Peace education for displaced populations

Overview

What is peace education?

Peace education is a learning approach that deliberately combines academic content with attitudes, skills, and values that promote nonviolence, social cohesion, and active citizenship. It goes beyond teaching about peace as an abstract ideal; it builds competencies such as critical thinking, conflict analysis, dialogue, and collaborative problem solving. In settings marked by disruption, peace education helps learners make sense of their experiences, develop hope, and participate constructively in their communities.

In displaced contexts, peace education aligns classroom time with the realities learners face—loss, displacement, uncertainty, and exposure to ongoing risks. It emphasizes safe spaces, inclusive participation, and practical strategies for building constructive relations across diverse groups. The goal is not only to reduce violence but to cultivate a sense of belonging, responsibility, and resilience among children and youth.

Why focus on displaced populations?

Displaced populations—whether refugees, asylum seekers, or internally displaced persons—often endure interruptions to schooling, heightened vulnerability, and gaps in protection. Education in emergencies provides continuity, stability, and a framework for shielding children from harm while enabling them to develop skills for their future. Peace-focused pedagogy supports social cohesion, counters xenophobia, and helps communities address trauma through safe, participatory learning experiences. In such contexts, education becomes a stabilizing force that can prevent cycles of violence and support long-term recovery.

Focusing on displaced learners also recognizes their rights and potential. Access to quality education during displacement is a core humanitarian and development imperative, reinforcing dignity, empowerment, and the capacity to participate in peacebuilding processes once conditions allow a durable solution.

Foundational Concepts

Education in emergencies

Education in emergencies is a rights-based, life-saving, and protective service that maintains learning continuity amid crisis. It integrates emergency response with longer-term development goals, ensuring that schools, teachers, and learners adapt to shifting contexts. Key elements include safe learning environments, flexible curricula, and rapid but quality-aligned assessment that respects learners’ needs and trauma histories.

Effective programs coordinate with protection mechanisms, health services, and psychosocial supports to reduce risk and promote well-being. They also prioritize accessibility for all learners, including those with disabilities or language differences, to prevent exclusion during upheaval.

Nonviolence and conflict resolution

Nonviolence in practice means teaching learners to resolve disputes through dialogue, mediation, and inclusive participation. Conflict resolution skills are embedded in classroom routines, group work, and community projects. By modeling nonviolent norms and providing restorative approaches to misbehavior, peace education helps learners translate principles into everyday actions, reducing the likelihood of violence within schools and beyond.

Programs also address the root causes of conflict—inequality, discrimination, and scarce resources—by fostering empathy, negotiation skills, and cooperative problem solving. This approach cultivates a culture of peace that extends to families and communities affected by displacement.

Human rights education

Human rights education centers on understanding rights and responsibilities, recognizing dignity, and defending equitable treatment. In displacement settings, it emphasizes protections for children, the rights of girls and boys, and the rights of refugees and internally displaced persons to access education, safety, and opportunity. This foundation supports learners in advocating for themselves and those around them, while nurturing a culture that values accountability and rule of law.

Integrating human rights into curricula also helps learners analyze power dynamics, challenge discrimination, and participate in peaceful collective action within their communities.

Curriculum and Pedagogy

Core learning objectives

• Peace literacy: understanding what peace means, its components, and how to sustain it in daily life.
• Conflict analysis and resolution: identifying causes of disputes and employing constructive, nonviolent strategies to resolve them.
• Social-emotional learning: developing self-awareness, empathy, resilience, and stress management.
• Critical thinking and media literacy: evaluating information, recognizing misinformation, and making informed decisions.
• Civic participation: engaging learners in community issues, dialogue with stakeholders, and peaceful advocacy.

Curricula should be flexible to accommodate disrupted schooling, portable across settings, and culturally responsive to diverse learner backgrounds.

Trauma-informed approaches

Trauma-informed pedagogy recognizes the impact of violence, loss, and displacement on learners. It emphasizes predictable routines, emotional safety, and supportive teacher–learner relationships. Classrooms prioritize gentle transitions, options for rest or quiet time, and accommodations that reduce re-traumatization while enabling engagement and learning progress.

Teacher practices include avoiding shaming, offering choices, and validating students’ experiences. Safe spaces and confidential channels for reporting concerns are integral to protecting well-being and learning continuity.

Participatory teaching methods

Participatory methods invite learners to co-create knowledge, share lived experiences, and apply learning to real-world challenges. Techniques such as collaborative projects, peer teaching, simulations, and community mapping foster agency and social cohesion. In displaced settings, these approaches help bridge gaps between host and refugee communities and support mutual understanding.

