When a few of us on staff and faculty at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP) came together last year to begin discussing the possibility of doing an online course – something we had never done before – we were met with some resistance, not the least of which came from Howard Zehr, Professor of Restorative Justice at CJP and a pioneer in the field.

Fast-forward one year: Howard and Brenda Waugh () are now three weeks into teaching the class, “Recovering the Vision: Conversations on Restorative Justice,” which is being carried out completely online. The students – all practitioners – hail from diverse locales in North America, Europe, and Australia. First-year MA student, Jenn Bricker, and I have had the pleasure of helping Howard and Brenda facilitate this course. And from deep skepticism, Howard has now become a strong advocate of the possibilities of CJP doing more online. What happened in the course of that year?

Relationality

Perhaps the strongest hesitation to implement an online course came out of CJP’s emphasis on embodied relationships. Restorative justice, in particular, is keen on the importance of encounter; of victims and offenders, but also of teachers and students. Circle processes, something practiced and taught heavily at CJP, are also predicated on there being a relational connection in the process. As we surveyed online educational practices at ��ݮ����, we noted their asynchronous (out-of-time) nature, usually following a message board model where teachers would assign students postings by a certain date to which others would then respond and discuss in the comments.  What’s lost here, though, is people’s faces, voices, and gestures, a whole cluster of non-textual expressions that help establish and nurture relationships. We simply couldn’t imagine doing a course in a text-only, asynchronous medium and have it maintain any semblance of the “CJP feel.”

Co-creative learning

Another hallmark of the CJP that was difficult to imagine happening in an online space was CJP’s elicitive pedagogical practices. The traditional Western approach to education has been variously described as a “banking” or “transfer” model by Freire and Lederach, respectively[1]. This view sees students as empty receptacles awaiting knowledge-as-information and teachers as the purveyors of such knowledge. This view limits the horizon of education, shutting off possibilities that open up in a more holistic, relational, co-creative approach to education, what Lederach calls “elicitive.”

One characteristic of how elicitive education gets done at CJP is through small group activities and projects that engage different learning styles, including artistic expression. The very nature of a text-only online environment privileges the banking model and limits modes of expression and different learning styles. So again we were not enamored with the idea of carrying out a CJP course in this fashion.

So what did we do?

To address these challenges, we investigated emerging edges of online communications technology. Software platforms are emerging which facilitate synchronous (within time), mixed-mode (audio/visual and textual) interaction within a virtual meeting space, in our case a classroom. So we strung together a curriculum that makes use of both synchronous and asynchronous technologies.

Every other week the whole class meets together for two hours in a virtual classroom using platform. Within that space we’ve found ways to simulate circle processes, host special guests, and let students interview and discuss. You can even “raise your hand” to ask questions. A text chat conversation is going on the whole time, which then gets saved and posted with other class materials to , a widely-used open-source course management system. After the first class session, small groups were formed based on sub-interests within restorative justice. These groups will stick together through the remainder of the course. On weeks alternate to the large-group meeting, these small groups meet in software. Then, before the next week’s full-class meeting, each small group is to post something to their group’s blog, using platform.

Both Connect and Hangout have the ability to be used by mobile devices such as the iPhone or iPad. So one student a few weeks ago joined her small group via her iPhone during a break in jury duty, something she was afraid would require her to miss her group’s meeting. Jenn and I would periodically drop in on the various Hangout sessions underway to see if things were proceeding well, and here was this student hovering over her iPhone in a courthouse, talking about restorative justice!

