Shaping a ‘culture of peace’ — How Armenia’s teachers navigate war, displacem

Schools and teachers must address complex and sensitive questions while at the same time creating a safe and open classroom environment.

War, violence, displacement, loss, and prolonged uncertainty change people’s relationships, their sense of security, and the way they see one another.

In the education sector, the results of conflict can appear in children’s questions, emotions, attitudes towards each other, and ideas about the past and the future. It often becomes a part of the teacher’s role to help their pupils process and understand what is happening around them, express their fears and doubts, and find their bearings in a complicated reality. At the same time, a teacher’s work can also include humanitarian and peacebuilding components: preserving the child’s dignity, discussing sensitive topics responsibly, and preventing the reproduction of violence and discrimination.

The consequences of conflict have had a particularly profound impact in Armenia, where successive rounds of hostilities have changed the lives of many. The Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020 resulted in displacement, loss of life, and lasting psychological trauma. In September 2023, following Azerbaijan’s military offensive and the months-long blockade of the Lachin Corridor, more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians were forced to leave Nagorno-Karabakh.

Cars at a standstill on the Lachin Corridor, as the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh flees to Armenia in September 2023. Photo: Marut Vanyan/OC Media.

This history has presented new challenges for Armenia’s education system. Schools and teachers have had to respond not only to the practical difficulties children face in adapting to new communities and educational environments, but also to the psychological consequences of war. For educators, this has meant addressing complex and sensitive questions about the past, identity, and conflict, while creating a classroom environment where children can safely and openly express their feelings and concerns.

Teaching sensitive topics

For Nara Simonyan, a history and social studies teacher at Ijevan Lyceum, teaching about peace has become a difficult topic.

Speaking with OC Media, she explains that traditionally she has begun discussions about peace in her classroom via an everyday example, such as asking students to imagine they had a neighbour with whom conflicts regularly arose. Since neither is willing to leave their home, they have to find ways to create conditions for co-existence.

Throughout these discussions, Simonyan has generally found that students are listening, and that they often agree that talking about finding solutions for peace is necessary. However, these days, when she moves to discuss relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the same context, focusing on the possibility of co-existence between neighbouring peoples, students’ reactions change.

‘Students do like talking about peace […] But when we move from that general, slightly pathos-filled theoretical talk to practical questions, serious problems arise: personal and delicate perceptions come into play’, Simonyan says.

Nara Simonyan. Photo Almast Muradyan/OC Media.She emphasises that the effects of conflict and displacement are not abstract concepts for her students.

‘They would remember all their acquaintances and relatives, the war, the losses. From our school, too, we had two senior students who were killed. Working here is very difficult, especially emotionally’.

Simonyan has also faced difficulties in addressing changing political priorities, particularly in how Nagorno-Karabakh is conceived in relation to Armenia.

She recalls that during one primary school class, while teaching on the subject of ‘My Homeland’, she discussed Armenia’s borders and regions. The map that hung in the classroom still showed the Republic of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh together. She noticed that many children would go up to the map and point to Nagorno-Karabakh, including it in their idea of ‘homeland’.

Since 2024, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has promoted the idea of ‘Real Armenia’ — referring to the Republic of Armenia within its internationally recognised borders.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan wears a pin portraying the internationally recognised territory of Armenia during a government session. Official photo.Simonyan says that she cannot simply forbid one of her students from pointing at Nagorno-Karabakh and saying it was their homeland. This was especially the case for students who were displaced from Nagorno-Karabakh. She also emphasises that fully closing the topic of Nagorno-Karabakh, or pretending it is no longer part of Armenian reality, is impossible for her.

‘Teaching history now, especially for me, someone who is first and foremost a historian, has become very hard. The hardest part is answering the little ones’ questions, because they ask very directly, without political wording, and you have to be able to answer them both honestly and responsibly. In such a situation, a teacher can’t completely separate their professional duty from their own feelings’, Simonyan says.

‘We work in a public school, where we have to take education policy into account, but at the same time we have children in front of us who hear their families’ stories at home, see information online, and have their own questions’.

She has discussed the topic with colleagues, and says that teachers are trying, in their own way, to find responsible ways of having this conversation. One way she does this is by trying to present the topic from a variety of perspectives, and to rephrase questions and steer the discussion so that conflict does not arise among the students. She also believes that schools need more unified approaches, so that teaching about peace doesn’t depend solely on the teacher’s personal experience, emotions, and worldview.

