Conflicts Global and Local: An Elementary Approach. (Elementary Education)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
CONFLICT IS NORMAL and inevitable in human society; handling conflict inclusively and nonviolently is a hallmark of democracy. Teaching about conflict can help to make schools and communities more peaceful, and prepare students for the challenges of democratic citizenship. This article describes a curriculum unit used with diverse, urban fourth and fifth graders that was built around the key idea of understanding conflict. This was not primarily a conflict resolution training program. Rather, it was an integrated social studies, language arts, and drama unit that presented controversial and international material in an accessible way. The understanding of conflict thus developed was later applied to complex interpersonal conflicts, such as bullying in the schoolyard. In today's era of mass media, globalized economies, and extensive human migration, children are already aware of world events and need to understand them. Students may be as familiar with social and political conflicts as they are with schoolyard scuffles. Thus, a unit on conflict can draw upon examples from many sources, including current world events and students' personal experiences. How might young students learn to analyze and discuss the conflicts underlying personal and public choices? As an educational researcher, I was privileged to observe and assist an experienced teacher, Ms. Betty Allison, teaching her combined grade 4 and 5 class in a Toronto public school over the course of eight months. (1) There were 33 students in the class, more than half of whom were recent immigrants. Their wide variety of language and cultural backgrounds provided a rich resource for their learning activities. Conflict was the unifying theme for a curriculum that extended through much of the school year. The learning activities revolved around three questions about the concept of conflict. Each of these elements builds upon the preceding element, gradually elaborating the students' understandings of the whole concept. 1: What is conflict? (2) Conflicts are problems or disagreements. Various people or groups may have different viewpoints, feelings, and interests about those situations and what to do about them. Violent and nonviolent responses are choices, not inevitable outcomes of particular feelings or problems. Conflicts may escalate or de-escalate, depending on the ways they are handled. 2: What causes conflict? (3) Various factors may lead to conflict among people or groups--in particular, competing needs and wants. 3: How can we handle conflict? (4) There are many possible responses to any problem. Different choices in handling conflict may affect social relationships in different ways: Individuals can predict and evaluate these options. Some responses to conflict have positive consequences for both or all the parties involved (win-win); other responses have positive consequences for one party and negative consequences for the other (win-lose); and other responses have negative consequences for everybody involved (lose-lose). The unit goal was for all the students to develop more complex understandings of conflict along these three dimensions, while at the same time meeting a variety of specific learning outcomes articulated in the school district's curriculum guidelines for social studies, language arts, drama, and occasionally other subject areas. What Is Conflict? The first step in concept development is often to identify several examples of the phenomenon, and to distinguish these from non-examples. Ms. Allison and the class began the unit by brainstorming and describing many different instances of conflict. The children's examples included a disagreement between a parent and child about what should be eaten for breakfast, competition between Native North Americans and European settlers over use and control of land (this example was found in a L. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".