Peace & Civic Education

Peace and civic education at Bayan is not a degree and not a single course. It is a strand of study events, workshops and community work running across the colleges, on the question of how people who differ live together in one society — and what a graduate owes to the place they graduate into.

Why the university runs it

Every department here trains someone who will end up holding a position of trust: a lawyer, an accountant, a teacher of English, an engineer signing off a system, an administrator deciding somebody's case. The technical half of that is the degree. The other half — dealing fairly, arguing without breaking things, seeing a conflict early and knowing what can be done about it — is learned by practice and discussion. A university that does not organise the practice is leaving it to chance.

What takes place

• Open lectures and seminars on citizenship, rights and duties, the rule of law, and the sources of conflict and its settlement
• Practical workshop series in dialogue, mediation, negotiation and facilitation, run in small groups where the participants do the exercises rather than watch them
• Debates and moot sessions, in which students argue the case they were given rather than the one they hold
• Reading and discussion groups convened with a member of staff
• Student-led community projects: volunteering, awareness work, sessions in schools, and activity with local associations

Who takes part

Any Bayan student, from any department and any year. Staff attend on the same footing as students, and some sessions are open to visitors from the city where the room allows.

There is no examination and no application form. Come to what interests you. The workshop series are the one exception: a group whose members change every week cannot do the exercises, so those ask you to commit to the whole run, and completion is recorded.

Proposing an activity

Departments, student societies and individual students may all propose something — a speaker, a series, a project in the community. Bring the idea to the organising office with three things: what you want to do, who it is for, and what you need. A proposal that comes with the student who will actually run it moves considerably faster than one that does not.

Finding what is on

Sessions are announced with the rest of the university's programme under Events and written up afterwards on the Blog. To ask about the strand as a whole, or to offer to help with it, write through Contact.