Peace Building as Social Transformation and Personal Pilgrimage
The Peace Building Study Program (PBSP) is a field based academic program that invites students to engage the world of post-Apartheid South Africa—its sociopolitical challenges, its unique ecology, devastating poverty and religious heritage.

The nation has emerged through a dramatic history of oppression where the white church claimed God's blessing over its system of government and the black church claimed God's blessing on its drive to overthrow the government. Once democracy was established in 1994, the country was faced with long term development challenges: How to redress the evils of Apartheid; how to balance the mission of justice against the mission of forgiveness; how to bring equality into a society where inequality was the basis for everything from social services to human rights; how to build the peace when so many are calling for retribution or restoration of the old system. Traditional community development efforts focus on means to empower an isolated local community to emerge from a poverty system. This Peace Building course pushes to a much more demanding approach to community development: it asks the various interrelated communities to come together in a way that honors the diverse story lines of each group, that makes room for the unique and redemptive gifts of each community, that tells the truth about historical trespasses against each other, that calls for the difficult long term work of social transformation in each group and personal pilgrimage in each individual.

Core Educational Components of the PBSP
The academic and co-curricular components of PBSP are designed within the following educational categories:

Global Dialogue
The world, in some scholars' language, has become a village. Diverse cultures, extreme markets, political rivalries and competing religions have all come together in one public square. Education that prepares students for a future in that world will necessarily insert the student into a context of dialogue where dominant cultural values and ideas will be tested against the assumptions of others. The Peace Building Semester Program is located in a country that has been free of its colonial ruler for less than a decade. The debates surrounding modernization versus ancient community, identity versus nationalism, indigenous control versus global economy, and environment as resource versus environment as partner are paramount in South Africa and challenge the students' assumptions regarding the “right” way the world should work.

Field Based Curriculum
Some academic content is best acquired in the field context. The Peace Building Semester Program is based in a context that is host to dramatic ecological and social challenges, and accessible to numerous organizations working for a sustainable future. These include the Tutu Peace Center, the Center for Conflict Transformation, the Anglican church, EarthWorks, Institute For Healing of Memories, Community Arts Project, University of Cape Town, Parliament, and dozens of small community development organizations working in areas of extreme poverty and social dysfunction. The local context also provides icons of the Apartheid era—resistance art, government monuments and museums, church centers and memorial parks—that serve as a precise illustration of how citizens in any context can either work for the common good or promote their own story at the expense of the rest of the society.

Communal Living
Knowledge is in part a community experience—ideas are negotiated through the personal storylines of the listeners. What is Truth for one might only be Fact for another. What is False for one might be Foundational to another. The PBSP student body is composed of two groups—half from Africa and half from North America. Students live together in homes (one from each continent paired together), do all field trips and course work together over a fourteen week period, and actively study what it means to do peace building as a community of diverse students while also studying the same subject in the larger context of South Africa. Knowledge, in this sense, comes through a genuine attempt to explore community.

Transformational Pilgrimage
Our life is a journey. Our acquired identity and values often come to us through a storyline (political, cultural, spiritual) that validates our sense of self while demeaning the storyline of another individual or community. Peace building efforts deal with social transformation at one level, but those efforts cannot sustain without the personal work of the actors who explore the foundations of violence and myth that have torn communities apart in the first place. This second level of peace building is often said to be the most difficult work of all—the journey into our deepest personal sense of identity and history. The Peace Building Semester Program encourages students to journey into their inner world and do the work of reckoning with the storyline that resides at their core.

Core Courses
Each academic program is designed to the requirements of participating academic institutions. Available courses include the following options:

• Human Rights and Building the Peace in Transitional Societies
• The Role of Art and Media in Confronting and Transforming Society
• Models of Community Justice and Social Reconciliation
• The Joint Practice of Environmental Sustainability and Community Development
• Case Study: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission
• Case Study: Religion’s Split Identity of Fomenting Violence and Peace Building
• Individualized Practical Internships in Peace Building