Matthew Parkes ’13 Extends Keene State’s Work for Peace
Just in case you haven’t noticed, Keene State’s good work towards international peace and conflict resolution is rippling out around the world. Holocaust and Genocide Professor Paul Vincent spent the 2015 spring semester as a Fulbright scholar at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, where he was asked to address the Czech Senate. Early last May, the Center for Peacebuilding in Bosnia named Tom White (coordinator of Educational Outreach for the Cohen Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies), Jan Cohen (Cohen Center Advisory Council member), and James Waller (Cohen Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies) Peace Ambassadors for 2015.
This summer, recent grad, Holocaust and Genocide Studies major, and recipient of the Susan J. Herman Award for Leadership in Holocaust & Genocide Awareness Matthew Parkes ’13 is in Braunschweig, Germany, on an intern fellowship at the Georg Eckert Institue for International Textbook Research through the Conflict Resolution Program at Georgetown University, where he is doing graduate study. The Institute primarily focuses on academic research, examining textbooks and other school materials around the world to determine how values of peace can best be integrated into school curriculum. The Institute also hosts a summer school and visiting scholars, and Parkes will be helping prepare for both.
“It is an amazing institution and the work is very relevant to what I studied in HGS and as a grad student,” Parkes said. “The theme of both the summer school and the visiting fellowships is transitional justice and education, and the fellows come from all around the world with regional focuses in how transitional justice principles are/can be better incorporated into education programs to help societies move forward in the aftermath of conflict.”
Why is this work important? “Educational materials can play a vital role in shaping the worldview of a child from a very early age, helping shape a child’s own identity, as well as how they view and interact with other groups,” Parkes explained. “The institute itself was born from research that tracked how educational materials in conflict areas tended to promote negative stereotypes of enemy groups, as governments utilized education as a means to indoctrinate their most impressionable citizens. It reminds me of a video we watched in Professor Vincent’s class on Nazi Germany many years ago about a child recruited to the Hitler Youth, who noted that ‘children are empty vessels.’ We can fill them with the ideals of peace and acceptance, or sadly in many cases, intolerance and xenophobia.”
