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Educators learn power of connection Bill Fentum, Jul 13, 2009
Phyllis Bernard
By Bill Fentum Staff Writer
ARLINGTON, Texas—Phyllis Bernard started college in the early 1970s, when black militancy was in full swing on many U.S. campuses. She felt sure guerrilla warfare would be the next stage in the country’s racial conflict.
She’s glad, of course, that she was wrong. As her studies continued, she learned the power of education to create a more peaceful world. Now a law professor, she leads the Center for Alternative Dispute Resolution at Oklahoma City University.
“How do you fight stereotypes that kill? You fight them with education,” Ms. Bernard told educators in June, opening a three-day conference sponsored by the United Methodist General Board of Higher Education and Ministry. The 2009 Institute of Higher Education drew 62 faculty and presidents from universities and colleges affiliated with the denomination. They held panel discussions and met in small groups on the theme, “Pedagogy for Peace: Educating Moral Leaders in a Violent World.”
“Education that values both intellect and human dignity can reshape communities,” said Ms. Bernard. She often travels to countries in Africa, training mediators to settle inter-tribal conflicts and build relationships that lead people beyond an “us vs. them” mentality.
“When ‘we’ remove humanity from ‘them,’ and ‘we’ are the only humans left, it makes it easier to hate or even to kill,” she said. Dehumanization, she noted, led to the 1994 genocide of 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda—not to mention the lynching of thousands of African Americans in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Ms. Bernard said she was disturbed by an April 7 Homeland Security report warning that white-supremacist militias are on the rise in the U.S. “Some call it passion,” she said, “but the language of propaganda is designed to create pain and incite violence.”
College students mature when they develop both individuality and a love for those who aren’t like them, Lutheran theologian Martin Marty said in a keynote speech.
“People are always defining the other instead of getting to know them,” said Dr. Marty, a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago Divinity School. “When I see good in higher education today, it’s usually because people work toward what [French philosopher] Gabriel-Honore Marcel called ‘counter-intolerance.’ We call it hospitality.”
To embrace hospitality, Dr. Marty noted, students first need a strong sense of themselves. “It’s fun to see when it dawns on a student,” he said, “that they’re not just being transmitted to—that he or she is God’s creature, called to their own vocation.”
That helps them to feel secure, and ready for respectful dialogue with others from different cultural or theological backgrounds. And teachers are the only people who can make it all happen, Dr. Marty added.
“The task of a teacher,” he said, “is to create a climate in which students can lose some inhibitions, feel secure in themselves and become open to the possibility of learning from others.”
One way it’s being done by David Ahearn, a professor of religion and philosophy at LaGrange College in Georgia, is by leading students in Reacting to the Past games. Developed at Barnard College in New York, the game allows players to debate each side of a historical conflict, from the American Revolution to the struggle against South African apartheid.
“They come to understand the conflicts of interest involved,” Dr. Ahearn said in a panel discussion. “They also see that when peace does come, it’s hard-won and something of a miracle.” The teacher lets the game unfold as it will and helps students “unpack” the experience when it’s all over. “If a student spends three months in the role of a racist, they can actually begin to sympathize,” Dr. Ahearn said. “That’s a danger, but also an opportunity for people to get out of their skin and into the skin of another.”
Ms. Bernard at Oklahoma City University agreed that seeing the world through another person’s eyes is often risky, and sometimes even painful.
“But isn’t it wonderful to know,” she said, “that people make decisions about what to believe based on the people they connect with? “Focus on the connections we and our students can make, to bring an ever-widening sense of humanity to the world. Violence doesn’t have to have the last word.”
The Rev. David Rowe, president of UM-related Centenary College in Shreveport, La., said that he recently launched the Methodist Global Ethics Initiative to help network more than 700 Methodist schools in promoting peace, social justice and environmental sustainability.
“We can be stronger together than we are alone,” Dr. Rowe said. “We’ve got to stop replicating the same programs, at institutions that are only 150 miles away from each other.”
Faculty at six schools in Brazil, Japan and the U.S. joined the network in March, taking a three-week online course on global challenges that was developed by Dr. Rowe, using research from the New York Times and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a bi-partisan think tank in Washington, D.C.
Small groups at the conference discussed ways to involve more colleges and universities in the network. Possibilities include student-exchange programs and online, international chats about war, poverty, the global economy or climate change.
Phyllis Bernard
Ms. Bernard said she was disturbed by an April 7 Homeland Security report warning that white-supremacist militias are on the rise in the U.S. “Some call it passion,” she said, “but the language of propaganda is designed to create pain and incite violence.” 
