User:EdwardBrantmeier/sandbox

Ian Murray Harris (August 13, 1943--) is an internationally recognized expert in the field of peace education. His many publications, spanning the 1980s until the present, have helped give the field of peace education legitimacy within the academy. As convener of the Peace Education Commission of the International Peace Research Association, he helped found the Journal of Peace Education, a primary outlet for international research in the field of peace education. Ian was a founding member of the Peace Education Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. In addition, he was the co-editor of a book series on peace education with Information Age publishing—the first series of its kind. As a professor of Educational Policy and Community Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, he developed a unique community-organizing curriculum for urban residents. He also is a pioneer in the field of men’s studies.

Background and intellectual development[edit] Dr. Ian Harris was born in New York City in 1943. His mother came from Indianapolis; his father was a retired British diplomat. His uncle was Bomber Harris, head of Bomber Command in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. He was raised on a small truck farm in northern New Jersey. Being raised on a small farm gave him a great appreciation of nature. In high school he was attracted to the writings of Henry David Thoreau.

During his undergraduate years at St. John’s College, Annapolis, MD (1961 to 1967), Ian Murray Harris was most influenced by Plato and Rousseau and began to formulate the notion that he could be a Socratic teacher. The St. John's curriculum is built around the Great Books of the Western World.

His first teaching job was at a middle school in the suburban community of Ambler, Pennsylvania. After two years he moved to West Philadelphia and taught science from 1969 to 1974 at John Bartram High School, a large urban high school in southwest Philadelphia on split shift with 4000 multiracial students. In 1971 that school opened an annex in West Philadelphia, the John Bartram High School for Human Services. Ian Murray Harris was the science teacher at this small alternative school where he taught biology, chemistry, and physics, and a class called “Science for Survival” based upon ecological principles. This class was the first peace education focused class that he taught in his career.

Dedicated to urban education and community education, Dr. Harris lived in the racially mixed community in Philadelphia that surrounded the high school and would often tutor his students in their homes. In Philadelphia he remained active in anti-Vietnam war activities through an organization named Resistance that had a staff of 13 in 1968. He lived communally in West Philadelphia during the late 60s and early 70s and developed a communal living partnership with a strong feminist. They had a daughter in 1973.

In 1975 Ian Murray Harris completed a doctorate in Foundations of Education at Temple University, continuing his commitment to community education in urban contexts. In 1975 Dr. Harris moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin to become a professor of community education at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in a program designed to build ties between the university and the inner city community of Milwaukee. That same year he and the mother of his daughter broke up. In 1976 Harris met his wife, Sara, who had recently divorced and had a son.

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee hired Dr. Harris as an expert in alternative schools. Dr. Harris was a strong believer that John Dewey was right when he argued for schools being learning communities with close contacts with the local neighborhood. At the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, he helped develop a unique community education curriculum that taught skills needed by community organizers. This academic program gave credit for previous life experiences to activists who demonstrated knowledge of these skills.

In part a response to issues raised by the women’s movement, in 1978 Dr. Harris taught his first class in male identity. In 1983 after he earned tenure, Dr. Harris taught a peace education class formally for the first time. In 1985 Dr. Harris became a Quaker to gain support for his interest in promoting peace.

In 1989 at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the Department of Community Education merged with a Department of Cultural Foundations to form the Department of Educational Policy and Community Studies. Ian Harris became the Chair of this department and served in that capacity for eight years. Under his leadership the department hired five new faculty, shored up the academic components of its undergraduate curriculum, expanded its graduate offerings, and developed a Ph.D. in sociology of education. He retired in 2007 after 40 years of teaching. In 2010 he and Sara moved to Walnut Creek, California outside of San Francisco.

Peace Educator[edit] Prior to becoming a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Ian Harris was a peace educator in Philadelphia active in anti-war organizations like Resistance and the New American Movement. At the John Bartram High School for Human Services he taught conflict resolution and nonviolent communication skills to inner city youth. At the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, he taught courses that summarized various philosophies of change-- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Saul Alinsky, the feminist movement, and environmentalism.

In 1981 Dr. Harris joined a faculty group, the Peace Studies Network, that promoted educational events on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus. This Network hosted public forums, guest speakers, and courses about the nuclear threat. In 1983 he realized that he could teach such a course. He named it “Peace Education.” The course had three different emphases: The first emphasis was “What are the predominate problems of violence that concern you?” The second emphasis was “What peace strategies address those problems of violence?” In a portion of the course, Professor Harris argued that peace education was itself a strategy to deal with problems of violence. In the final section the students developed a curriculum to teach about how peacemaking and peacebuilding strategies could be used to address conflicts. For the first ten years in that course the main emphasis was upon the nuclear threat and U.S. Imperialism—a response to the historic events of the time. This budding emphasis on the nuclear threat and U.S. Imperialism conformed to similar peace studies classes that had been springing up on college campuses in the nineteen seventies and eighties in international studies in political science departments.

