Pre-primary educators’ views on peace education as a strategy for building a sustainable society in Tanzania

ABSTRACT

Though children are recognized as change agents to make the world a better place, it remains generally unknown how educational leaders and teachers conceptualize peace education based on classroom practices for building a peaceful and sustainable society. This study involved 42 pre-primary educators and leaders drawn using purposive sampling. Face-to-face interviews with individual study participants and semi-structured questionnaires were used to generate data. The study adopted a phenomenography approach to data analysis. Findings indicate that peace education in pre-primary education should be provided even in countries without conflicts or wars to develop children’s capacity to recognise and respect human dignity regardless of one’s socio-economic background. The study concludes that respondents were well-informed about strategies for provision in contributing to a peaceful and sustainable society. Integration of peace education into pre-primary teaching and learning for children was seen as essential in schooling and when cooperating with others within and outside the school.

KEYWORDS:

• Peace
• peace education
• pre-primary education
• sustainable society

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.