Creating Peace in a Consumer Society
 The course is designed to turn the spotlight on the interface between peace and consumerism. It weaves these together in the context of globalization and postmodernism. We will collaboratively explore these relationships. What is it about consumerism that makes it so hard to build peace? Or, what is it about peace that makes it easier to change consumerism? The first part of the course involves becoming familiar with the literature on these four sub-topics, and the second part of the course involves weaving these together to address the issue of building a culture of peace in a consumer society. The Inquiry Process informs the learning activities including: mock conferences, freewrites, article chunking, roundtables, free-thinking, reflection, metaphors, keynote speakers, and conventional learning activities as well (including research papers). Co-learners receive all materials ahead of time. Everyone is expected to have everything read before the intensive two week course starts.
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Peace and Social Justice: Pedagogy and Practice
Co-learners should leave the course with a closer appreciation of their own professional understanding of a peace education pedagogy. To that end, each learner will be expected to participate fully in class seminars on each of the building blocks of the course, and be prepared to lead discussions and share comparative analyses. This engagement with other learners and course material should lead to deeper understanding of how various scholars and you understand what a peaceful classroom “looks like.” The word look means more than just the outward appearances and includes peace education processes and philosophy (values, attitudes, goals and principles) that create that peaceful look you see when you peak into a peaceful classroom.
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Globalization, Consumerism and the Human Spirit
This course is about contemporary human experiences of living in times of uncertainty
and complexity. Discussion, dialogue and reflection will enable students to begin to develop
their own understanding of the impact of several phenomena on human spirituality, potential and security, such as globalization, capitalism, neo-liberalism, commodification, technological
progress, cultural diversity, civil society, the scientific world view, and economic growth and development.
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Socializing Consumers in the Global Economy
Over an intense but fun period of one or two weeks, we will examine dimensions of peace education, human rights education and citizenship education in the context of a global, consumer culture. The objective of the course is to gain critical awareness of the nuances of each of these areas of education, and then find the synergy that exists as we engage in our educator role of socializing students to be global citizens living a responsible, holistic life of peace and non-violence.
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