Limitations, as always

While the experience of helping conduct this online course has been one of the highlights of my career as a technology worker (and fledgling teacher), it has not been without its hiccups. Using a string of cutting edge technologies raised the bar in terms of tech requirements, for students and instructors alike. Streaming video over the internet takes a lot of horsepower on the student’s machine and a lot of network capacity across “the cloud.” Actively seeking international student-practitioners for this course was difficult, partly for that reason since high-speed internet is far from a given in many countries and not everyone has a fancy new computer or iPad. Also, it took extensive training efforts for students and instructors both since so few people have used software like this.  Finally, cutting edge technologies have a tendency of not playing well with other cutting edge technologies. The number of “moving parts” in this course is somewhat dizzying, making troubleshooting inevitable technology issues  a challenge, as I try to keep the “frame” as invisible to the students as possible, so we’re focused on restorative justice and not the tech and its limitations. We’ve had a few glitches small and large but so far nothing that has completely derailed the course.

But as I noted at the beginning, even our strongest skeptic, Howard Zehr, is feeling energized about what we’ve been able to accomplish so far in this course. I’m confident that as these technologies become mainstreamed, their glitches will be ironed out and a smoother experience will be possible. I’m proud to be a part of this team that has basically taken CJP’s teaching into the 21st century. Despite all the legitimate concerns we had at the outset, a creative solution was envisioned and implemented, and so far it’s showing tremendous promise for the future.[2]

Notes:

1. Cf. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 30th Anniversary ed. New York: Continuum, 2006; and Lederach, John Paul. Preparing for Peace: Conflict Transformation Across Cultures. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996.
2. While also signaling toward all the warning signs on over-use of tech and social media, and its impact on the very embodied relationships we value at CJP. For instance, this popped up in my twitter feed as I was writing: via Al-Jazeera.

[Brian Gumm, , is the Web and Information Systems Coordinator for the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. Brian is also in his final semester of Mdiv studies at Eastern Mennonite Seminary. After  – and currently teaching it at a nearby college – Brian has been on a pedagogy kick and is thrilled to be mixing that up with his tech nerd skills at CJP.]

In an  over at NationofChange, Christopher Petrella paints a troubling picture of the state of corrections in the United States and the paths which brought us here. Particularly troubling is what Petrella calls “the circuitous pathways between race, citizenship, containment, and profitability.”

Not only is the phenomenon of for-profit prisons becoming more common, in the midst of state budget crises across the nation, California is even suggesting that inmates pay for the services of the correctional facilities to which they’re being sent. How inmates from predominantly impoverished backgrounds would actually be able to pay for those services (they couldn’t) is part of the scheme. Even after leaving facilities, ex-offenders would then be financially indebted to the facilities, effectively shifting their “incarceration” to another form, economic. As Petrella point out, these people cease to be “criminals” in the eyes of the system and now become “consumers.”

But it doesn’t have to be this way. One of the most important aspects of restorative justice is its emphasis on rehumanization of all involved in instances of wrongdoing, criminal or otherwise. A privatized corrections system assumes an anthropology of literally captive consumers (structured economic individualism), whereas restorative justice assumes an anthropology of relationship and responsibility amidst community. Restorative approaches seek to heal the personal and social wounds done in instances of wrongdoing, whereas a privatized corrections approach seeks to extract capital to buoy the ailing state. Therefore, restorative justice  entails an implicit critique of systems such as privatized corrections but also the assumptions that underwrite such approaches at levels social, political, and economic.

So to use capitalist jargon, the “return on investment” of restorative justice is a return to pre-modern understandings of justice, rooted in embodied, accountable relational networks rather than abstract ideals and institutions. Such a return is well worth the investment.

[Brian Gumm is co-editor of the Peacebuilder Online blog and in his final month of studies at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, with an emphasis in restorative justice. He also blogs at , where this piece was cross-posted.]

James Cavanaugh, a retired ATF executive, offers a good picture of the role of police in the #occupy movement in posted to Tickle the Wire, a site focused on federal law enforcement.

Most notably, he encourages the “greatly underutilized” resources of police negotiators to form relationships and build trust with #occupy movement leaders, and to coordinate plans on a day-to-day basis. As Cavanaugh states, “It does not mean that the police will do everything that the protesters want, but it insurers that police will not act without first building trust and communication.”

