Lubna Bandak and Marwan Fararjeh from the Nonviolence Department, and Jerry Lawler Ph.D licensed psychologist and volunteer from the United State made up the Holy Land Trust team.   We first raised a general question for discussion: What does conflict look like in your school? This generated a lot of animated discussion and first-hand accounts of conflicts between students and teachers’ and frustrations from teachers about not always being able to maintain order in their classrooms.

The trainees were then asked to create a role play depicting student conflict daily in a typical class room inside Dar Alkalimeh School. The trainees jumped into the exercise with enthusiasm taking on the roles of students, teachers, parents and principles, and social worker.

The role play opened up many questions about to deal with certain scenes of conflicts. The team provided many suggestions on techniques for calming classrooms, modeling non-violent behavior, dealing with violent cultural norms brought into the classroom, and handling individual problem children. The workshop seemed to be well received judging from the comments we heard and the HLT team was invited back for a follow-up workshop toward the end of January.