Ian Murray Harris taught his peace education courses in response to the various forms of violence encountered and strategies developed to alleviate those forms of violence. In the 1990s with school shootings and domestic wars on drugs, etc. he focused more on conflict resolution, structural violence, human rights, and environmental issues. Harris argued that peace education is always dynamic because its curriculum deals with shifting types of violence that concern people who then organize to teach others about alternatives to that form of violence. He developed this class because urban violence was a real issue in the lives of many of his students. He also was attracted to this topic because his background as an affective educator enabled him to teach peacemaking skills, and his background as an organic farmer enabled him to talk about environment issues. His background as a peace activist opposing the war in Vietnam and the threat of nuclear extinction also led him to this topic. In essence, Ian’s approach to teaching peace education is one that responds to various forms of violence with positive solutions for change.

Dr. Harris developed four courses in the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Education to deal with the promise of peace and problems of violence. The first was the peace education course mentioned above that was meant to be an introduction to the topic; the second course was “Conflict and Change” that covered practical peacemaking skills he had acquired at the affective education program in West Philadelphia. He drew upon his background as a philosopher to teach a course “Nonviolence in Education” that used the works of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., the Indian philosopher J. Krishnamurti, and the feminist philosopher Nel Noddings to explain notions of “Positive Peace” and to help students appreciate the power of nonviolence. In addition to teaching philosophies of peace and nonviolence, he became active in transforming various forms of violence. For example, in 1988 Harris participated in a 14 day fast to protest United States policies in Central America.) Through his teaching Harris began to see that domestic violence was an important source of urban violence and developed in 1998 a course, “Abusive Relationships: Community Problems, Community Solutions,” to help teachers and social workers deal with the hostility and anger that pervades inner city neighborhoods.

Not only was Ian Murray Harris actively teaching peace in the classroom, he was creating venues for peace education in local, national, and international contexts. Professor Harris helped organize other professors throughout the state of Wisconsin interested in providing information to the public about the nuclear threat. These individuals established in 1985 the Wisconsin Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies.[1] This unique consortium of 23 private and public colleges and universities in Wisconsin sponsors a speakers program, a fall faculty conference, spring student conference, a Journal for the Study of Peace and Conflict, annual distinguished faculty and student awards, cooperative research, faculty development, and curriculum consulting.

In 1985 in St. Louis, Missouri Dr. Harris attended his first conference of the Consortium for Peace Research, Education, and Development (COPRED). This organization held annual conferences that brought together grass roots activists, k-12 teachers, scholars and peace researchers providing a forum for academics, activists, and educators concerned about wars, ethnic conflicts, and human rights to exchange insights about efforts to promote peace. In 1978 the Consortium for Peace Research, Education, and Development became an official sponsor of Peace and Change, an academic journal that publishes scholarly articles related to the creation of a peaceful and humane society. Harris served on the board of COPRED from 1992- 1996. In 1986 university professors in COPRED, feeling the need for a more professional organization to promote the growing field of peace studies on campuses, broke away to form the Peace Studies Association. These organizations have subsequently merged in 2001 into the Peace and Justice Studies Association (PJSA).[2]

In the late 1980s Dr. Harris was a member of the Southeastern Wisconsin Chapter of Educators for Social Responsibility (WESR) that sponsored annual conferences for local teachers on how to teach about the nuclear threat. In 1994 this organization invited Christine King Farris, the sister of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr to University of Wisconsin Milwaukee to be the keynote speaker at one of its annual peace education conferences. She mentioned that in the previous summer 20 young adolescents from Detroit went to Atlanta where they were trained in nonviolence at the Martin Luther King Jr. Center. The next summer WESR sponsored a Summer Institute on Nonviolence at University of Wisconson-Milwaukee for inner city teenagers. Dr. Harris organized and hosted this institute at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee for six straight summers, 1992-2000.

In 2006 Dr. Harris with Amy Shuster produced the 7th edition of Global Directory of Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution for PJSA.[3] This directory lists over 380 peace studies programs in 42 countries. It demonstrates that college and university students can take individual courses, earn certificates, and complete bachelors, masters and doctoral degrees in peace studies.

