This is the site for last year's conference. Please click here to visit the November 2009 Conference site!

For the past six years, the Canadian Centres for Teaching Peace (CCTP) has worked in partnership with the McMaster Centre for Peace Studies to facilitate the Annual Conferences on Peace Education in Canada. These conferences provide opportunities for anyone and everyone to collaborate, exchange knowledges, and develop critical skills for nonviolent social change. The conferences also aim to demonstrate to the public that anyone can be engaged in peace education, and that peace education is invaluable to a sustainable future.

To these aims, the Seventh Annual Conference on Peace Education will include workshops, presentations, and public speakers demonstrating best practices and encouraging critical engagement as global citizens.

The conference will be held from November 21st to November 23rd, 2008 in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, primarily at McMaster University.

Theme: “What Can I Do For Peace? Engaged Citizenship for the Sustainable Future”

“What can I do for peace?” is a common question on many minds. Often, this question is posed more in a negative despair -- or even apathy -- at the seeming overwhelming forces advocating and acting with violence in our communities, countries, and globally.

While the peace movement is portrayed often as a fringe movement engaging in intangibly idealistic goals, there is now a growing awareness that everyone can be an engaged citizen for peace education within their own professions and trades.

Violent conflict is the greatest detriment to health in history and presently; in terms of emotional cost, monetary/resource cost, and a great environmental cost. It is clear that in a future where past and present unsustainable practices will lead to further resource and land conflicts, people will need to have the tools of social intelligence and conflict transformation to reduce the potential increase to the human cost of violent conflict.

This year the conference seeks to highlight those who have integrated the values, skills, and knowledges of nonviolent social change into their lives and to inspire and engage with those who have the desire to bring peace education into their work, interests, and personal lives.