Language for Peace Forum
neuroscience
Creating Space for Peace with Brain Breaks and Focused-Attention Practices
One part of peace education is creating a classroom environment in which students can experience a peaceful space. In the often high-stakes world of language learning, testing, and curriculum goals, it can be a challenge to integrate opportunities for this. Continue reading
Relationship key to communication and community
Daniel Siegel, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, and co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center, has done extensive work with connections among relationships, mind and brain in his neurobiological research. Relationship, it turns out, is an essential key to learning. Communication and community are interrelated. Continue reading
Language Learning as Tool for Resolving Worldview Conflicts
How can language learning help us to navigate the difficult experience of worldview conflicts? Peacebuilding becomes most challenging when the conflict is not the surface issue, but the difference in the ways that people organize their way of making meaning in the world and by which they make decisions about action. Most entrenched conflicts actually are not about the apparent issues, but these underlying ways of seeing the world that are opposed to each other. Language learning can provide essential tools for addressing these conflicts in constructive ways. Continue reading
Brain Development and Bilingualism
Here’s an interesting article on how being bilingual helps the brain to develop into a “more powerful, flexible brain.” A little motivation for language learning at any age!
Language for Peace Forum 