This to me seems right on. Part of the problem I’ve seen in citizen coverage of police presence in the #occupy movement is the militarized/SWAT stance. Granted, there is also a problem with how many in the movement view and antagonize police (including in said citizen coverage), so it’s not like protesters are beyond implication. Less emphasis should placed on militarized police forces and more placed on building collaborative relationships with protesters, and a segment of protesters/citizen journalists should stop demonizing the police. Such moves could encourage an already mostly-nonviolent movement to stay that way, and keep them on course toward substantive change.

De-politicizing the public square

I part ways, though, with Cavanaugh’s final assessment, that the movement needs to “(transmute) itself into an occupy the voting booth movement.” Here he conflates “public” with “political” (in the governmental sense) and ignores how deeply corporatized government has become in the U.S., which is part of what the #occupy movement is protesting in the first place.

While I’m not opposed to voting per se, part of the genius of the #occupy movement is its inchoate awareness that the government is not the public savior, providing for all of our society’s needs. Indeed, as political theologian, William T. Cavanaugh (no relation to James, I assume) has shown, one of the problems with the contemporary nation-state is that very view of the state, sucking out all sociality from public life and arrogating it unto itself. The #occupy movement by its very praxis combats this. Some instantiations of the movement setting up ad hoc food systems, for instance.

Complexifying public space, restoring sociality to non-government-mediated public life, is one of the strongest forms of witness the #occupy movement has to the powers that be. Sure, go to the voting booth, but stay in the square. For good.

Social media interfaces?

One of the topics we’ve covered on the Peacebuilder blog in recent months is the potential role of in peacebuilding. In particular, we have two alumni who are trainers of the conflict monitoring platform. I haven’t seen any conversation about how Ushahidi and the #occupy movement may intersect, but perhaps this #occupy/police relationship may have potential. If both movement leaders and police are contributing information to (via SMS texting) and monitoring situations on the ground via Ushahidi, the use of that platform could be part of the day-to-day review, which could follow an action-reflection model.

[Brian Gumm is co-editor of the Peacebuilder Online blog and is completing his MA in Conflict Transformation at CJP this fall. He is also a licensed minister in the Church of the Brethren, with a special interest in the intersections of peacebuilding and theology, on which be blogs regularly at .]

On Friday of last week, I had the most fun day at work ever. I had the fortune of being the web & social media nerd for the alma mater of a Nobel Peace Prize winner! Liberian nonviolent peace activist, Leymah Gbowee, was one of three women to win the . She is also a  of ��ݮ����’s  (CJP), where I have been studying and working for the past three years. Leymah has been back on campus a time or two since I arrived in 2008, and I even got to hang around behind the camera while one of my teacher-colleagues, Paulette Moore, filmed  with Leymah about her time at EMU. She is truly an amazing person and commands a powerful presence when you’re around her.

In my 10+ years as a professional web nerd, I’ve never been involved in anything that’s “gone viral,” until Friday. We weren’t caught completely off-guard at CJP, as we’d been hearing rumors of Leymah’s being considered for the prize for months. But that still didn’t prepare for me for riding the social media tidal wave on Friday morning, when the winners were announced. It was the quickest 5.5 hours of my professional life, keeping track of the activity on Facebook and Twitter, watching with amazement when at one point on Friday morning, “Leymah Gbowee” was one of the top-trending phrases in the U.S. on Twitter. When the digital dust settled by Monday morning and I checked stats, I saw that the EMU website as a whole doubled its traffic on Friday alone, not to mention the thousands of “likes” on the EMU News article which .

