Abstract
Teaching young people how to deal with conflict is rarely part of a school curriculum. Although, as social communities with humans of different ages, and levels of power and status, schools themselves are full of conflict, they are often reluctant for many reasons to acknowledge the fact, and more reluctant to give it an explicit profile by including the teaching of conflict management and transformation within the curriculum. Most conflict and bullying management in schools is reactive (i.e. after the fact), top-down (i.e. done to or with the participants by teachers and school leaders), and any training is extra-curricular.
Cooling Conflict was a ten-year action research project in Australia, part of the international dracon project, investigating how drama can provide young people with the cognitive tools to resolve their own and other people's conflicts, and to manage bullying for themselves. The program developed carefully structured drama pedagogy to give students knowledge and a vocabulary to understand the origins and structures of conflict, and to provide practice in the range of strategies available for resolving, managing or transforming conflict. The aim was to provide the students with autonomy and agency over this knowledge, and peer teaching became an important part of the program, which was (and still is) implemented in a wide range of educational settings internationally, formal and informal. From the outset and wherever possible, the program was deliberately integrated into standard curriculum time and programs, to embed the concept that conflict transformation and management can be learnt through experiential, integral learning. Over ten years, the project accumulated overwhelming evidence that, properly used, drama pedagogy is a valuable method for providing students with the tools they need to manage or transform their own conflicts, and themselves to take responsibility for assisting peers and younger students to do the same.