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In this episode, we’re talking about the concept of negative peace and positive peace. This impactful framework is not known by many educators but can be transformational for our educational practices as we work towards safe, inclusive, and justice-oriented classrooms..
Why? Educators often avoid high-emotion topics with our students. Areas like current events, politics, or racism are not talked about out of fear that they’re too triggering or upsetting. But this is a mistake, and something Gorski and Matias identify in their 10 elements of white liberalism. Students will always seek out other spaces to have these conversations, so educational settings should be safe, open environments to discuss hard topics. The concept of negative peace and positive peace can help us get there. The history of these terms is fascinating. Jane Addams was the first to use the concept of “negative peace” back in 1907. She talked about how there was a negative side to what people called “peace.” Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., further defined the terms in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail in 1953: Negative peace is the absence of tension, and positive peace is the presence of justice. Johan Galtung published work on the concept in 1969, defining the terms this way: Negative peace is the absence of personal violence, and positive peace is the absence of structural violence. For educators, it’s important to remember how we are prioritizing each type of peace. We often want to eliminate personal violence—of course. But is this where we stop? And are we so intent on avoiding tension we ignore difficult conversations? As educators, we want to prioritize eliminating structural violence to achieve full justice. Understanding these concepts help educators prioritize the right thing in their teachings and classrooms. Specific Considerations: From an adaptive leadership lens, educators can start using this framework by digging into these action steps: Step 1: Which types of data are you collecting and analyzing? Office referrals, detentions, and suspensions are all related to personal violence (prioritizing negative peace). They’re important, but we don’t want to stop there. It’s also important to look through the positive peace lens, at structural issues. This can include:
Step 2: Do your conflict resolution or restorative practices have a structural question for adults or leaders? In restorative conversations after student-to-student conflict, you may address those involved by discussing personal responsibilities and impacts of the situation. But to dig deeper to that structural level, it’s important to ask about underlying causes of the conflict. You might ask an individual: what was the underlying need you were missing? It may be that they were hungry and, therefore, upset and lashed out at another student. There’s always a “why” behind each action, and we need to determine if it’s structural to address it properly. Then, follow up. How can you structurally support that student's needs? What needs to change in the classroom or school to do so? Step 3: Are our pedagogical practices generating a sense of community? If students don’t feel cared for and valued, there is no positive peace. So we can go back and evaluate our pedagogies and professional framework to evaluate how we’re upholding the student voice and empowering student agency to co-create their education. This may include changing pedagogical approaches or incorporating new professional development and coaching sessions for educators. Step 4: Where are we silent on or avoiding raising issues that matter? In his letter, MLK called out “the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice, who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.” Is this how we’re operating in our classrooms? Are we prioritizing our comfort and “negative peace” over uncomfortable and necessary antiracist change? Educators can start by identifying where they’re choosing “negative peace” by avoiding certain topics or conversations. By identifying that, we can start to change our frameworks to achieve true positive peace. Step 5: Make a plan to design effective environments for discussion that enable students to connect and grow Ultimately, students are hungry to build their skills in talking about really tough stuff. As a student (Harshan) put it on an episode of Street Data Pod: “If you keep saying they’re not ready, they never will be ready…I think that’s a pretty dumb sentiment…[adults are afraid of] control…it’s that power they want to feel…they’re scared that people will actually break free of that mold that they’re continuing to create.” But building environments where students can have challenging discussions that raise high emotions—and then the repairs and reconnections that may need to take place—is difficult. It doesn’t happen overnight—educators will need to be committed to this as an ongoing professional development and learning priority. To get started, here are two key resources to check out: Final Tip This week, identify one place where you or your staff may be choosing negative peace over positive peace. (Use the resource below if you need help!) To help you diagnose instances where you or your staff may be choosing negative peace over positive peace, I’m sharing my Diagnosing Adaptive Challenges Mini Workbook (based on the work of adaptive leadership scholars, Heifetz, Grashow, & Linsky) with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 194 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
