Introduction

These activities are designed to help students build on their experience of conflict and to help them reflect on sources of conflict and potential resolutions, drawing on instances in the NT production of His Dark Materials .

It is essential that some ground rules are established before addressing this topic There must be a respect for privacy, confidentiality should be asserted and no-one should feel pressured to talk. The intentions for the lesson should be explicit and students informed about the sorts of things they will be discussing. In advance of the lesson students might be asked to recollect a personal conflict and write about their thoughts and feelings in a journal.

A range of starters are offered as ways of raising awareness of conflict situations. You can use them individually or in combination as most appropriately matches your aims for this scheme of work.

Starter Activities

Provide a set of images of conflict taken from local and national newspapers and adverts depicting different conflict situations.

In pairs or small groups study the images:

· What sorts of conflict are depicted?

· What do the students imagine is being said?

· What might have happened before the picture was taken?

· What might have happened afterwards?

· How are the people in the picture affected by this situation?

· How might other relevant parties be affected?

Students might be asked to storyboard events before and after the moment depicted in the image.

Or to add speech bubbles to the images, illustrating the sorts of things that people say to each other in conflict situations.

With the class, ‘thought shower’ sources of conflict in everyday situations and list them on a flipchart or interactive whiteboard. You may need to give the students some prompts to broaden the range of their suggestions.

Ask the students to suggest possible motivations for the conflict in each of the situations that they have suggested. Motivations might include:

· dishonesty

· jealousy

· greed

· fear

· pride

· prejudice

· mistrust

· anger

· trauma

· ignorance

· misunderstandings

· different perceptions of events

· Does the way in which society is organised generate some of these conflicts?

· Are human basic needs the source of some of these conflicts?

· Do cultural pressures (belonging to cultural groups) contribute to these conflict situations?

‘Thought shower’ a list of words with the same or similar meaning to the word ‘conflict’. A thesaurus might be used to extend the students’ suggestions.

Example

animosity, antagonism, bad blood, battle, brawl, clash, collision, combat, competition, contention, contest, discord, dispute, dissension, dissent, dissidence, disunity, divided loyalties, encounter, engagement, differ, discord, fight, fracas, friction, hostility, oppose, revenge, retaliation, rivalry, set-to, strife, striving, struggle, war, warfare.

You might construct a concept web with the word CONFLICT in the centre and other words at the ends of lines radiating from the centre. Group words according to ideas (e.g. war and battle; competition and contest might be grouped together)

You might want to distinguish between the usage of conflict as a verb (the act of conflict) and as a noun (the result).

Discuss and organise the words on a scale of intensity – i.e. from mild to intense conflict. Review the scale and use it to stimulate a discussion:

Disagreement………………………clash……………………………………bloody battle

· Consider whether all conflict is unhealthy.

· Can conflict be creative?

· Do all of these conflict words imply violence? Why are violence and conflict sometimes regarded as the same thing?

· What generalisations can be made about the word conflict?

Following from the starter activities, work towards a definition:

· Ask students to attempt a personal definition in just one or two sentences. Share ideas and build a collective definition.

e.g. Conflict exists where groups are in opposition to each other, where rights are undermined and disharmony exists in personal relationships.

· You might also look at several dictionary definitions and discuss their adequacy in the light of the initial class discussions.

“A sharp disagreement or clash e.g. between divergent ideas, interests or people.” Longman Dictionary of English Usage

Note that conflict happens at many different levels, which can broadly be identified as fitting within three categories:

· INTERNAL or PERSONAL (conflicts a person may have within themselves e.g. peer pressure vs. parental pressure)

· EXTERNAL

· GLOBAL

Invite the students to draw on their own experiences and to suggest examples to illustrate the different types of conflict.

Briefly relate this idea to His Dark Materials , giving examples of Internal (Will’s conflict of loyalties), External (Mrs Coulter and Lord Asriel), and Global (Lord Asriel and The Authority) conflicts.

· Conflict is a characteristic of human experience

· Needs to be managed constructively