Broadcast live to the web from a phone call

Welcome to Irish Peace Centres pod casting. My name is Paddy Logue and I am the Co-ordinator for Experiential Learning within Irish Peace Centres. Experiential Learning has two aspects, research and training. I am talking about the research element here and my colleague Owen Donnelly is podcasting on this website on the learning element. The purpose of EL is to capture and share the personal and institutional learning and best practice of the entire consortium through a variety of methods one of which is issue based action research. The approach is bottom up and exploratory and will result in new ways to understand and articulate the peace building work that is being conducted and continues in Ireland, North and South. To this end I organise “master class” seminars, international conferences and internal and external research studies. The work of capturing and sharing the learning impacts both at home and internationally. It provides a major international link for IPC having formed a close working relationship with the Israel/Palestine based group, Combatants for Peace. Exchange visits last year gave an opportunity to share experiences and for both sides to significantly increase their learning about the theory and practice of peace building. The report on the exchange visits entitled PEACE2TALK is available in the reports section of this website. We organised the successful “Prejudice and Pride” international conference in March of this year which was also the occasion of the formal launch of Irish Peace Centres. This was a successful event on a number of levels, receiving print and TV media coverage, as well as being attended by many local leading figures in the peace-building field and internationally recognised figures. It was opened by an exhibition of photographs on the horrors of war, both from Northern Ireland and from Israel/Palestine, that added a weight to the conference and created a dynamic background to discussions. The proceedings of the conference are due to be published in September. We organised a well-attended seminar delivered by Professor Kenneth Bush on the Aid for Peace approach to the evaluation of peace projects. This delivered real benefit to fro many peace building organisations, particularly in light of the fact that the SEUPB have adopted the Aid to Peace approach for the evaluation of the Peace III programme. Two internal research studies have been carried out and the resulting papers are due for publication. The Faith and Positive Relations paper is currently out for peer review with publication expected in October and the Intergenerational Impact of the Conflict report is ready for peer review with publication also planned for October. Two external research studies have been commissioned in collaboration with INCORE, the International Conflict Research Institute which is a joint project of the United Nations University and the University of Ulster at Magee College in Derry. The first is a qualitative evaluation of the Sustainable Peace Network which is a core programme of IPC. This is an example of reflective practice capturing and sharing the learning of an IPC programme and informing the future direction of the work. The second is an evaluation of the near universal methodology of storytelling as a peace-building tool. It is extraordinary that no such agreed and effective evaluation tool exists despite the huge investment by the EU and others in story-telling projects. An ideas paper has been circulated and terms of reference set for an international workshop at the end of September. Thanks for listening to Irish Peace Centres pod casting and there will be more pod casts available soon.