TRANSCRIPT Welcome to episode 194 of the Time for Teachership podcast. In this episode, we're talking about the concept of negative peace and positive peace. Surprisingly, when I searched my Spotify account, I could not find a podcast episode on these concepts. I'm sure it exists, but those terms did not flag anything. So I am certain this framework will be new to some folks, given that it's not even in the podcast space yet. Specifically, I want to share the spark for this episode first. 00:37 So I was listening to Street Data Pod, which is one of my favorites. Street Data is one of my favorite educational books. It's awesome. Very much centers student voice and student leadership. 00:49 And so in that context of this podcast episode, in which high school students were talking about and responding to comments from educators, from adults, who were really feeling like, you know, we don't want to, and even outside of the education space, we don't want students to be talking about hard things. We don't want high emotion topics like current events, politics, racism, any of these things that raise emotions with students right, we shouldn't be talking about it. That's the sentiment they were responding to and this little student, harshon, had a beautiful answer and he said quote if you keep saying they're not ready, they never will be ready. Right, thinking about students here, he goes on to say I think that's a pretty dumb sentiment, I love kids. And then he goes on to say, really, adults are afraid of control, right, he's saying that they really want to feel that power and they're quote, scared that people will actually break free of that mold that they're continuing to create. So end quote. I think there's so much here that students are frustrated that adults don't believe in them to be able to have the conversations they're going to have. And in Harshon's comment he really talked about how, if we don't talk about it in school, like we don't talk about it. 02:09 And I also want to add kind of this extra layer here which I've talked about before on the podcast, which is students will find other spaces in which these topics are being talked about and they might not actually have an opportunity to engage within a kind of container of perceived safety and belonging to the extent that a classroom might be able to create that. And I was listening to another episode of that same podcast where Dr Django Perez is on there talking about this idea of community care and how, you know, as an activist and community organizer, he also has been thinking about this idea of his culturally sustaining pedagogy, which he has coined a term and built out lots of research and text around that. Really, he's kind of seeing this culturally responsive pedagogy as a kind of element of community care. Like are pedagogical practices generating community care? And I'm kind of getting ahead of myself here because we'll talk about that today. 03:02 But I think, in the context of all of this right culturally sustaining pedagogy, student voices and student leadership and what do students really want to do and what do we really want to do as leaders to create the container in which students are engaged citizens, helpful participants in a community of like, moving it forward right, like leaders now and in the future, and avoiding those high emotion topics like shouldn't be the thing right. We need to equip people with the ability to negotiate and navigate conflict in ways that our leaders and our adults in our society currently are not doing right, and I wanna be very clear that that is a tough ask. It is a very tough ask given so many things, given exactly what is happening with adults in our society, given legislation that is happening in many states and communities and the fear of teacher jobs Like. I want to caveat all of this with like it is. It is challenging. It is challenging to be good at this, even in places where the law is not an issue right, and I want to encourage and inspire us that it is worth it despite the challenge. And personally, I just want to constantly get better at this. It is something I'm always striving to do and maybe the circumstances dictate how I do it, but I want to try to always do it right. I want our students to be able to navigate their emotions and emotionalities with care and thoughtfulness and to be able to discuss things that bring up emotions like a critical life skill. I also want to frame that recently on the podcast a few months ago, we had Gorski and Matias' 10 elements of white liberalism list, and avoiding or kind of equating negative piece with positive piece and mistaking these two distinctions are number two on that list. So all of this to say we've been leading to this moment of needing this framework perhaps, so I'm going to share that today Very long intro, but here we go. So let's talk about these terms negative piece and positive piece. 05:02 There has been historically kind of this emergence of this term over the last century or so, and so Jane Addams is actually one of the first documented people to use, in 1907, the term negative piece, talking about how people have talked about peace or are using the term peace in a way that she was like I have some negative connotations around this. There are bigger things and the way you're using peace almost seems like it's just not what we want, right? This is kind of like my negative view of peace. Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr, in his letter from a Birmingham jail, really brought it to the forefront in 1953. In that letter, talking about specifically white liberals and what he was calling white moderates at that time, defining the term as quote negative peace, which is the absence of tension, right. And he talks about quote positive peace, which is the presence of justice, right. So negative peace, absence of tension. Positive peace, presence of justice. I really like that framing a lot. 06:10 Johan Galton I hope I'm saying your name correctly popularized this distinction next a little later, where he really developed it into a theory right, of positive peace and negative peace, negative being the absence of personal violence and positive being the absence of structural violence. So these two things came about. This distinction came about, published in 1969. So we have kind of this evolution over the course of the last again about century of this term, and so now it is taught in peace studies programs and things like that. 06:52 I think the takeaway for educators here is we want to be thoughtful about the moments in which we are and the structures in which we are prioritizing perhaps negative peace with positive peace. And so what I mean by that, given all of these definitions and uses of the term, is that sometimes we want an absence of tension, right, or we want an absence of tension, right. Or we want an absence of personal violence. And