Artful Dialogue: Moving towards an Alternative Peace Education Pedagogy

At scale, limited research considers arts-based practice as research towards understanding how local and indigenous cultural art forms can facilitate dialogue with and between children and youth, educators, and policymakers to advance everyday peacebuilding. This paper presents a conceptual framework for a pedagogy, ‘Artful Dialogue,’ which begins to respond to how cultural forms can be used for dialogue and create alternative spaces for peacebuilding efforts and curricula development. It encourages an adaptive, emplaced, and intergenerational peace education pedagogy in non-formal, informal, and formal post-conflict learning contexts. The framework draws from the learnings and findings of the ‘Mobile Arts for Peace’ (MAP), a four-year applied research project (2020-2024). Artful Dialogue proposes a value system foregrounding process, relationality, plurality, and a pang of hunger for qualities of experience before product/outcome. It suggests a different ontological and epistemic focus for peace (art) education, one that understands engaging with art forms as dialogic communication that is expansive, generative, and impactful in and of itself. The framework considers three optics: deepening adaptations of indigenous art forms, disrupting space and emplaced dynamics, and reframing intergenerational relations. Artful Dialogue moves towards creatively revealing and transforming structures and situations of violence stemming from harmful social norms.