School Violence Prevention Programme

The School Violence Prevention Demonstration Programme is a curriculum, training, and research programme that provides students with opportunities to engage in high quality civic education and group participation exercises. The programme is designed to improve students’ civic knowledge, skills, and attitudes.

It provides training opportunities for teacher participants that support the curriculum and emphasize critical thinking, cooperative learning, group problem-solving, and performance-based assessment. It also provides research and evaluation of changes in students’ civic knowledge and attitudes as they relate to tolerance for the ideas of others; civic responsibility; authority and the law; and social and political institutions.

The programme began in May 1999, when the Center for Civic Education, Calabasas, California, USA, was awarded a grant from the United States Department of Education to study ways in which civic values and principles might be used to create a positive effect on violence among youth. Research studies had demonstrated that excellent civic education programmes, such as the Center’s We the People programme, could have positive effects on students’ attitudes towards society. The 1999-2000 school year pilot implementation of the programme in seven large school district sites was premised on that belief and began the attempt to draw attention to ways in which civic education can be used as a violence prevention tool. The expansion of the programme since the pilot year has been significant, and the programme now includes twenty-one sites in public, private, urban, rural, and Native American school sites in the United States of America, and many countries in the world.

The professional development component of our programme is what makes the School Violence Prevention Demonstration Programme unique. Often referred to as trainings, what a teacher actually receives is intensive staff development. The objective is to lend support to the teacher through the course of the programme year. Teacher participants attend a minimum of forty hours of professional development during the school year and incorporate the programme curricular materials – Foundations of Democracy, We the People, and Project Citizen – into their regular Civic Education and Social Studies curriculum. Participants are expected to integrate 60-80 hours of programme instruction and involve students in culminating activities for Project Citizen and We the People Curriculum.