Conflict Resolution & Recognition of Diversity via an Art Experience

Most school districts in our world expect teachers and students to behave in a manner that promotes tolerance and peaceful conflict resolution. This is not always easily accomplished, mostly because few have had any formal training in issues of diversity and conflict resolution beyond conventional life situations, and issues and circumstances reach crisis levels before they are addressed. Students and teachers and the communities in which they function need to have an ongoing dialogue that progressively helps all to understand and deal with issues of diversity and conflict. An established means to understanding who we are and why we do what we do is to generate an aesthetic distance to observe for understanding those and that which we call ‘other.’ This workshop was an encounter with ‘others’ (flora, fauna, cultures, social constructs%) whom we created (and whom we implicitly re-presented as metaphors for ourselves and ‘others’ in our world) through the making of a threedimensional mural of four separate geophysical regions with four distinct cultures that have never encountered one another. How they eventually encounter one another and what occurs because of this encounter is the mirror each group holds up to itself. Subsequent discussion encompasses not only the hypothetical cultures and how their members dealt with the challenges of change, disaster, and forced integration but also how or if the people within the workshop groups co-operated or resolved conflict to create the murals and their cultural representations.