Peacebuilding education and the teacher’s professional toolkit

According to Lusine Kosakyan, the co-founder of the youth-led peacebuilding organisation, the Frontline Youth Network, there is a gap in peacebuilding education, something the network has been working to address since 2020.

‘Children receive a large amount of information from different sources, but they can’t always assess its reliability, understand the context, or recognise the generalisations and manipulations within it’, Kosakyan tells OC Media.

   Lusine Kosakyan. Photo: Almast Muradyan/OC Media.One of the network’s key tools is a teaching support manual intended for social studies teachers. The manual includes materials on the types and causes of conflicts, their peaceful resolution, human rights, democracy, the culture of peace, and the different levels of peacebuilding.

‘A teacher should help students think through certain topics, rather than hand over ready-made answers. This principle can be applied even to a single phrase said in class’, Kosakyan says.

She gives the example of a student who makes a generalisation or shares a stereotype, emphasising that the teacher should use questions to help the student understand the claim being made. Such questions could include simply ‘Who do you mean by “they”?’ or asking the student whether the same trait could be attributed to other groups.

Since 2020, over 1,500 teachers across Armenia have been trained by the Frontline Youth Network. Yet, Kosakyan argues, the training sessions have not solved every problem, including how knowledge is applied in the classroom when the teacher is dealing with children who have experienced the effects of war first-hand.

‘Training in itself doesn’t guarantee that professional behaviour will change. Quality training can provide a larger toolkit. It is very important that the teacher be a bearer and shaper of a culture of peace, that they not reproduce and spread a culture of violence themselves, and not encourage violence’, she emphasises.

Two children’s paintings stand underneath text reading ‘The search for peace’, created during a workshop for children organised by the Frontline Youth Network as part of their peacebuilding initiatives. Photo via the Frontline Youth Network.Teacher trainer Hasmik Charkhchyan also argues that tools for addressing sensitive topics are particularly important for educators working with children and families affected by war and displacement.

She recalls one programme she organised when she held meetings with displaced children and their mothers, creating an environment where participants could talk about their feelings, memories, and experiences of loss.

‘It was especially important that displaced children and teachers could express their feelings and memories without feeling that a particular answer or assessment was expected of them. During the meetings we pieced together their memories and talked about Artsakh’s [Nagorno-Karabakh’s] cultural wealth and the life they had lived there’.

Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia say their last goodbyes to the Dadivank Monastery. Photo: Marut Vanyan/OC Media.She recalls that, when discussing the blockade of the Lachin Corridor, the mothers often expressed a feeling that Armenia had not stood by them. In response, Charkhchyan tried to discuss the broader context by sharing what she had seen, including student initiatives in schools, where students collected supplies for soldiers. Her aim was to share her own experience without denying people’s pain or squeezing their experiences into a single explanation.

Charkhchyan also remembers when she facilitated an international summer camp in Georgia that brought together local ethnic Armenian and Azerbaijani children. As a facilitator, she observed how participants interacted in an environment where their relationships were not defined by the political tensions between the two countries. In her view, under these conditions, participants were able to treat one another with respect, support each other, and work together.

That experience was a source of hope for her, but not proof that the same relationships would hold in any other setting. She questions whether human connections made in a third country would work the same way when people return to their own societies, where the memory of war, political opposition, and public expectations are present.

Indeed, Charkhchyan cautions that the pain and hostility created by war cannot disappear quickly. Many families have lost children, relatives, friends, and acquaintances. For her, peacebuilding is a long process, and education can give people the chance to speak, listen, and think, but cannot impose a ready-made path to reconciliation.

   Hasmik Charkhchyan. Courtesy photo.As a teacher, Simonyan says such training courses have become not only a way to gain new knowledge, but also a chance to revisit her own ideas. For example, she says that she used to understand peace as simply the absence of war. After attending some courses, she became able to distinguish between ‘negative peace’, the absence of direct violence, and ‘positive peace’, which involves building relationships based on trust, dialogue, and social justice.

‘I take the knowledge from those courses with me to school and still use it today, even when resolving the simplest everyday conflicts with students. They’re really interesting, but most importantly, they’re practical’.

Simonyan adds that talking about sensitive topics is no longer as frightening. She has also passed on what she learned to colleagues by running a seminar on conflict prevention, resolution, and peace.