A teacher aims to cultivate international solidarity and critical thinking in…

Peace education seeks not merely to inform learners about peace but to build the values and the habits of thought that sustain it. Two of its constitutive aims are international solidarity — a felt sense of shared responsibility with people beyond one's own community or nation, which grows out of working together on problems held in common — and critical thinking — the independent analysis of the causes and consequences of a situation and the reasoned evaluation of the possible responses to it. Aims of this kind, one affective and one higher-order cognitive, are served only by a classroom task that makes learners actually practise those processes; a task that asks them to recall, recognise or reproduce information about peace addresses the topic without engaging either process.

Judged against that requirement, organising collaborative projects on global social issues does both things at once. Its collaborative form makes solidarity something the learners live rather than hear about: a shared goal, interdependent roles and a common outcome. Its subject matter, a social issue that crosses national boundaries, obliges them to gather evidence, trace causes and consequences, weigh competing responses and defend a proposal — that is, to think critically instead of reproducing a given account.

The remaining tasks engage only part of what the objective asks for:

• A multiple-choice quiz on peace-related vocabulary has learners retrieve meanings already taught and recognise them among fixed alternatives — recall of terminology, worked individually, with no weighing of alternatives.

• A textbook summary of conflict theories has learners restate an author's already-organised account in fewer words — comprehension of a single source, worked individually, rather than independent analysis of a live problem.

• Short stories about local customs draw on the festivals, rituals and practices of the learner's own immediate surroundings, so the reach of the task is intra-cultural; it develops imaginative expression rather than a shared responsibility extending beyond that community.

The task best suited to cultivating international solidarity together with critical thinking is therefore organising collaborative projects addressing global social issues.