like sure that sounds like absence of personal violence sounds great. But in that model, right, galton talks about how we actually we need both the absence of personal violence and structural violence, right, we can't have true peace without both. 07:33 And in Martin Luther King Jr's model, right, dr King talks about how the negative piece is the absence of tension. Right, in that definition, I would argue that we need the tension, we need the conflict. It is healthy and we need to learn to navigate it effectively and in a healthy manner, one that enables us to connect and grow. If we don't have the connection, if we don't have the growth, we don't have evolution of society. Right, we don't have solutions to longstanding adaptive challenges. So, from an adaptive leadership lens, we really want to make sure we are not conflating these two things. And I would say again, from an adaptive leadership lens, let's kind of ask the following questions so specific considerations, to kind of make this applicable to practice. 08:19 One which types of data are you collecting and analyzing? Are they around negative piece right? Are they around kind of like office referrals, detentions, suspensions, things that are about personal violence, which, again, I'm not saying don't collect that, but is it just that? Or are we bringing in policy analysis or bringing in student and family voices, which often surface structural issues we may not be aware of with our particular lenses and experiences? Do we have a protocol that lifts up the issues of structural violence or aspects of positive peace really being lacking Like? Are we looking at identity markers that would signify that structural issues are present? Right, the great disparity between, for example, these racial identities, between these gender identities, sense of belonging right Between AP access for students with IEPs or that don't have IEPs, perceptions of belonging for different nationalities in our school, the perception of belonging versus people who were born in the community that they're going to school in, versus, not right, social, emotional excuse me, socioeconomic status? You know what are the kind of identity markers we're pulling out and filtering the data through those lenses. Right, are we contrasting specific things to identify where structural issues may not be noticed so far and may be present? 10:00 Okay, the second consideration do your conflict resolution or restorative practices, conferences, whatever you have in place have a structural question for adults or leaders? So usually I will say that restorative conferences have a few questions. Right, they might just involve the participants of it's a student to student conflict, right, what was your experience of what happens? You know, what was the underlying need that you had, or the you know whatever. That piece is just identifying kind of like the root of the problem and then like, how am I taking responsibility for my impact? Right, how did it impact you? How am I taking responsibility for my impact on others? Something like that, some basic stuff. But I don't see in there that's very like personal, right, that could get at the negative piece absence of personal violence, part of Galton's theory model or whatever but it doesn't get at the structure that may underlie the conflict in the first place. 10:59 So if we have a trend of students, or even not a trend, but like some underlying thing that contributed to that problem, that maybe in student language, the way I usually frame the question is like what underlying need were you missing, right? So I might say, well, I was very hungry, right, I was needing a basic like survival aspect. Like I was hungry and so I got angry and so I lashed out in a way that if I wasn't hungry, I might not have right. That might be a way that a high school student responds to that question, for example. However, if we were looking structurally, if I as a leader, I don't need to hop into that conversation necessarily, but afterwards I say, wow, hey, I realize that you're hungry and I realized that other students might be hungry and I realized that structurally, we don't have an ability to give you free food for whatever reason, and maybe we make that possible. Like, maybe we look into grant funding for, like, a snack bar or something great, like I don't know what it is, but I'm just off the top here thinking about what you could say. 12:00 I think there are often structural things that underlie interpersonal conflicts that we could identify as leaders. Either looking at trends across these situations or in the moment that a restorative conference has finished. We note that on a form Are there. You know, we finished this thing. Are there structural pieces we want to identify or look into that could reduce the likelihood of something like this happening in the future? How do we structurally support? 12:27 The third consideration that I would think about is are our pedagogical practices generating that sense of community care that Dr Django-Parris is talking about? So what pedagogies are we employing? Are we infusing into our professional development, professional learning sessions, into our coaching? What are we modeling as leaders for teachers, right? What are those aspects of community care where everyone right under culturally sustaining pedagogies under that umbrella, thinking about everyone right under culturally sustaining pedagogy under that umbrella, thinking about everyone experiencing belonging. How do we make sure all students and teachers are experiencing that and feeling cared for, feeling like they are valued? And how do we do that? Because if we are not doing that, we don't have positive peace, right, we might not see, for example, or witness experience, we might not have an outpouring of students complaining, right, negative peace, right, absence of tension in MLK's definition. But we might have an absence of positive peace because we haven't created the space for students to be able to say the thing that they need, right. 