Cultivating a Professional Culture of Peace and Inclusion: Conceptualizing Practical Applications of Peace Leadership in Schools

Abstract

Beyond the role of educating students across all academic domains, school leaders are tasked with the monumental responsibility of creating positive, engaged systems and cultures that embrace the growing cultural, economic, linguistic, and cognitive diversity in the United States landscape. With collective goals to create peaceful learning environments with capacity to serve diverse learners, many school leaders have embraced school-wide prevention and intervention efforts, such as Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) for social-emotional and behavioral development of students. Unfortunately, due to the inherent complexities and fragmentation of such efforts, many school leaders have continued to experience significant barriers to sustainable systems change. Throughout the following discussion, the authors argue that the school-wide programs most commonly utilized in schools lack the explicit organizational structures for integrating culturally responsive practice, leadership development, and collaborative community building processes that are essential to sustainable implementation. Therefore, this conceptual paper aims to explore the possibilities for practical applications of the Integral Perspective of Peace Leadership (IPPL, McIntyre Miller and Green, 2015) within school systems change efforts by shifting focus from direct student skill development toward a more integrated and systems-oriented approach aimed at strengthening culture and capacity within communities of educational leaders. The IPPL can "connect the dots" and provide a strong foundation through which school-wide change is possible and more sustainable. By challenging individuals, schools, communities, and organizations to examine and include Innerwork; theories, behaviors and practices, or Knowledge building; Communities of practice; and Environment work, such as systems and global thinking (McIntyre Miller and Green, 2015), the implementation of the IPPL may "challenge issues of violence and aggression and build positive, inclusive social systems and structures" (McIntyre Miller, 2016, p. 223). The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, there is a discussion of how the elements of the IPPL connect to school culture and system change. Second, specific examples, such as character development, mindfulness, school-wide positive behavior supports, social-emotional learning, professional learning communities, home-school connection, systems thinking, and distributed leadership, will demonstrate how school leaders might engage, using consultants and an implementation team, in the work to create positive, equitable school cultures.

Peace Studies, Knowledge and Learner Achievement

“…Atwi et al (2022) adds that the need for integral peace leadership comes from the nexus between leadership studies, peace studies and conflict transformation. Miller and Abdou (2018) state that peace leadership is a growing element of leadership, where leaders are supposed to cultivate a professional culture of peace and inclusivity. They confirm the need for integral perspectives of peace leadership initiatives in building positive school cultures and establishing climates that are conducive to learning.…”

“…One of the basic demands of peace leadership is to enhance positive cultural change to support the organisation. Peace leadership should also affect the development of learners into peace-loving adults, who have been capacitated to achieve success by educators who work diligently to close achievement gaps among their learners (Miller and Abdou 2018). Yet school leadership cannot achieve a peaceful educational context on their own-there is a vital role for communities, parents and various other networksincluding neighbouring schools to play (Atwi et al 2022;Miller and Abdou 2022).…”

Understanding integral peace leadership in practice: Lessons and learnings from women PeaceMaker narratives.

“…This definition builds from Galtung’s (1996) distinction between positive peace, which focuses on building peace, and negative peace, which focuses on existing challenges to peace. While there are numerous emergent perspectives of peace leadership (Amaladas, 2018; Chinn & Falk-Rafael, 2018; Dinan, 2018; Ledbetter, 2016; Schellhammer, 2016, 2018), this article focuses on integral peace leadership first discussed by McIntyre Miller and Green (2015) and further explored in subsequent works (McIntyre Miller & Abdou, 2018; McIntyre Miller & Alomair, 2019).…”

“…While many of the concepts embedded in integral peace leadership are not new, what integral peace leadership provides is a framework to illuminate how change is made by engaging in all quadrants. To better reflect the work of peace leadership, the I quadrant was renamed Innerwork, the WE quadrant, Community, the IT quadrant Knowledge, and the ITS quadrant, Environment (McIntyre Miller & Abdou, 2018; McIntyre Miller & Alomair, 2019). Figure 1, below, demonstrates how the concepts and practices of integral peace leadership appear within the four-quadrant framework…”

“…One such effort is integral peace leadership, an emergent framework that focuses on four areas of peace and leadership. Utilizing deductive qualitative analysis (DQA; Gilgun, 2010, 2015, 2017), this research study serves to critically examine the concepts of integral peace leadership (McIntyre Miller & Abdou, 2018; McIntyre Miller & Alomair, 2019; McIntyre Miller & Green, 2015) by analyzing narratives of the lives and work of women peacebuilders. This article explores the relevant literature, provides an in-depth methodological review, and shares findings and discussion that offer insight on how the women’s narratives help to understand peace leadership in practice.…”