Making this all the more exciting for folks at EMU is the fact that Leymah is coming to campus this weekend – which is homecoming – where among other things she will be named EMU’s Alumnus of the Year. Here are a few links which document the online “Leymah mania” which has taken hold at EMU:

• New today: 
• From Friday: 
• ��DZ����Ƿ�-�ܱ�:��

Brian Gumm is Web & Information Systems Coordinator for EMU’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP). A licensed minister in the Church of the Brethren, he is also in his final year of graduate studies at EMU, finishing an MA in Conflict Transformation from CJP and an Mdiv from Eastern Mennonite Seminary. He blogs on theological peacebuilding at , where this post originally appeared.

justice, n. Etymology: < Old French justise, -ice (jostise) uprightness, equity, vindication of right, administration of law, jurisdiction, court of justice, infliction of punishment, gallows, judge, etc. —Oxford English Dictionary online

The customary way of thinking of justice – usually tied to determining what kind of punishment is appropriate for a particular wrongdoing – is not the way that justice is viewed at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. At CJP, many faculty, staff and students are advocates for “restorative justice.” In this essay, Brian Gumm explains the roots of restorative justice. Gumm is a licensed minister in the Church of the Brethren, who is in his final year of earning two master’s degrees at EMU: an MA in conflict transformation and a master’s of divinity. This paper is excerpted from a talk Gumm gave to the Student Learning and Global Justice Conference in the Washington D.C. area on April 8, 2011.

From humble origins

Restorative justice is a values- and principles-based framework that attempts to address incidents of wrongdoing by asking three questions: (1) Who has been hurt? (2) What are their needs? and (3) Whose obligations are these?¹ In its early days in the 1970s and ‘80s, before it was even called “restorative justice,” the field’s practitioners saw the Western criminal justice system as implicitly asking a very different set of questions when addressing wrongdoing: (1) What laws have been broken? (2) Who did it? and (3) What do they deserve?²

When contrasting these two sets of questions, it’s quickly seen that the starting points for restorative justice and the criminal justice system are fundamentally different. One assumes a powerful system where the other assumes relationship. One focuses on an individual, the other, a community. Finally, one prescribes punishment where the other seeks restoration. But these are boring, abstract ways to talk about restorative justice, so let me tell you a story. It’s a story first told to me by the “grandfather” of the restorative justice movement, my mentor, colleague, and friend, Dr. Howard Zehr. I lovingly call this the “creation story” of restorative justice.³

One night in in the spring of 1974, in a small town in central Ontario, two teenage boys got drunk and went on a vandalism spree throughout the town. The two 18-year-old boys smashed windows, damaged vehicles, defaced church signs, and even pulled a boat out of a driveway and into the middle of the street before going back home and passing out. They awoke the next morning to police knocking on their door. The boys were charged with vandalism of 22 properties.

Mark Yantzi, who had begun working with the local probation office as a (MCC) volunteer, and David Worth, another MCC volunteer involved with the justice system, ended up on the case. One of them suggested that it “would be neat” to have the offenders in this case meet the victims of their vandalism face to face instead of simply sending them both off to jail, to which the other replied “why not?”⁴ Along with their pre-sentence report to the judge in the case, the two Mennonite probation workers suggested their wild idea.

Much to everyone’s surprise, the judge accepted their suggestion. So the two Mennonite probation workers took the two young men around Elmira, Ontario, knocking on doors, meeting their victims face to face, and apologizing. Within three months the men paid back all their victims. This experience radically reoriented the life of one of the boys, Russell Kelly, who had lost both of his parents and was struggling with substance abuse issues before this. He eventually entered college to study law and security and became a volunteer mediator with in Kitchener, Ontario.⁵

Let’s explore our three restorative justice questions using this story. First: Who has been hurt? The obvious answer is the 22 people or families whose properties were vandalized. But wait a minute, we also heard that one of these boys, Russell, had lost both of his parents before he was even 18 years old, and was coping with drugs and alcohol. Does this not sound like someone who is hurting? So any justice process that is restorative will quickly show how easily lines are blurred when you shift from blame in an isolated incident to identifying pain and brokenness in a community that has experienced wrongdoing.

