 I teach about peace because I believe education can lead to peace. But not any education. I think education has to make a conscious choice between changing the world or educating about it as it is. We either teach the world as it is and leave the injustices as they are. Or we make a choice to teach for peace and to teach in a way that changes the world to be more just and peaceful. We always teach with a circle of praxis in mind and praxis being theory melded with action in the world, hoping that each informs the other. In one of my classes last year I showed a video about blue jeans manufacturing in China. It was about sweatshops. A couple of my students were so frustrated by that that they needed to take action. They couldn't just learn about it and leave it at that. They found out that our bookstore on campus sold a lot of clothing that was produced in sweatshops around the world and decided they were going to change that. So they found a company that provided fair trade clothing. They found out that that company goes to an expo that our clothing buyer at our bookstore went to. They set up a meeting between the two and then went to our bookstore and said, we have a meeting set up for you, will you do this? And the bookstore buyer said yes. Six months later we had a line of fair trade clothing in the bookstore that gave our students a choice between a product that promoted or at least supported that difficult industry and those sweatshop conditions and a product that lived up to their values and their ideals. The process for us is always that pedagogy, that approach to education that says we start with people at the margins, we don't start with the expert view or the common understanding, we try to ground ourselves in the experience of people who are suffering from injustice or oppression or at the margins of power. From there we moved to a descriptive analysis trying to bring all the different social sciences together to truly understand it from many different perspectives. The next step goes to normative analysis, trying to understand our own biases, our own worldview, what we might bring to a discussion that would lead to positive alternatives and what we might bring to a topic that we're examining that might also blind us to some of the realities and then ending with some kind of an action step. Planning action to understand what the obstacles are, what our resources might be, who stands in our way and who's with us as we try to make change and continuing to go through that cycle over and over again in class. The change that they chose was something very much in their own world, right here at our own school and in a way that they can see tangible change happen in a fairly fast order as part of a larger global solution.