The Peace and Justice Studies Association is the North American affiliate of the International Peace Research Association (IPRA) (http://ipra-peace.com) Since 1964 IPRA has been pursuing interdisciplinary research into the most pressing issues related to sustainable peace around the world. Dr. Harris attended his first IPRA conference in 1986 at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England where he discovered strong interest in peace education issues. He visited with Teachers for Peace, an organization that was part of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. He drew inspiration from the Peace Education Commission (PEC) of IPRA that had peace educators from all over the world. He became the executive secretary of PEC from 1998-2003 and used that position to get Taylor and Francis to sponsor an academic journal, Journal of Peace Education that aims to link theory and research to educational practice. This journal furthers original research on peace education, theory, curriculum and pedagogy.

In 2003 Dr. Harris became the president of the International Peace Research Association Foundation (IPRAF), a non-profit, tax-exempt organization founded in 1990 to further the purposes of IPRA and to support peace research. During his tenure as head of this organization peace research projects were completed in Argentina, Burundi, Ethiopia, Israel, Pakistan, the Philippines, Turkey, and Uganda.[4]

In 2007 Ian Murray Harris joined Dr. Jing Lin and Dr. Edward J. Brantmeier as founding co-editors of a book series on peace education with Information Age Publishing (Available at: http://www.infoagepub.com/series/Peace-Education). To date, fourteen books on peace education topics have been produced in that book series. In specific, Harris’ (2003) presentation on the promises and pitfalls of peace education evaluation directly inspired and influenced other scholars in the field to produce a recent book in the series, Peace Education Evaluation  (Available at: http://www.infoagepub.com/products/Peace-Education-Evaluation). He recent edited book, Peace Education from the Grassroots (Available at: http://www.infoagepub.com/products/Peace-Education-from-the-Grassroots) tells the story of ordinary people and organizations doing peace education at the grassroots level in thirteen difference countries around the world. After nearly a decade of work on this book series, Ian Harris retired as a founding editor of the series.

Selected publications related to Peace Education[edit]

Harris, I. (ed.) (2014) Peace Education from the Grassroots. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Press. Harris, I., & Morrison, M. L. (2013). Peace education (3rd ed.). Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. Howlett, C. & Harris, I. (2010) Books not Bombs: Teaching peace since the dawn of the Republic. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Press. Harris, I. (2007) Peace education in a violent culture, Harvard Educational Review. 77 (3), 350-353. Harris, I. & Shuster, A. (2006). Global directory of peace studies and conflict resolution programs. San Francisco, CA: Peace and Justice Studies Association. Harris, I. (2005) “Growing foundations through community education,” Educational Studies, 38 (3), 254-262. Harris, I. (2004). “Peace education theory,” Journal of Peace Education, (1) 1, 5-20. Harris, I. (2000). Peace-building responses to school violence. Bulletin: The National Association of Secondary School Principals, 84(614), 5-24. Harris, I., & Forcey, L. (1999). Peacebuilding for adolescents: Strategies for teachers, Administrators, and community leaders. New York: Peter Lange. Harris, I. A. (1999) Types of peace education, in: A. Raviv, L. Oppenheimer & D. Bar-Tal (Eds) How children understand war and peace (San Francisco, CA, Jossey-Bass). Harris, I. (1999). Peace education: Colleges and universities. In Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace, and Conflict (pp. 679-689). San Diego: Academic Press.Harris, I., & Jeffries, R. B. (1998). Cooling the climate: Using peace education in an urban middle school. Middle School Journal, 30(2), 56-64.Harris, I., & Haessley, J. (1997). Violence and alternatives to violence: An educational perspective. Holistic Education Review, 10(4), 51-58.Harris, I., & Halverson, C. (1990). Developing effective teams to work on sex equity issues. Equity and Excellence, 24(14), 51-55.Harris, I. (1988). Peace education. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. Men's Studies[edit] In addition to work in the field of peace education, Ian Murray Harris helped develop another new field, Men’s Studies. In Philadelphia in the 1970s, Ian Harris was hanging out with feminist women who were bonding in women’s support groups. In 1974 he and some friends decided to form a men’s group to give support for the challenges they faced in living up to social expectations for masculinity.When he got to Milwaukee in 1975 he joined another men’s group that lasted a year.In 1978 he taught for the fist time a course entitled, “Men and Masculinity: Education and Development,” one of the first courses in the budding field of men's studies.

In the meantime Dr. Harris was attending men’s conferences at both the local and national level. In 1979 he hosted a national conference, “Sixth National Conference on Men and Masculinity” at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.. While Dr. Harris was getting involved in men’s studies, feminist peace activists were blaming the excess of violence in this world upon men. Dr. Harris set out to determine why men are so violent operating from the premise that men are not hard wired for violence because they have a Y chromosome. History is full of heroic male figures who had renounced the use of violence-- from Jesus to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.-- and beyond, so male violence could not be caused by genes.

