The activity is one of the follow-up local actions to the Peace in Practice training course within the Peace in Practice project.

Conflicts happen more frequently in schools. It can occur between students, teachers and parents. This is why it is important to teach students how to handle arguments and conflicts in their lives by applying Nonviolent Communication (NVC).

In Hungary, we have a chance to teach NVC in the headteacher’s lesson. This is why I made an NVC presentation for my fellow-students, to give them an overview of this topic.

Firstly the most important thing is the knowledge of different emotions and their descriptions. The amount of lessons about it really depends on the specific group to whom we want to introduce this topic. During my presentation, I used the wheel of emotions for its explanation and then I gave different situations where they could observe the persona’s behaviour and reaction. It is really important to give time and space for this discussion and their unique, own finishing of the story!

After this part, I showed them a short video (appr. 10 minutes) from Marshall Rosenberg about NVC where he used the giraffe and the jackal way of solving conflicts. The giraffe way is when we solve a problem with NVC. The jackal way is when we can not manage by NVC. After the video, I gave them time to compare their solutions for earlier situations. Here we can even discuss what would be the good giraffe way to solve these problems. In the end, I gave space for reflection of the topic and the importance of it. We even discussed what they can take from my NVC presentation and at which grade they would raise this topic to the students.

Luckily the reflection was, that this topic is getting more and more important, but to manage a deep conversation about the feelings of students we should have a strong connection with them. We think the best age of students is in 10th or 11th grade at high school and definitely, before this conversation we should create a safe environment for the students because of the effectiveness of this NVC presentation.

At the end I want to share with you my presentation (in Hungarian) as well, to inspire you and give you basic material from this topic.