Our Special Focus Day on Peace & Conflict invites the entire school community to pause the regular timetable and come together for a day of shared learning, dialogue, and reflection. Organized collaboratively by students and staff, the day replaces regular classes and transforms the campus into a space for exploration—where peace is examined not just as a global issue, but as something deeply personal, social, political, and practical.
Throughout the day, students choose from a wide range of interactive workshops that approach peace and conflict from many angles: inner life and relationships, history and geopolitics, social justice, creativity, nature, and civic responsibility. Rather than passive lectures, the focus is on discussion, participation, and lived experience—creating opportunities to listen, question, disagree respectfully, and imagine alternatives.
Some workshops explore peace within the self and everyday relationships. For example, sessions on Nonviolent Communication and active listening offer practical tools for navigating conflict in friendships, families, and communities. Others invite students to reflect inwardly through creative writing, poetry, letter writing, meditation, or even movement—such as a workshop that uses running and time in nature as a metaphor for inner tranquility and connection to others and the environment.
Other workshops zoom out to examine global and structural conflicts. Students can explore contemporary geopolitical issues like the China–Taiwan relationship, Greenland’s political status, or the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, as well as historical and regional case studies from Rwanda, South Sudan, Afghanistan, East Asia, and Europe. These sessions emphasize multiple narratives, historical context, and the complexity behind headlines.
Peace is also approached through the lenses of social justice and inequality. Workshops address topics such as economic inequality and class conflict, racial profiling and police violence, xenophobia and right-wing extremism, LGBTQ+ rights, and the ongoing impacts of colonialism. Others focus on remembrance and responsibility, for instance by cleaning Stolpersteine in the city or digitizing Holocaust victims’ stories—connecting memory, justice, and peacebuilding.
Creativity and imagination play a central role as well. Through art, photography, storytelling, blackout poetry, anime, and role-play, students explore how peace can be expressed, challenged, and practiced. Activities like a simulated EU Peace Summit or workshops on art as a tool for peace encourage participants to experiment with decision-making, collaboration, and empathy.
Across all of these workshops, one idea remains constant: peace is not just the absence of conflict, but an ongoing practice. It is built through how we care for ourselves, relate to others, engage with difference, remember the past, and take responsibility for the world we share.
The Peace & Conflict Special Focus Day is a chance for the community to slow down, think deeply, and learn from one another—stepping outside normal routines to ask difficult questions, hear diverse perspectives, and explore what peace might look like in practice, both locally and globally.
