Sarah McDonald, Class of 2026

This summer I worked with Professor Leonisa Ardizzone to create a peace education handbook to help educators implement peace education practices and lessons into their classrooms. Professor Ardizzone is the founder of the Peace Education Center of the Hudson Valley (pechv.org) which supports the local community through peace education and programs primarily for students and educators. Peace education actively educates to counteract the war system and various manifestations of violence and promotes peace through the values of relational existence, global consciousness, and holistic earth care. Many people can agree that peace education aligns with what we would like to see more of in our classrooms and society at large, and the goal of our handbook is to make it easier for educators to put peace education into practice. 

I began the summer by analyzing data from a cohort of educators who went through a peace education workshop conducted by Professor Ardizzone last year. I then worked with her and Zak Shearn, another Vassar student working at the PECHV this summer, to create an outline for our handbook which was informed by a variety of peace education texts. It includes an introductory section about the practices of a peace educator as well as a curriculum of nearly 50 lessons divided into the categories of Need and Wants, Human and Planetary Rights, Conflict Resolution, War is Terrible, and Creating a Peaceful Society. Completing the handbook will be an ongoing project with the collaboration of others and all of us are very proud of the progress we made this summer. 

In addition to writing curriculum, I also spent the summer assisting with many other PECHV projects including Zak’s Photovoice research, working with students at the YWCA and YMCA in Kingston, creating videos about peace education, and screen printing upcycled t-shirts to sell at events the PECHV participated at throughout the summer. I had the most amazing experience this summer and I will always be extremely grateful I was given the opportunity to participate in and learn so much from this work.