New Year Update - January 2007
Posted: 12 January, 22:36 by Jon Dorsett
Well this section of the site hasn’t seen much action, so we thought it was about time to post a bit of an update on Peace School and what’s been happening…
The first year of the Peace School programme began in August 2006 with the summer school in North Yorkshire. We have a small group for this first foundational year (12 including the facilitators) and this helped to develop a strong sense of community very quickly, in fact by the end of the 10 days together we were all really sad to be leaving.
The summer school was an intense time of explorations into all sorts of different aspects of what it means to be a shalom activist, from ‘playfulness and peace’ to ‘the philosophy of non-violence’, from ‘Jesus and empire’ to ‘shalom and gender’. With a daily routine of 3 main sessions and other scheduled time for sharing stories and ideas with each other, we covered a lot of ground.
As expected food took a central role in our time together and the wonderful menu prepared by Anita and Ben was a hit with everyone, in fact so much so that there was demand for the recipes to be posted on the Peace School programme blog.
We also managed to make time for some relaxation! Walks in the beautiful countryside were a daily feature with two longer expeditions taking place on our afternoon off. The ‘local’ pub was also paid a couple of visits (though local in N. Yorkshire terms means 2.5km away). The nightly game playing turned out to be not so shalom after the introduction of the game of ‘Mafia’ which generally involves lots of lying and deception!!
In November we met again for a weekend in Bedfordshire, in another wonderful converted church (with much appreciated under-floor heating throughout). It was great to be back together again following the months since the summer and our explorations continued learning more about creativity, environmentalism and ‘idolatry and social movements’.
The times between our gatherings have given us all an opportunity to reflect on the issues that have been brought up and the topics we have been discussing, much of this has been in a personal capacity (with some big changes for some – more of which below), and some has been on the Peace Schools webtools site where we have all got a blog as well as the discussion forum and the embryonic impact map and values map (now called the Tree of Life). This section of the website is currently available only to Peace School participants (so that participants feel able to discuss sensitive issues in a close community), but we hope in the future we will be able to open it up to others too.
We’ve got a wonderful group of participants this year from such a wide variety of backgrounds from Anti-arms campaigners to stand-up comedians, from a community arts worker to a web designer (and obviously there is so much more to people than simply how they earn their money). The impact of the Peace School explorations on people has been amazing to see, with reactions as varied as becoming vegetarian to travelling to Palestine/Israel on a Christian Peacemaker Teams delegation.
We’ve certainly learnt a lot so far this year, with such amazingly helpful feedback and ideas coming from all involved. We’re presently re-jigging the programme slightly for the 2007/8 programme based on the suggestions from this year. The changes probably won’t be major, but we’ll be trying to fit in more reflection time in the summer school; looking at developing some more online resources so that high input sessions can be done online during the dispersed parts of the year; and looking at ways to keep the momentum of community learning going between gathered times. We have a new venue for the 2007/8 programme, The Beamsley Centre (www.beamsleyproject.org.uk), it is only a mile or two from last year’s great venue but it will enable us to have full disabled access for participants. The dates for the 2007/8 programme summer school have also changed from those originally advertised and will now run from Friday 3rd August to Sunday 12th. If you are interested in taking part in this coming year’s programme please do give us a call and we’ll be happy to chat with you or put you in touch with others who have been participating this year so that you can get their thoughts on the experience.
We still have 2 more exciting weekend gatherings planned for this year’s programme with our next one in March focusing on conflict resolution skills, and we will be sure to keep these updates a little more regular from now on.
Wishing you shalom and blessings for 2007
The Peace School facilitation team