13:42 So I've thought about other kind of student voice frameworks as well, applied to Mitra's student voice pyramid I've talked about before on the podcast, where when we have students respond to a survey saying there's a problem but then we don't actually address it and we don't work with them to fix it, we actually have increased turbulence, we have increased tension that builds because we invited the ideas and we didn't do anything with them. We didn't partner with students, we didn't support their agency in co-constructing a solution, right? So are we engaging in practices that truly enable students to feel like they belong, they are cared for, they are loved and they have a true voice that will be respected and listened to and actioned on? Right, that they have true agency in the co-creation of their learning experience. I think the big next one, right? 14:45 The fourth consideration is where are we silent on issues that matter? Or where are we avoiding raising issues that matter? Where are positive piece, the full, the kind of fuller piece, the piece that precedes those definitions is, quote the white moderate who is more devoted to quote order than to justice, who prefers a negative piece, which is the absence of tension, to a positive piece, which is the presence of justice, end quote. That's some context there, right, we are often in this space. I find myself often in a space of really being devoted to order, right, really being falling into the trap of negative peace, right, oh, everyone's quiet and peaceful and not complaining and great, everyone's happy, the end Versus digging in a little deeper and identifying injustices that are present. We have to be uncomfortable, we have to sacrifice order and silence and the negative peace idea, the absence of tension, for the larger positive peace. So we have to first be able to identify where this is happening, where we personally are gravitating to that lens or that preference, living that out, where our team is. I think there's so much. 16:18 I mean, dr King goes on to say a lot more, but talks about the quote we will have to repent in this generation, not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people. End quote. Like that is the theme here, right, it's not just this definition that comes from this. If you've read this text, it is robust with this and I'll just share another one. Right, he's talking about white church leaders who he's expecting to step in and work and labor for racial justice, and he says, quote all too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows. End quote. 17:03 Great, again, hearkening back to this idea of Gorski and Mathias's 10 elements of white liberalism, this is number two on here. Right, we see this when we are laboring for racial justice. We see this in white liberals, white liberal spaces, and recognizing that the vast majority of educators are white females. I think this is a really important, as a white female, just naming this, this, that we, we we identify this as a thing that's happening and we determine where we personally or our staff are silent on these issues or avoiding issues of racial justice. Right, so are we prioritizing our comfort and positive piece over excuse me, a negative piece, over uncomfortable and necessary anti-racist change? 17:50 So, again, thinking about Harshon's words, I think this is really important to name that students are hungry for opportunities to build their skills in talking about really tough stuff, and so I think step number five, or consideration number five, is to really make a plan to design effective environments for really challenging discussions that raise high emotions, that enables students to connect and grow and learn from one another in community, to make mistakes and to recognize and take responsibility for the impact and the repair that those mistakes may have right and to truly live in community, to truly use their hearts and their heads. I will link to resources for your staff to build this capacity. I will link to resources for student discussion supports. But think about where in your professional learning as a leader, where have you identified places where this is something that staff can practice, because we're not just going to get good at it. Many, many adults, myself included, are not great at this. Naturally, it takes so much work, so much professional learning, so much experience just in the conversations and practicing and making mistakes and growing and learning together and being in community, and we can't just anticipate our teachers are going to be ready for it. Right, this is hard work and we need to support it with professional learning. So identify where in your professional learning calendar this lives, and it shouldn't be a one-off right. This should be like an ongoing, touch-based thing that I think actually is really best when leadership directs this or when leadership facilitates and participates actively in this as well. 19:33 Okay, my final kind of call to action here is that this week I'd love for you to identify one place where you or your staff may be choosing negative piece over positive piece, even just writing those terms up on a sticky note and having that present. Just have that construct front of mind. Try to identify where this might be happening. I'll link to another resource if you need help with this. That's from the work of Adaptive Leadership Scholars Heifetz, graschau and Linsky. It's my Diagnosing Adaptive Challenges mini workbook, which will help you identify where avoidance is present and what are kind of like the listen, experience, observe, things that you can try to use as a resource bank or a checklist of like ah, I just witnessed this happening. There we go. That's that in action. Now I can concretely identify it as an example of where we may have chosen to preserve the negative piece or the absence of tension over a positive piece or structural justice.
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AuthorLindsay Lyons (she/her) is an educational justice coach who works with teachers and school leaders to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice, design curricula grounded in student voice, and build capacity for shared leadership. Lindsay taught in NYC public schools, holds a PhD in Leadership and Change, and is the founder of the educational blog and podcast, Time for Teachership. Archives
March 2025
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