What Do Teachers Need to Become a Peace Educator?: The Competencies of Teachers for Peace Education

Introduction

In the recent era, the borders among countries have become more accessible, and as a result of this people who have different cultural background have started sharing common environments for professional life or education. This fact makes cultural differences an important issue to be taken into consideration. While talking about cultural differences, the ones the ones based on gender, age, socio-economic class, physical or mental disorders, and so on should be considered together with the ones based on ethnic origin or race (Salomon, 2002). All of these cultural differences can be said to be faced in many parts of daily life. Hence, the above-mentioned differences should be managed successfully. Otherwise, it would be inevitable to have conflicts among people, which can cause damaging results.

It is a well-known fact that all of these differences can easily be seen in many communities, starting from family to any type of organizations that including educational organizations. Thus, building and keeping peace is very important for any type of communities. In order to manage that, individuals should learn how to be a peace-maker and it is highly possible to say that this can be managed through the process of peace education. This makes peace educators’ qualities very important. Thus, this chapter focuses on teachers’ competencies to be a peace educator, and suggests a model called “The White Pigeon Model”.