Educators tailor activities to contexts, languages, and literacy levels, ensuring that everyone can contribute. Regular reflection and feedback loops help refine learning experiences and strengthen local relevance.

Inclusivity and Safeguarding

Inclusive access for girls and boys

Equitable access means reducing barriers to participation for all children and adolescents, regardless of gender. Programs should address transportation, safety, cultural expectations, and financial constraints that disproportionately affect girls. Creating welcoming, female-friendly spaces and ensuring equal opportunities to lead and participate helps close gaps in enrollment and learning outcomes.

Monitoring enrollment by gender, collecting disaggregated data, and engaging communities in inclusive planning support sustained progress toward parity. Inclusive pedagogy also integrates diverse family structures and acknowledges gender diversity as part of respectful, rights-based education.

Disability and language accessibility

Learning opportunities must be accessible to learners with disabilities and those who speak different languages. This requires accessible infrastructure, adapted materials, sign language interpretation, plain language formats, and multilingual resources. Universal design for learning principles help ensure that all students can participate meaningfully.

Language accessibility includes translation of core materials, community language support, and inclusive assessment practices. When learners can understand and express themselves, learning quality and retention improve significantly in crisis contexts.

Child protection and safeguarding

Safeguarding policies establish clear standards for safeguarding children from abuse, exploitation, and neglect. Schools and learning centers implement codes of conduct, safe recruitment, reporting mechanisms, and girl- and boy-friendly safeguarding practices. Training for teachers, parents, and community volunteers reinforces protective environments where learners feel secure to study and grow.

Safeguarding also involves aligning education with broader protection responses, ensuring that schools are considered safe spaces even amid security concerns and displacement dynamics.

Settings and Delivery

Formal schools, informal learning spaces, and digital platforms

Peace education programs operate across a spectrum of settings. Formal schools provide structured curricula and recognized credentials, while informal spaces—community centers, learning hubs, and makeshift classrooms—offer flexible, context-responsive learning. Digital platforms and radio-based education extend reach to learners in remote or restricted environments, supporting continuity when physical access is limited.

Effective delivery combines these modalities to maximize coverage and resilience. Hybrid approaches enable learners to progress regardless of changes in displacement status or mobility, while ensuring that content remains relevant to daily realities.

Learning in refugee camps and host communities

In refugee camps, learning initiatives emphasize safe schooling, psycho-social supports, and continuity with learners’ home cultures. In host communities, programs encourage integration, mutual understanding, and access to shared resources. Collaboration with local authorities, community leaders, and refugee committees helps tailor curricula to needs and strengthens social cohesion.

Across both settings, learners should gain skills that enable them to contribute to community resilience, regardless of whether they expect to return home or settle elsewhere.

Community-based and mobile learning

Community-based learning leverages local knowledge, mentors, and peer networks to sustain education outside formal institutions. Mobile learning reaches populations that move frequently or lack consistent access to schools, using portable materials, community tutors, and outreach teams. These approaches help preserve learning momentum and reduce dropout risks.

Engagement with families and communities is essential to sustaining motivation and ensuring that learning remains relevant to daily life, livelihoods, and protection needs.

Teacher Development

Pre-service and in-service training

Teacher preparation combines pre-service coursework with ongoing in-service training focused on emergencies, trauma sensitivity, and peace-focused pedagogy. Training emphasizes adaptive lesson planning, flexible assessment, and culturally responsive practices that honor learners’ experiences and identities.

In-service programs support teachers to adapt to changing contexts, adopt new tools, and collaborate with peers. Continuous professional development helps educators stay motivated, skilled, and capable of addressing complex classroom dynamics in displacement settings.

Supportive supervision and mentoring

Supervision and mentoring provide practical guidance, feedback, and emotional support for teachers working in challenging environments. Regular coaching visits, reflective practice sessions, and peer observation foster professional growth and classroom quality. Mentors help educators manage stress, maintain well-being, and implement trauma-informed approaches effectively.

Strong supervision structures also reinforce safeguarding standards, ensure alignment with curricula, and promote consistency in delivering peace education across settings.

Peer learning and professional communities

Peer learning networks and professional communities enable teachers to share experiences, resources, and strategies that work in their contexts. Collaborative platforms—whether through in-person meetings, online forums, or regional workshops—facilitate collective problem solving, innovation, and mutual accountability in pursuing peace education goals.

Professional communities reinforce a culture of continuous improvement, monitor emerging needs, and sustain motivation for educators serving displaced learners.

Partnerships and Policy

Coordination with education sector plans

Peace education programs succeed when they align with national and regional education sector plans, emergency response frameworks, and protection mandates. Coordination ensures coherent resource use, avoids duplication, and supports scalable, evidence-based interventions. Collaboration among ministries, agencies, and organizations helps embed peace education within broader education in emergencies strategies.

