News: Peace Talks

State proficiency tests do not measure schools’ success in one of the most vital skills children need: How to handle conflicts.

But for Paulette Meier, conflict resolution is important in any child’s curriculum. That’s why she recorded Come Join the Circle: LessonSongs for Peacemaking.

“I really wanted to focus on this peace education, because for me it brought things together,” Meier says. “If you start young, children can understand it as part of their language development that you can do this — talk about your conflicts.”

Come Join the Circle is a collection of musical stories of children who worked out their problems. The situations that form the subject of the songs on the CD, mostly written by Meier, were those of real students she met as a trainer in conflict resolution in Cincinnati and Kentucky schools.

“I was writing these songs for the lessons, just as a fun way to have the kids remember what we were learning,” Meier says.

Teachers urged Meier to record the songs so they could use them in classrooms.

The CD is a continuation of her earlier work in making peace education part of schools.

After taking training at Cincinnati’s Center for Peace Education, Meier wrote a training program for teachers in 1994.

A former teacher, she left the profession to work in a variety of fields aimed at helping others and changing social policy.

“At some point I felt like I needed to see a lot of other things to understand the world better,” she says.

Meier set off to fight for safe energy in Washington, D.C., went to massage school and worked with Catholic Social Services in Covington as a school services counselor. Today she is an education advocate at Beech Acres.

“By the time I moved back to Cincinnati, I really wanted to sing,” Meier says. “I was singing a lot around social justice groups for organizations in Cincinnati.”

Meier believes peace can be achieved through social justice, and in order to find peace there must be change in the outer world as well as in the individual. She recently received a McCrackin Peace and Justice Award, named for the late Rev. Maurice McCrackin, a long-time social activist in Cincinnati.

Meier trains groups of students to work as peer mediators, helping other students work through disagreements. The best teams are those that have peer mediators to whom other students can relate, according to Meier. Eventually, even the students who thought they had little in common find similarities with others.

“You want the kids who are the skaters and you want the kids who are jocks so you have this diversity on your peer mediation team,” she says. “When peer mediation programs are done well, the diversity on the team starts to lead to some walls breaking down.”

Seeing past the walls
Meier prepared her master’s thesis in education in the 1970s in Germany, where she interviewed teachers and students. At the time, German students who were not going to go to college were separated from other students in elementary schools, a practice that was about to change.

The schools were trying to develop a curriculum that would help students from all economic classes relate to one other.

“What was happening there was the kids from working class backgrounds had been isolated since the fourth grade,” Meier says.

What was happening in Germany, she says, also was happening in Cincinnati as children were bused to schools for racial desegregation.

With students thrown together after no prior exposure to one other, there were sure to be some periods of adjustment.

“There was nothing to help these kids grapple with each other and try to understand each other,” Meier says.

The trip to Germany was a turning point in Meier’s life. There she was exposed to people and ideas that were new to her. The family she stayed with had two sons who were socialists, and another woman in the program spoke of her experiences with racism.

All of the students kept journals of their experiences and feelings on the trip. After visiting a former concentration camp, Meier was asked asked to read a woman’s journal. In it was an account of the woman’s house being burned down by the Ku Klux Klan when she was a child. The author was the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth’s daughter.

A little help from friends
David Archer, who arranged and recorded Come Join the Circle at a studio in his home, is an associate director in consumer research at Procter and Gamble.

Archer brought his recording gear from the United Kingdom when he moved to Cincinnati three years ago. Because his work permit doesn’t allow him to make money from recording, he offered his services to Meier free of charge.

“I very much bought into what she was doing,” Archer says.

The goal was to create music that would appeal to children ages 8 to 14, something for the age group that was past singing along with Barney, but not into the hard-edged rap geared at older kids.

“What we were really trying to do was reach a group of kids in that in-between age that are receptive to that peace and reconciliation message,” Archer says.

The CD contains a wide range of musical genres, from Bluegrass to Reggae.

“We tried to make something that wasn’t a sort of plinky-plunky, nursery-rhyme thing,” Archer says. “We didn’t want to patronize kids.”

Archer’s wife, Liz, also helped with the project, singing back-up, working in the promotion of the CD and organizing a launch party for its release. The cover art for the CD is by local artist Mary Ann Lederer, who uses a wheelchair.

Meier hopes her CD will encourage young people to look within themselves to make the world a better place.

“You’re not going to have peace unless you have healing, unless you have justice and liberation and compassion,” Meier says. “I can’t separate the social activism from the need for deep, personal healing. When we are allowed to feel our feelings with loving attention, we’re able to think much more clearly.”

This article appears in Dec 19-25, 2001.