Conference Program

Peace education is increasingly understood as a transformative set of cognitive, relational and ethical‑political competencies needed to address conflict, polarisation and disinformation in contemporary democracies. Rather than defining peace as the absence of violence, current approaches emphasise the construction of just, inclusive and dialogical relationships (UNESCO, 2024; Prudenciano de Souza & Velez de Castro, 2025). This aligns with UNESCO’s 2023 Recommendation on Education for Peace, Human Rights and Sustainable Development, which links peace education with human rights, global citizenship and sustainability and calls for systemic reforms (UNESCO, 2023).

UNESCO’s four transformative competencies—critical thinking, respect for diversity, belonging to a shared humanity and the planet, and peaceful conflict transformation—offer a framework for analysing initial teacher education and its ethical‑relational dimensions.

This contribution examines how peace education is conceptualised and enacted in the initial training of future primary teachers at a Swiss university of teacher education. The study analyses its presence across the formal curriculum, institutional initiatives and students’ reflective work. The corpus includes: (1) 72 bachelor‑level module descriptions (2024/25); (2) documentation from the 2025 International Democracy Day; (3) around forty student papers. Materials were analysed through qualitative content analysis using UNESCO’s competencies as the analytical lens.

Curricular analysis reveals an uneven distribution. Critical thinking is widely represented (70–80% of modules), while peaceful conflict transformation appears in 30–40%, mainly in practice‑oriented modules. Respect for diversity and a sense of belonging to humanity and the planet are far less visible (six modules each) and rarely integrated into assessment tools. These findings concern formal documentation and do not capture hidden curriculum dimensions, a limitation noted in democracy education research (Plata et al., 2025).

The Democracy Day functioned as an intensive pedagogical device, foregrounding the role of media in shaping representations of war and conflict. The plenary addressed images, propaganda and digital manipulation—including AI‑generated deepfakes—thus linking peace education with critical media literacy (UNESCO, 2023). Students’ collective outputs highlighted cooperation, memory, responsibility and dialogical conflict management, as well as challenges related to emotions, sensitive issues and classroom heterogeneity.

Individual papers further explored these themes, focusing on language, non‑violent communication, peer mediation and emotional regulation. Students also identified structural tensions, such as difficulties in assessing relational competencies and the perceived gap between school practices and a polarised public discourse.

Overall, the findings show that peace education in initial teacher training operates as a cross‑cutting domain shaping teachers’ professional identity by intertwining critical thinking, conflict mediation, ethical responsibility and global awareness (Castro et al., 2025).