Peace Players International

Brothers Sean and Brendan Tuohey founded PeacePlayers International (PPI) in 2001. They believed, “children who play together can learn to live together.” As a result over 52,000 youth have been reached by PPI in its short history.

Using basketball to bring children together and teach them proven methods for improving their communities, PeacePlayers International utilizes a groundbreaking peacebuilding and leadership development curriculum. PPI currently has year-round operations in South Africa, Northern Ireland, Israel and the West Bank, and Cyprus. Check out www.PeacePlayersintl.org to learn more about PPI’s history.

PeacePlayers International programs incorporate an element of formal peace and leadership education, grounded by an innovative basketball curriculum developed with the assistance of the Laureus Sport for Good Foundation and the Arbinger institute. The Arbinger institute is a global center for the study of interpersonal conflict. Through fun on-court activities and guided discussion the participants are taught how to ways to think about conflict and their roles in society. The Curriculum emphasizes what PPI calls, “out of the box thinking”- a way of interacting with those around us that honors both others; humanity and our responsibility for change.

Ways to use this Resource:

Educators can use many of the same activities that PPI uses in their camps. One example of a drill that PPI uses is one that focuses on anti-social behavior. In the activity the coach instructs the team to not pass the ball to a designated team member. That member is unaware that he/she is being excluded. Once the excluded team member finally does receive the ball he/she reciprocates the exclusion by not passing the ball to another member. At the end of the activity the coaches facilitate a dialogue around the issues of anti-social behavior. They stress the importance of not reciprocating that hurt feeling onto others even if we really want to. Watch this video to see the activity in practice. The example activity takes place at 3:50 mark.

Educators can use this activity as well inside the classroom or at recess to show students that excluding others from groups, games, or other cliques has a negative impact. Physical education teachers would be best equipped to facilitate such an activity due to the availability of a ball of some sort. However, other teachers may use a smaller ball such as a tennis ball to facilitate this activity inside of a traditional classroom.

Goals:

With this resource I believe that students can learn the importance of inclusion and partnership. Team work especially is can be learned because this exercises stress the importance of inclusion. When the team member who has been excluded feels the hurt he/she often reciprocates the exclusion and hurts the team in the end. So this activity teaches students to collaborate and work together to perform in a productive way.

I think teachers who are seeing destructive cliques form within their classes can benefit from this resource. I would suggest that middle school teachers (i.e. 6^th grade teachers) would benefit from this because it’s around that age that anti-social behavior and bullying takes place. I also think that sports teams that are having problems working together may also benefit.

Resources:

Curriculum- http://www.peaceplayersintl.org/about/curriculum

PeacePlayers International- http://www.peaceplayersintl.org/