Conference Program

Armed conflicts and protracted humanitarian crises profoundly reshape educational spaces, transforming schools into fragile yet crucial sites where protection, care, learning continuity, and democratic meaning intersect (INEE, 2010; UNESCO, 2021). In war-affected and emergency contexts, education cannot be reduced to a technical response to disruption; rather, it becomes a political and pedagogical terrain in which possibilities for peace, agency, and social reconstruction are negotiated (Freire, 1970; Galtung, 1969). In dialogue with the panel’s focus on alphabets of peace as transformative devices, this contribution advances a pedagogical framework for peace-oriented education in emergency and conflict-affected schooling, drawing on the experience of the Erasmus+ project ServU – Service-learning in Higher Education for Ukraine’s Recovery (2023-2026).

Building on critical pedagogy and education-in-emergencies scholarship, this contribution conceptualizes peace education not as a standalone curriculum but as a plural set of situated competences – alphabets of peace – that structure educational practices under conditions of extreme constraint (Freire, 1970; Lederach, 1997). These alphabets are articulated along four interrelated dimensions: (1) relational literacy, encompassing dialogic practices, mediation, and nonviolent conflict management (Lederach, 1997); (2) civic–ethical literacy, oriented toward participation, reciprocity, and the recognition of education as a public good (UNESCO, 2021); (3) critical media literacy, addressing propaganda, disinformation, and the production of meaning in digitally saturated war contexts (Galtung, 1969); and (4) care-oriented literacy, grounded in trauma-sensitive, inclusive, and continuity-focused pedagogies that are central to education in emergencies (INEE, 2010).

The ServU project provides an empirically grounded backdrop for this framework, illustrating how service-learning can be reconfigured as an institutional and pedagogical infrastructure connecting universities, schools, and local communities during wartime and recovery phases (Hoth de Olano et al., 2024). Within this perspective, this contribution highlights the role of higher education institutions as mediating actors capable of transforming solidarity-driven actions into reflexive, accountable, and educative practices. Service-learning is thus interpreted not merely as experiential pedagogy, but as a governance device that enables shared responsibility, collective learning, and democratic orientation across educational levels (Kenworthy & Opatska, 2023; UNESCO, 2021).

From a methodological standpoint, this contribution reflects on forms of evidence and evaluation that are ethically sustainable in emergency settings, privileging formative assessment, qualitative documentation, and community feedback over extractive or outcome-driven models (INEE, 2010). Attention is given to the tensions between urgency and reflection, protection and participation, care and critique.

By situating emergency schooling within broader debates on peace pedagogy and democratic education, this contribution argues that schools – even under conditions of war – can function as laboratories of peace, where alphabets of coexistence, critical awareness, and civic imagination are continuously rearticulated (Galtung, 1969; Lederach, 1997).