User:Linafpinto1

Betty A. Reardon

Founding Director Emeritus, International Institute on Peace Education.

Internationally acknowledged as a founder of peace education, was brought up in Rye, New York,spent her adult life as a resident of New York City, but is a citizen of the world. She holds a doctorate in education from Teachers College Columbia University, an MA in history from New York University, and a BA in history from Wheaton College. World War II, the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement, and the Feminist movement were formative in the development of her worldview. In the face of the horrors of world war, she believed in the fifth grade that there must be an alternative to war, and in the face of racism and sexism she pondered early on the limits and possibilities of justice. In these formative experiences were the seeds of her fundamental approach to peace, as both the elimination of violence and the establishment of justice. As she articulates it: “The conceptual core of peace education is violence, it’s control, reduction, and elimination. The conceptual core of human rights education is human dignity, its recognition, fulfillment, and universalization. …Human rights are most readily adaptable to thestudy of positive peace, the social, political and economic conditions most likely to provide the environment andprocess for social cohesion and non-violent conflict resolution.” She chose to be a teacher, believing that education was key. In 1963, she began her work in peace education as Director of the Schools Program with the Institute of World Order. What drove her was an interest in war, not as an isolated eruption in human affairs, but as a social system justified by particular ways of thinking. She had a hunch that not only the structures of society, but the structures of consciousness as well, could, and should be,transformed through a comprehensive education for and about peace. Working for the Institute for World Order in the 1960s she began organizing international intensive residential workshops to introduce teachers to peace education. During 1970s she introduced hundreds of American teachers to peace education through weekend workshops and presentations at professional meetings. She integrated into American practice both content and perspectives gleaned from cooperative endeavors with peace educators from other countries with whom she worked regularly via the Peace Education Commission of the International Peace Research Association. International cooperation has characterized her work since its inception as manifest in decades of work with the United Nations, UNESCO and later the International Institute on Peace Education. Dr Reardon’s ideas on teaching practice evolved from practical classroom experience in the first decade of her career. Her internationally influential theoretical work developed from practical experience that enabled her to work well with other practitioners in introducing them to the field. Always an educator first, she spent her career working more in the teacher mode than the scholar mode. Her work as the Founder and Director of the Peace Education Center and Peace Education Graduate Degree Concentration at Teachers College, Columbia University established a model for the development of university based peace education programs around the world. Scholars have come from around the world to study with Dr. Reardon toward developing their own institutional models.