responding to an order by Congress and President Clinton following the tragedy of Columbine, the Surgeon General published “Youth Violence: A Report of the Surgeon General.” This report, the product of a joint commission of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institute of Health, and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, is a multiple chapter examination of the problem from many perspectives. Some of their findings relate directly to the potential benefits of interventions such as our Peace Camp. Specifically, it was concluded based on the study of children and adolescents that “The window of opportunity for effective interventions opens early and rarely, if ever, closes.” (p. 3) It was also suggested that such interventions be viewed not from just a problem-reaction perspective but rather with a broad, public health approach. Indeed, in contrast to “the medical model which is concerned with the diagnosis, treatment, and mechanisms of specific illnesses in individual patients, the public health approach offers a practical, goal-oriented, and community-based strategy for promoting and maintaining health.” The Report goes further to evaluate existing intervention programs and to categorize these programs as meeting intentions of what the Commission categorizes as Primary Prevention, Secondary Prevention, and Tertiary Prevention efforts. The Commission further rated each program for effectiveness in meeting the goal of reducing youth violence. Primary Prevention “is defined...as lessening the likelihood that youths in a treatment or intervention program will initiate violent behavior....therefore, prevention programs are designed to target youth who have not yet become involved in violence or encountered specific risk factors for violence...they are implemented on a universal scale and aim to prevent the onset of youth violence and related risk factors.” (p. 2) Secondary Prevention and Tertiary Prevention programs are “defined as reducing the risk of violence among youths who display one or more risk-factors for violence (high risk youths) or preventing further violence or the escalation of violence among youths who are already involved in violent behavior.” (p. 2) Overall, such programs target youth who have already shown violent behavior or multiple risk factors for violence. Secondary Preventions are more geared towards individual risk factors while Tertiary Prevention is the most intensive level with a combination of both approaches. Because the intention of our Peace Camp is to reach a broad base of children and to give them an opportunity to think about how they perceive themselves and their relationships with others, familiar and not familiar, and to learn skills to navigate those relationships and to integrate them into their way of living, our Peace Camp appears to best fit the category of Primary Prevention. Indeed, we have not seen the Camp as an appropriate activity for children with more intense behavioral/emotional needs, given that ours is an unfunded, completely volunteer activity that is intended to be recreational and educational but not clinically therapeutic. We have had a few circumstances when a child with more significant emotional needs may have been signed up for the Camp with some subsequent behavioral issues. So far, however, we have been able to both devote more of our own attention to those Campers while also matching those children to more individual supervision with older, more experienced counselors, and no child to date has needed to leave Camp because of behavior. It seems reasonable to posit that many of the elements of Peace Camp could play a clinically positive role in Secondary and Tertiary Prevention programs, but that could and should be subjected to clinical empirical inquiry. With our Camp structure, however, the Primary Prevention focus is most appropriate. A review of the data examining the effectiveness of varying approaches to reducing youth violence by the Surgeon General showed that in Primary Prevention, skills training, behavior monitoring and reinforcement, cooperative learning, and positive youth development programs, in addition to several other approaches, are effective on a universal scale, i.e., designed to prevent the development of violent behaviors rather than trying to reduce and/or eliminate violent tendencies that might already exist. Certainly, that is what we strive for, thus aligning with the structure of Primary Prevention. Overall, investigations of factors correlated to the development of youth violence Finally, while our program content is tailored to the developmental levels of our elementary school-aged Campers, we strongly believe that recruiting the adolescents who function as our Counselors serves an equally important purpose by giving us the opportunity to train them in the specific application of peace-teaching methods. The reinforcement they receive from both the younger children they teach and interact with as well as from families, the media that has positively and enthusiastically reported on the Peace Camp every year, and the skills they learn by teaching strongly contribute, we believe, to the development and integration of their Peace-making and Peace-building attitudes, values, and behaviors. Further support for the purposeful inclusion of adolescents in the fabric of an intervention such as Peace Camp is found in the Surgeon General’s Report: “Targeting prevention programs solely to younger children misses over half the children who will eventually become serious violent offenders, although universal prevention programs in childhood may be effective in preventing late-onset violence.” (p. 3) Since then, I’ve labored to do just that whenever and wherever I can. The most effective intervention in that pursuit to date has been our Peace Camp and this summer, my wife, Terry, and I concluded our 17th annual Peace Camp in Vestal, NY, where for four consecutive evenings we gathered with 88 young Campers and 47 adolescent Counselors to share, sing, draw, discuss, dramatize, and celebrate the possibility of PEACE, to understand more about what it means in our own lives, the lives of those around us and in the world, and to begin to learn the skills necessary to make it happen. While there was a scattering of literature to direct us, most was academic, abstract and geared to adults. Seeking some direction as the date of our first Camp approached, I reached out to the stimulus of this concept and managed to reach Mr. McCarthy directly, first through Directory Assistance and then through cajoling staff at the Washington Post. When I did connect with him, he was responsive, patient, and passionate about the principle and directed me to Mary Joan Parks, someone who had already done some Peace-teaching work with youngsters. A phone number search and call later, we talked about her conception and implementation of Peace Camps, and she sent her program material which gave specifics and a sense of how she approached it. To date, more than a thousand children (Grades K to 6th) have passionately participated in our nondenominational Peace Camp under the guidance of our “staff” of about two hundred fifty dedicated teen counselors. A variable indicating that the Camp is meeting one of our core objectives of fun for campers and staff is the fact that almost all of our counselors are former Campers who return eagerly year after year, often bringing friends and peers who are intrigued by the concept and claims of good times and sign up to come. Most who come one year return the next. The Peace Camp has been possible because of the sponsorship and donation of school/church properties by Our Lady of Sorrows Church. There is no fee for attending the Camp, and T shirts that have the current year Camp theme on them and are tie-dyed in the opening Peace Art activity are available to Campers for a fee that covers the cost of the shirts. Campers and Counselors bring non-perishable food items if and when possible for donation to the Parish Food Kitchen donation program. Structure of Peace Camp For our first Peace Camp, we implemented many of Ms. Park’s program ideas. Since then, however, we have tailored, created, and tapped into many other sources to mold Camp activities based on our experiences and the response of the kids who have attended. Learning what works well and what didn’t through experience, our current four-evening Camp schedule runs for 2 ½ hours with a mixture of Large Group and Small Group Activities. An example of our Camp Schedule is provided below. Camp Schedule 6 pm to 6:15 pm - Table activities. Stay with your group, make name tags, color in booklets. Tell kids why you came to peace camp, learn about each child. 6:15 to 6:30 pm - Large group – Sit in assigned section on floor
8:20 Large Group Activity – Sit on Floor in your section 8:30 When activity finishes, return to table and have parents initial as children leave. NO child leaves without parent!