Joint planning also enhances data sharing, monitoring, and evaluation, enabling a clearer understanding of what works in diverse displacement contexts.

Donor and NGO collaboration

Effective partnerships with donors and non-governmental organizations mobilize resources, technical expertise, and field presence. Shared goals, transparent funding, and risk-informed planning improve project design, implementation, and sustainability. Donor support can enable long-term program integrity, teacher professional development, and robust safeguarding measures.

Coordination should prioritize local leadership, community ownership, and alignment with learners’ rights and needs rather than top-down approaches that may miss ground realities.

Policy frameworks for Education in Emergencies

Policy frameworks provide a structured environment for implementing peace education in emergencies. They include standards for curriculum development, teacher qualifications, inclusivity, safety, and protection. Clear policies help ensure consistent quality, accountability, and rapid deployment of learning opportunities in crisis contexts.

Policies should be adaptable to shifting displacement patterns, financing conditions, and security environments, while maintaining core commitments to learners’ rights and wellbeing.

Monitoring and Evaluation

Learning outcomes and well-being indicators

Monitoring focuses on both academic progress and well-being. Indicators include literacy and numeracy gains, critical thinking measures, social-emotional skills, and indicators of psychosocial wellbeing. Inclusion metrics—such as enrollment and retention by gender, disability status, and language group—are essential for assessing equity.

Evaluation should also track safety, protection incidents, and sense of belonging within learning spaces, linking educational outcomes to overall resilience in displacement contexts.

Data collection in unstable contexts

Data collection in crises requires ethical standards, trauma sensitivity, and participant protections. Methods prioritize low-burden approaches, community input, and rapid feedback loops. Data must be used to inform improvements, not punitive measures, and should respect privacy and consent in sensitive environments.

Reliability is strengthened through triangulation across sources, careful sampling, and clear documentation of context-specific limitations and risks.

Measuring peacebuilding and resilience

Beyond grades, evaluating peacebuilding outcomes includes assessing shifts in attitudes toward others, reductions in violent incidents, and increased cross-group cooperation. Resilience metrics capture learners’ ability to adapt to ongoing challenges, maintain learning, and contribute to community recovery efforts.

Effective monitoring links educational progress with protection, health, and social cohesion indicators to present a holistic view of learners’ trajectories in displacement settings.

Implementation Challenges and Risks

Security and displacement dynamics

Conflict and displacement dynamics pose significant risks to learners and educators. Schools may face closures, targeting, or movement restrictions that disrupt attendance. Programs must incorporate flexible scheduling, remote learning options, and contingency planning to maintain continuity while prioritizing safety.

Understanding local security conditions and engaging with community protections can help minimize risk and sustain learning opportunities in unstable environments.

Resource constraints and funding gaps

Funding shortages and uneven resource distribution challenge program scale and quality. Sustainable peace education requires predictable financing, in-kind support, and efficient use of resources. Partnerships and joint fundraising can help close gaps and ensure long-term viability for critical learning services.

Budget flexibility is essential to adapt to changing displacement patterns, emergent needs, and the integration of new delivery modalities such as digital platforms.

Cultural and language barriers

Cultural diversity and language differences can impede access, comprehension, and engagement. Culturally responsive curricula, multilingual materials, and inclusive teacher training address these barriers. Engaging communities in curriculum development helps ensure relevance and acceptance across groups.

Ongoing assessment of language needs and cultural considerations supports better learning outcomes and greater learner participation.

Future Directions

Innovations and technology

Emerging tools—low-bandwidth digital platforms, offline content repositories, radio-based learning, and mobile labs—expand reach and flexibility. Technology can support personalized learning paths, real-time feedback, and remote mentoring for teachers. However, access disparities must be addressed to avoid widening inequities.

Innovations should prioritize safety, privacy, and ethics, ensuring that digital solutions complement, rather than detract from, face-to-face learning and safeguarding commitments.

Scaling and sustainability

Scaling peace education in displacement contexts requires building local capacity, strengthening governance structures, and embedding peace education within national education plans. Sustainability hinges on community ownership, durable financing, and alignment with protection and development objectives. Gradual, context-aware expansion helps ensure lasting impact beyond emergency response cycles.

Trusted Source Insight

For the original source, visit UNESCO document repository.

Trusted Summary: UNESCO underscores education as a fundamental right in emergencies, advocating peace education that fosters nonviolence, critical thinking, and social cohesion for displaced learners. It promotes inclusive, safe, and continuous learning environments to ensure all children and youth can learn despite displacement.