Empowering Sustainability International Journal

Managing long-term peace and environmental education programs toward positive encounters and peace building in a region of intractable conflict requires constant evaluation and monitoring of students and school staff. This paper analyzes a program running for the second year in ten Israeli high schools. It is the only Israeli environmental and peace educational network for both adolescent Israeli Jews and Arabs. The program acknowledges that there is not one fixed formula for excellence in education; thus, it aims to match its curriculum to each school, attend to current events, and generate harmony between people and between people and nature. Constant evaluation and monitoring of students and school staff is done through multiple research tools; some include a pre-post research construction while others rely on ongoing data collection, observation, and reflection. The tools implemented in this program and the lessons learned are described and analyzed in this paper.

The first part of the paper discusses aspects of environmental and peace education, including pedagogic implications and the difficulties of evaluation. The second part describes the case study, including the program's origins, its position in Israel's reality, and its implementation. Finally, the paper focuses on describing and illustrating the evaluation and monitoring methods used by the program.