Could it be that men are violent because of gender conditioning? In order to explore the roots of male violence, Dr. Harris informally surveyed his male friends and concluded most of them weren’t violent. He also did a study in which he interviewed over 500 men about messages they had received from their culture. The respondents did not rank “tough guy,” “warrior,” and “stoic” very highly. Instead they most valued standard bearing behavior that included being the best they could be and being a good Samaritan.

Dr. Harris became a counselor at a woman’s shelter for men who had physically abused their girlfriends/partners where he helped develop a program that teaches nonviolence to domestic abusers. After directing this 23 week program he concluded that some men are violent because they themselves have been violated. Gender conditioning sets some terrible role models for male behavior but does not cause men to be violent. The inner rage they have inside causes male violence. Deep within the male psyche exist repressed hostilities and feelings of hatred that feed angry monsters within some men.

Some of Harris’s friends and former students got involved in a New Warrior weekend that was created in 1985 in Milwaukee and went all over the world. This weekend experience challenged men to open up and share their vulnerabilities and strengths with other men. Ian Harris went through the weekend in 1988 and joined a men’s group with other men who had gone through the weekend. He stayed with that group for 11 years. The New Warrior Weekend is now known as The Mankind Project.[5] Ian Murray Harris continues this aspect of peace education in his retirement in the San Francisco Bay area where he volunteers with a program called “Alternatives to Violence” {Available at: http://www.avpcalifornia.org} and runs weekend programs in anger management and nonviolent communication in jails and prisons.

Selected publications related to Men's Studies[edit] Harris, I. (2004) Men as Peacemakers. In Men and masculinities: A social, cultural, and historical encyclopedia (pp. 345-356) Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. Harris, I., & Salt, R. (1998). Patterns of paternity. The Journal of Men's Studies, 7(2), 245- 264. Harris, I. (1997). Ten tenets of male spirituality. The Journal of Men’s Studies, 6(1), 29-53. Harris, I. (1995) Messages men hear: Constructing masculinities. London: Taylor and Francis. Harris, I., Torres, J., & Allender, D. (1994). The responses of African American men to dominant norms of masculinity within the United States. Sex Roles, 31(11/12), 703- 719. Harris, I. (1994). Men as standard bearers. Journal of Men’s Studies, 3(3), 103-125. Harris, I. (1989). Media myth and men’s work. Media and Values, 48, 12-13. Harris, I. (1988). Male messages. Men’s Studies Review, 3-5. Harris, I. (1987). The roots of male violence. The Men’s Journal, 12-15. Harris, I. (1986). Media myths and the reality of men’s work. Changing Men, 8-12.

Urban teacher[edit] For all but his first two years of teaching Dr. Harris taught in the inner city, first in Philadelphia and then in Milwaukee. In West Philadelphia he taught high school students. At first he was frustrated by teaching in a large impersonal high school where he had 35 students for 50 minute periods. In between periods the students had to rush to the next class, so there was no opportunity to get to know them as people. All that changed in 1970 when a group of teachers at that school petitioned the principal to let them form an alternative school, the John Bartram High School for Human Services, in the basement of a church near the University of Pennsylvania campus.This small school was part of the “free school” movement that was gaining popularity in the 1960s and 70s. Faculty at this alternative school of 200 students grades 10-12 developed a curriculum based upon the principles of affective education that emphasized teaching students how to articulate their own feelings and correctly identify the feelings of others. Ian Murray Harris was the science teacher at this school while he was working on his doctorate at Temple University.

The School for Human Services was a product of the affective education program implemented in the Philadelphia School system in the early 1970s (now known as socio-emotional learning). People who support this educational reform teach young people self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills and responsible decision making. (See CASEL webpage for a description of how those programs teach peace, http://casel.org/guide/ ) The assumption behind affective education is that young people from inner city neighborhoods do not do well in schools because frightening aspects of their lives--gang violence, domestic violence, structural violence--distracts them from their lessons. In affective education classes the attention that teachers give to emotional aspects of human development enables students to relax and focus on their lessons. Curricula for all the subjects at that school were realigned to provide opportunities for young people to express their concerns about growing up in violent neighborhoods and homes. In affective education classes students learned about alternative dispute resolution techniques. Students valued the lessons they received about nonviolent communication and ways to avoid bullying.