Once we have an idea who has been hurt in a situation, we ask: What are their needs? The people whose properties were vandalized had their sense of safety and security shattered, as were their plate glass windows from rocks thrown by the boys. These people needed to feel safe again in their own homes and neighborhoods. And what of the boys? We know from Russell’s experience of losing his parents that he likely needed the experience of a family which he’d since lost, the need to feel connected and supported.

Lastly, we’ll ask: Whose obligations are these? As members of the community, the boys had an obligation to help restore their victims’ sense of security and safety, but the victims and the wider community hopefully feels – even in the midst of their distress at the violation – a sense that these boys are one of their own and might be successfully brought back into relationship through the justice process. This last bit on community obligations is tricky business, as we are so conditioned to think of justice as a one-way street. But at the same time you can’t command someone to suddenly begin thinking and acting restoratively in this way.

Punitive “justice”

Through his survey of literature covering post-Enlightenment legal traditions and prison systems, David Cayley helps us see that the penitentiary system that developed in 18th and 19th century America had its roots in early modern European monastic orders that practiced particularly harsh forms of punishment, including solitary confinement and physical mutilation.⁶ But as even the word “penitentiary” shows us, it goes back further than that. What made such an idea conceivable in the first place? Cayley makes the claim that “the idea that crime demands prosecution and punishment seems no more than common sense to us today. But it cannot be found in Western society before the 12th century, when modern conceptions of law first made their appearance.”⁷

In early European society, law was “embedded in social life rather than embodied in special legal institutions.”⁸ If this sounds familiar, it should. Pre-modern practices of law and justice were inherently social. This sociality began to shift in Europe, however, in the 11th and 12th centuries when the Roman church began to assert itself over-against ruling authorities, resulting in a long and conflictual, often violent, social-economic-political battle.

Results of this power struggle produced among other things: the Inquisition in the 15th century; the Protestant Reformation in the 16th; and the so-called “Wars of Religion”⁹ in 17th century Europe. These helped give birth to the Enlightenment intellectual project and its political progeny, the powerful Western systems we inhabit today: the modern nation-state and democratic capitalism. Mixed up in all of this was the developing idea that crime is primarily an individual matter rather than social, and therefore the solution is also individual, namely punishment.

What I’ve just tried to do is to take a quick sprint through Western history from the medieval period into the early modern period in hopes that it can become at least conceivable that the whole cluster of thoughts and practices encapsulated in a phrase like “crime and punishment” or a word like “penitentiary” are not givens, but are rather products of messy history in which the church is very much enmeshed.

The Anabaptist angle

Before I start explaining what Anabaptism is, I want to recall that the two probation workers who had the crazy of idea of making the two boys apologize to the victims of their vandalization were Mennonites.

I think it’s no accident that these two Mennonite men would conceive of such a thing in this strange new work in which they found themselves, and that it didn’t just come out of the clear blue sky. Rather, this idea was the fruit of a peculiar strand of the Christian tradition.

The Anabaptist tradition, which eventually formed into groups including the Mennonites, began in 16th century Germany, roughly contemporary with the beginnings of the Protestant Reformation. While there is no single “myth of origin” for the Anabaptist movement,¹⁰ one of the more straightforward and observable dimensions was their dawning conviction – based on a deep engagement with the Bible – that the rite of baptism was to be a person’s own conviction discerned in the fellowship of believers. In other words, they became convinced and practiced adult baptism, which in that generation meant re-baptism, the source of the word “Anabaptism.” In Reformation- era Europe – the highly volatile climate described earlier – such a move as adult baptism was political from the word “go.” For both Catholic and Lutheran churches in Germany, hand in glove with provincial governments, the practice of infant baptism served not only a spiritual function but a civic one as well, namely being registered as a citizen to your territory and, if you were an able-bodied man, being subject to inscription into your prince’s wars.

