Peace education through storytelling: social reconciliation and intercultural dialogue among children in Southern Thailand

The study addresses the use of storytelling as a vehicle for the transformative learning of peace education aimed at promoting reconciliation and intercultural dialogue between children of Thai-Buddhists and Malay-Muslims in Southern Thailand. Senehi (2002) argues that storytelling is an instrument for socialisation and education that is the key to conflict resolution and peace building, to motivate people to undergo a self-transformation. Through interviews and focus group as well as art workshops with children of the conflicting parties, this case study demonstrates that peace education through storytelling can raise critical awareness about the system of government oppression and encourages intercultural dialogue with a child from the other group as a form of truth-telling contributing to the development of cultures of peace. Storytelling is, therefore, an apparatus for conflict transformation and an act of art leading toward social change through nonviolent means.