All the Campers are grouped by age into smaller groups of 8 to10 children, each with at least four adolescent Counselors who stay with them throughout all Camp activities. Large Group, which opens and closes each evening’s gathering, is an opportunity for me, my wife, or a motivated counselor volunteer to talk with all about an important and relevant theme or concept, such as “What is Peace?”, or “Who are the Peacemakers?”, or most importantly, “How to be a Peacemaker,” where specific age- Small Group activities, run by Counselors and attended by the Campers and their Small Group Counselors, include Peace Art, Cooperative Games, Peace Music, Role Plays, Peacemakers, as well as varying proactive activities where the campers help by creating, making, writing, drawing, etc., for others such as the elderly, the ill, our soldiers overseas, etc. In Small Group, there are many opportunities for the Counselors and Campers to interact with and to get to know each other on a personal basis, to share thoughts, experiences, and opinions about Peace, Diversity, Conflict and other related topics, and relationships among and between the ages and genders are formed and strengthened. Many friendships established at Camp have continued for years after. The 20-minute Small Group activities are located in different rooms and run by two or three Counselors who have been given specific activities and training in how to conduct them. For example, in Peace Art, all the Campers may make paint imprints of their hands on a large role of poster paper with a theme of “With These Hands, We Can Make Peace.” Another will be directing Campers on a discussion of what Peace looks like, sounds like, or feels like to them, and then drawing pictures depicting that, or in other artistic ways creating what they have imagined. In Peace Music, Campers learn, sing, and discuss a number of Peace Songs that celebrate how Peace can bring us together. For example, “God Bless the Planet Earth,” sung heartily be about 150 kids, was inspiring to both singers and audience. In Cooperative Games, Campers don’t compete. Rather, the game objectives call for cooperation by working together to figure out how transfer a bucket of water from one site to another using only cups and a line of Campers. Progress only flows from cooperation. Peacemakers has Campers learning from Counselors about those who have made a positive difference in the quest for Peace, some internationally known such as Dr. King, Mother Theresa, Gandhi, and others who were not as well-known but have nonetheless impacted the world around them through their service, such as Samantha Smith, Irene Sandler, or Sadako. Ultimately, Campers are encouraged to see that they, too, can change the world through their everyday lives and interactions with that world and specifics of what they have done or might do are discussed with and by them. Future Directions/Needs for Interventions Such as Peace Camp While in the context of our Peace Camp there is little to radically change because of inherit on a local, unfunded, volunteer activity, there are potential additions/ modifications that could enhance the objectives of increasing pro-social beliefs, behaviors and skills and decreasing observable and measurable aggressive behaviors. These additions are clear because of our experiences in running this program and our interactions with the 1000+ youngsters who have participated. Campers and their families are asked for written feedback about the Camp, and there have been occasional comments about time and/or days chosen for the Camp or other peripheral issues. However, the most common comment by far has been that activities such as those conducted at Peace Camp happen much more frequently, including an integration into children’s education. That belief, strongly held before starting, seems more valid now. The shared experiences transform an abstract, esoteric concept into a fascinating, personally relevant, and individually reachable way of living. To be sure, we stress repeatedly that Peace does not exist on its own; rather, it needs to be made, and each of us has the chance to do so. It is also pointed out that one takes this journey a day at a time, and there are obstacles encountered along the way. However, that truth clarifies another maxim that guides Peace Camp: there is no way to Peace; rather, Peace is the way. Finally, while we believe Peace Camp has made a difference, such an intervention needs empirical investigation, including random assignments to this and/or other interventions, control groups, data collection, and appropriate analyses to objectively define efficacy. While I hypothesize that Peace Camp has made a positive change in participants, this approach and relevant variables (e.g., duration, age, activities, etc.) should be measured to show if they improve our ability and reliability in promoting Peace and to better shape the interventions provided. ARCHIVE: Link to November 2009 Article of the Month |