Simply put, the Anabaptists were not only heretics but treasonous heretics at that, which earned them death by drowning, burning, hanging, and my favorite: being put in a cage and hung from a church steeple. My point is to underscore the importance of the martyr tradition in Anabaptism, especially among Mennonites even today, nearly 500 years later.¹¹

Early Anabaptist conflict within the fellowship was handled with deference to Jesus’ own instruction in Matthew’s gospel, namely Matthew 18:15-18, which for generations Anabaptists would call the “Rule of Christ.”¹² With the restorative justice creation story in view, let me offer you the first few sentences of the Rule of Christ: “If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over. But if they will not listen, take one or two others along, so that ‘every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses’” (NIV).

Is it too much of a stretch to suggest that this verse, so important to early Anabaptist experience, could have somehow helped spark the imaginations of the two Mennonite probation workers on another continent a few hundred years later?

Circling the globe

Let me make a few things clear as to what I am not trying to say in all that’s preceded. I am not trying to colonize restorative justice by claiming that it’s solely a “Mennonite thing.” Doing so would be ignorant and irresponsible considering the directions that the field has taken since the 1970s.

Another thing I am not trying to say is that the communal/relational attitudes inherent to restorative justice are necessarily new. In fact, if anything, I hope I have shown through my glimpses into history that they’re actually quite old. When my mentor, Howard Zehr, tells this creation story and his later work in articulating the field, he’s quick to point out that non-Western people who come to know restorative justice often say quite matter-of-factly, “Well, of course! That’s how we’ve handled wrongdoing all along!” or “That’s how our elders handled these situations!” Indeed, a communal awareness as it relates to handling wrongdoing is a very, very old impulse, and that it’s so surprising to Westerners only underscores how our societal imagination has been captivated by the habits of individualism.

In short, restorative justice is a “return to the teachings” approach for understanding and repairing harm in communities and societies. The movement has swept the globe, with unique and culturally sensitive applications being developed for criminal offenses, societies transitioning out of violent conflict, disciplinary matters in educational settings, and the lingering effects of historical harms, such as slavery.

Notes

1. Howard Zehr. , Little Books of Justice & Peacebuilding. Intercourse, PA: Good Books, 2002, 21.
2. Ibid.
3. This story has been told by Howard Zehr countless times and has been recorded in a handful of restorative justice books. I’m drawing on the account from Gary Nyp. Pioneers of Peace: The History of Community Justice Initiatives in the Waterloo Region, 1974-2004. Kitchener, Ontario: Pandora Press, 2004, 13-15.
   
4. Ibid., 15.
5. Barb Toews, , Little Books of Justice & Peacebuilding. Intercourse, PA: Good Books, 2006, 9.
6. David Cayley. . Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1998, 138.
7. Ibid., 123.
8. Ibid., 126, emphasis mine.
9. Cf. William T. Cavanaugh. . New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
10. Cf. Thomas Heilke. “Theological and Secular Meta-Narratives of Politics: Anabaptist Origins Revisited (Again).” Modern Theology 13, no. 2 (1997): 227-52.
11. Cf. Thieleman Van Bragt. . 2nd reprint ed. Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 2001; and . Edited by Kirsten Eve Beachy. Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 2010.
12. Ervin A. Schlabach. “Rule of Christ among the Early Swiss Anabaptists.” Mennonite Quarterly Review 52, no. 3 (1978): 265.

Nearly three years ago, in the fall of 2008, I had just started the four-year saga known as “” at EMU, between the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP) and the Seminary. There I was, a small-town Iowa boy, learning conflict analysis with Lisa Schirch and restorative justice with Howard Zehr. Around me sat peacebuilders-in-training from all around the globe. My cohort that year had an especially high number of students from across Africa. One of those students, Solomon from Ethiopia, took an interest in me and we quickly became friends. By the end of that first semester, Solomon was encouraging me to think about something beyond my wildest Midwesterner’s dreams: “You should come to Ethiopia.” Last year, when Solomon was graduating with much of my cohort, he introduced me to his visiting family: “This is Brian Gumm, and next year he is coming to Ethiopia to teach!” Solomon, it seems, had done the work of selecting my CJP practicum, often a daunting task for CJP students. Two months later, the end of last summer, it was official: In July 2011 I would be teaching “Intro to Conflict Transformation” at in Debre Zeit, Ethiopia.