Dr. Harris was a strong believer in the thesis advanced by Nel Noddings that caring relationships are at the core of successful education. At that school he learned how difficult life could be for many of his pupils. The school was a success because students got to exert leadership and their concerns were listened to by faculty. Students also received valuable job skills volunteering for credit at local community based organizations. They earned better grades and graduated at higher rates than their peers at the large high school. Faculty empathized with the struggles of students to get to school every day in drug and gang infested neighborhoods.

In Milwaukee Dr. Harris taught adult versions of his inner city high school students in Philadelphia. The majority of the students in the Department of Community Education were people of color. They worked in human service institutions and could get credit for their past experiences organizing agencies, institutions, and movements in inner city environments. Ian Harris helped develop a curriculum that prepared people to be community organizers. This curriculum consisted of 13 different competencies or skills. If students already knew the information that defined a particular competency they could get credit for that knowledge by passing a written exam on that topic. The skills taught in this program are local community systems, philosophies of change, group process skills, conflict resolution, resource development, administrative skills, leadership issues, social problem analysis, personal growth, action research, political/economic analysis, change strategies, and educational advocacy. A review of this program can be seen at http://www4.uwm.edu/soe/academics/ed_policy/comm_ed/index.cfm.

This last competency lay at the heart of Ian Harris’s educational philosophy--how could education be used to promote social change? He used his skills as an adult educator to warn students and community members about the threats of nuclear war, about the stress of domestic violence, and about problems of structural violence. He taught many of the competencies that were the core of this academic program that gave people skills they could use to improve their neighborhoods, create institutions, generate jobs, and promote change.

Selected publications related to Urban Education[edit] Harris, I., & Denise, P. (1989). Experiential education for community development. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Harris, I. (2005) “Growing foundations through community education,” Educational Studies, 38 (3), 254-262. Harris, I., & Schutz, A. (2001). The fragility of community and function: A snapshot of an alternative school in crisis. Encounter: Education for Meaning and Social Justice, 14(1), 39-53. Harris, I. (1987). Attempts of two community based organizations to preserve owner occupancy for low to moderate income people in Milwaukee. Catalyst, VI(1), 29-42. Harris, I. (1983). Criteria for evaluating school desegregation in Milwaukee. Journal of Negro Education, 52(4), 423-435. Harris, I., Hedman, C., & Horning, M. (1983). Success with high school dropouts. Educational Leadership, 40(6), 35-36. Harris, I. (1983). Community group dips toes in water of self sufficiency. Dimensions: Journal of Architecture and Planning, 4(1), 4-6. Harris, I. (1982). An undergraduate community education curriculum for community development. Journal of the Community Development Society, 13(1), 69-82. Harris, I. (1982). Credits for previous learnings: An appeal to non-traditional students. The Urban Review, 14(1), 25-33. Harris, I. (1979). An undergraduate degree program for urban residents. Community Education Journal, VI(4), 8-12. Harris, I. (1978). Community education in an urban setting. Journal of Alternative Human Services, 6-9.

Summary[edit] As the son of a diplomat, Dr. Ian Harris was surrounded by worldly discussions about politics, international affairs, economics, and culture. Upon graduation from St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland in 1967, he moved to Philadelphia to enroll at Temple University in an Intern teaching program to become a certified math and science teacher.In 1969 he moved into West Philadelphia to teach science at John Bartram High School in South West Philadelphia. Ian earned a masters and a Ph.D. at Temple University in urban education and took a job at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) in 1975 in an innovative Department of Community Education. Dr. Harris worked at UWM for thirty-two years, establishing a peace studies certificate program, a unique undergraduate curriculum in Community Education, and an urban Ph.D. in Social Foundations of Education. During his career he wrote or co-authored eight books on topics related to community development, peace education, and men’s studies. In 1985 Ian Harris helped found the Wisconsin Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. In 1988 he was a founding member of the Peace Education Special Interest group of the American Educational Research Association. He served as convener of the Peace Education Commission (PEC) of the International Peace Research Association from 1998-2003. Under his leadership PEC developed the Journal of Peace Education (Taylor & Francis). He retired from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2003. From 2003 to 2008, Dr. Harris was president of the International Peace Research Association Foundation where he was pivotal in launching the international Journal of Peace Education. In 2006 he joined a team of co-editors to produce a peace education book series, the first of its kind in history, with Information Age Publishing. He retired as a founding member of that peace education book series in 2015.

References[edit] Jump up ^ Wisconsin Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies accessed: September 30, 2012 Jump up ^ Peace and Justice Studies Association (PJSA) accessed: September 30, 2012 Jump up ^ Global Directory of Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution for PJSA accessed: September 30, 2012 Jump up ^ International Peace Research Association Foundation Research accessed: October 2, 2012 Jump up ^ The Mankind Project accessed: October 3, 2012