������Ƶ

The aim of the project Creating Peace is to encourage and coach students with special educational needs to develop their transversal skills, especially interpersonal and intrapersonal skills and critical reading and thinking to help them to integrate more easily into local society. During the first year, students learned about the Thirty Years´ War, how it influenced lives of people and how peace was reached. They looked for successful solutions of conflicts in their national history in general, discussed other possibilities and tried to draw inspiration from it for their lives. Students were coached to improve their critical reading and thinking. They expressed their impressions and feelings through comic, art object, song, rap, drama, etc.

This intervention is an educational approach centred on nurturing philosophical enquiry, originally developed by Professor Matthew Lipman in the USA in 1970. The aim of the programme is to create a classroom ‘community of enquiry’ and to help children become more willing and able to question, reason, construct arguments and collaborate with others. Materials recommended by the Society for the Advancement of Philosophical Enquiry and Reflection in Education (SAPERE) include stories, poems, scripts, short films, images, artefacts, and picture books. Feedback from teachers and pupils suggested that P4C had a beneficial impact on wider outcomes such as pupils’ confidence to speak, patience when listening to others, and self-esteem.