My family and I have only been back from this amazing experience for three days and there is much that I have to say about our month there. But for the purposes of this post, I want to focus on one thing: The wonderful humility, patience, and cultural sensitivity that the CJP teaching style exhibits and invites, and how it helped make the experience of this first-time teacher in a brand new culture go smoothly.

Students who come to CJP often notice something very different in the classroom within the first week. CJP professors describe their students as “colleagues masquerading as students.” Professors don’t spend the entire class period lecturing. They invite students to ask a lot of questions and conduct long discussions as a class or in small groups. For some students this can be unsettling at first, but by the end of the first semester when a group dynamic has gelled, most see the deep wisdom in this “elicitive” model of teaching, an approach that dares to let knowledge creation and learning happen in the collaborative dance between instructor and student, materials and activities.

So when I went to Ethiopia last month to teach, this is the style of teaching that I took with me. Because I was warned that my students would be used to Western teachers using traditionally Western methods, I spent time on the first day of class making explicit how I was and was not going to be teaching the class. Part of my explanation was bare honesty: As a first-time teacher in a new culture, I needed to teach this way, because I had just as much to learn as the students. It worked. As part of my “monitoring and evaluation” process for the class, I handed out evaluation forms to all students at the end of each of the three weeks of class.  This feedback helped me adjust the content and form of the class to better suit the pace and interests of the students. The most consistent topic in all three weeks of class in the comments section had to do with my teaching style and how (most of the time) it was working well for the students. One student remarked, “You are a new teacher but you teach like an experienced teacher.” Others noted their surprise that a Westerner could teach this way because, for instance, “you see us as a brother.”

There is something truly remarkable about the pedagogical style of the CJP. To be fair to the broader EMU institution – where I see similar sensitivities at work – this style reflects some long-held attitudes and practices of the Anabaptist tradition, in which EMU finds itself. Humility and patience are, after all, Christian virtues that Anabaptists have typically faithfully inhabited. That these functioned in the way I taught and had such a positive impact on my first teaching experience is something I’m very grateful to CJP for showing me first-hand.

On the final evaluation form, one of my students wrote: “I encourage you, please come back and teach in this college.” What better encouragement could an Iowa boy ask for in such circumstances?

[ is the co-editor of the Peacebuilder Online blog for ��ݮ����’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP) and is also a student in EMU’s dual degree program between the CJP and Seminary. More on Brian’s teaching can be found on his personal Restorative Theology blog.]

The sixteenth annual (SPI) at ��ݮ���� came to a successful conclusion on June 17th, just over a week ago. During the course of SPI a few of my colleagues conducted sixteen interviews with students and instructors. (To my knowledge, the recurrence of “sixteen” is a happy coincidence.) Our interview subjects hail from nearly ten different countries: from Mexico to Myanmar, Iran to the U.S., and from Darfur to Northern Ireland. The series of questions were designed to elicit a sense for one overall question: What makes SPI so special?

Qualitative research which relies on interviews for data often demands a very long, tedious task: transcription. For these interviews, this job fell to me. I’ve never heard the words “transcribing” and “fun” appear in the same sentence, certainly not from my own experience with a handful of qualitative-style research projects. Though there is an upside to all the starting, stopping, rewinding, replaying, and typing: In my transcribing all the interviews, I started to get a deep sense for why this broad range of people thought SPI was so important. Sixteen people seemed to be saying this…

The Summer Peacebuilding Institute is people working at peacebuilding in a different kind of learning community.

