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Cultivating peace...
The Peace Studies minor
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| co-chair of the program |
"It's for people who want to engage in conflict and resolution," Ryan said.
The Peace Studies minor allows students to resolve both social and personal conflicts peacefully. This program focuses on providing students with answers to their daily confrontations with violence. Students form an understanding on the rise of social violence, how to change violence and how to resolve personal violence. This issue is becoming a priority as war is on everybody's mind, Frank said. Those professors involved in the Peace Studies minor are readjusting their classes in the context of the situation in Afghanistan.
Peace studies is an undergraduate multidisciplinary minor under the College of Arts and Sciences. Students are required to take a 12-credit core. This is composed of Systems of War and Peace, Social and Political Philosophy, and either Value System and Cross-cultural Perspectives or World Value System.
In addition to the core, students have to complete 20 credits from three different blocks: Conditions that give rise to Violence, Values and Arrangements Necessary to Transcend Violence, and Strategies for Achieving Peace. The requirements cover a range of disciplines: political science, pscychology, sociology, geography, international studies, philosophy, women's studies or planning, public policy and management. Ryan said he thinks it would be too restrictive to put Peace Studies classes in one department
"That would lock it into one place," he said.
Most students use these skills to enhance their careers in the Peace Corps, government or teaching.
"Our vision is that students would learn how poverty would give rise to violence locally and internationally," Frank said. Students who minor in Peace Studies have gone on to create organizations designed to help young people to deal with conflicts and violence. Other students became diplomats and served as third parties to resolve disputes.
"Students should ground [the theory] and experience it," Frank said.
Even when not involved in this minor, students recognize the need for acquiring such skills.
"If we, as a global society, are going to move towards a more evolved society, we need to move towards what this aims to teach," said Amos Nadler, a junior double majoring in math and economics.
The Oregonian reported 371 universities across the country that have Peace Studies programs. The newspaper said the University of Oregon is one of the 10 universities within this state to offer peace and conflict resolution courses.
Portland State University has an important Peace Studies programs in the state of Oregon. PSU developed both its undergraduate and graduate programs concurrently with the University of Oregon's Peace Studies minor.
Ryan co-developed the PSU program with a former UO student and now sponsors and helps to maintain the program. He said these programs are gaining popularity, but surprisingly, the demand doesn't come from college students. Instead, PSU's Peace Studies programs draw a large audience of adults, who are already part of the working world.
Ryan said people seek the skills this program offers as a way to resolve their family conflicts because this is an area where the court has no power. This area is known as alternate dispute resolution or ADR.
Both co-chairs, Ryan and Frank, also organize events outside the academic Peace Studies curriculum. Ryan said he is currently working on organizing a forum about the current war on Afghanistan. The plan is to have Oregon congressmen come to the UO to discuss this hot topic with students.
"We need a movement -- a group of people to hit the street...Peace needs to be taught," Frank said.