I’ve highlighted words in the previous sentence because they were the ones that showed up at the top of word frequency lists from the transcript data. It illustrates that SPI is about people, work/vocation, peace(building), being different/unique, and learning in community, with the words “people” and “peace(building)” taking particular prominence. During the 2009-’10 academic year, I remember a new textual analysis tool sweeping like wildfire through the CJP student body: . This is a marvelous little tool for visually reading and interpreting text data. It offers a more appealing way to look at my transcript data:

As a student who has gone through a past SPI, I find myself nodding in agreement when I study this image; it does seem to capture some of what makes SPI such a powerful, unique learning experience. How about you? If you’ve gone through SPI – as a student, an instructor, or both – do these findings resonate? What are some words you might add to the Wordle image? Or, considering my “story” here is kind of boring, do you have any great SPI stories that illustrate how this may be true from your experience? Please feel free to share in the comments below!

[ is the co-editor of the Peacebuilder Online blog for ��ݮ����’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP) and is also a student in EMU’s dual degree program between the CJP and Seminary. He blogs at on the intersections of theology and peacebuilding from an Anabaptist Christian perspective.]

On behalf of the faculty, staff, alumni, and students of the ��ݮ����’s  (CJP), I’d like to welcome you to the new Peacebuilder Online! Over the past year, this website has functioned as the online home of articles written for our print magazine, Peacebuilder, which has for some time to the Issuu platform. With this new version of the website, we greatly expand on that by offering a  and that facilitates staying connected professionally and personally, including over social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. We’ve also worked with the talented EMU Marketing department to refresh the look and feel of the website to improve readability and ease of use.

The purpose of the remainder of this post is to introduce the various sections of the new Peacebuilder Online.

The Peacebuilder Online – This page serves as the hub through which you can explore most of the other sections on the website. The most prominent section of the page will feature the photo, title, and snippet from an article out of the most recent issue of Peacebuilder magazine (currently Fall/Winter 2010/’11). In the “Web exclusives” section to the right of that you’ll find the most recently published posts from our blog. Below the featured article you will find a “carousel” which scrolls three of the latest stories stories from each of our fields of peacebuilding practice such as restorative justice or strategic peacebuilding. Below that you’ll see short quotes from people connected to our program related to the work they’re doing in the field. Finally, to the right of those two section, at the bottom-right of the homepage you’ll see the three latest CJP alumni updates with links to each alumnus to read more about their work.

& – The former page will lay out the articles from the latest issue of Peacebuilder magazine in tile format with links to each article, while the latter page will list the past issues of Peacebuilder magazine by their covers with links taking you each issue’s articles page.

– This section of the website has been moved over from the CJP graduate program website and expanded upon. On the directory page you will be able to browse our alumni based on the region in which they currently work, their area of concentration (restorative justice, etc.), or their full name organized by last name. Alumni will be able to easily submit updates via an “Update” link at the bottom of each alumni profile page. These submissions will be reviewed before finalized on the web.

– This section was created to increase the frequency of new content being generated on �ʱ𲹳�����ܾ������������Ա����Ա�, to supplement the biannual publication of the print magazine articles. In addition to being published more frequently, the length of the blog posts will be shorter than the magazine articles, and be written by peacebuilders themselves with editorial oversight by the CJP. (Learn more about .) As with most blogs, readers will be able to comment on stories which we hope will carry the discussion further in exciting directions.

Social media buttons – At the top and bottom of every page you’ll see a list of colorful buttons which lead to other social media outlets for the CJP: Our , , , and our . If you click on the RSS feed icon, you will have the ability to subscribe to Peacebuilder Online using an RSS reader application (such as ) or via e-mail notifications. In addition to those social media links, “tweet” and “like” buttons appear at the bottom of all articles and blog posts. So if you find a particular piece of content insightful, please remember to click that “like” button!

So welcome again to the new Peacebuilder Online! We hope you enjoy exploring and learning as much as we did helping bring it to you!

[ is the Web and Information Systems Coordinator for the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding and is also a full-time, dual-degree student at CJP and the . A licensed minister in the Church of the Brethren, Brian’s personal blog, , investigates the intersections between theology and peacebuilding. You can also follow him on Twitter, .]