I’ve just completed an Outward Bound experiential peacebuilding training expedition at UWC Red Cross Nordic, and for the first time since joining a UWC, I felt like I was really inside the UWC movement, not inside an IB school with a few excellent extras attached.
It’s a significant difference, because the UWC idea is not “academic excellence plus enrichment.” It is education as lived preparation for peace, through community, service, challenge, and real encounter across difference. UWC was born from Hahn’s conviction that young people become more human through responsibility and lived experience, not through academic recital alone.
The thread that ties everything together: uncertainty
What I saw last week, in the most practical way, is that peacebuilding begins where certainty ends.
Uncertainty is where ego shows up and where group dynamics reveal themselves. It’s where people either grip for control, disappear, dominate, perform competence, or (if the conditions are right) choose trust, dignity, humour, repair, and shared responsibility.
This is also why I think the IB is right to keep pushing towards learning that can hold complexity, not just reward correctness. Olli-Pekka Heinonen has been clear about the need to create learning environments where students can engage within uncertainty, rather than avoid it, and in the age of AI, this becomes even more urgent.
Information is cheap, answers are instant. What’s rare is the human capacity to stay steady in the unknown, to relate ethically, to discern what matters, and to act with responsibility rather than reactivity. The future of education, for me, depends on whether we can help young people become capable inside uncertainty, rather than protected from it.
Peacebuilding, in teacher language
Peacebuilding isn’t conflict resolution. It’s not a programme you “deliver.” It’s the daily practice of building conditions where people can live, disagree, and repair without escalating into harm.
In schools, peacebuilding looks like:
- Dignity (challenge without humiliation)
- Trust (psychological safety, especially under pressure)
- Inclusion (more humans can participate, not just the fast processors)
- Shared responsibility (load is distributed, not dumped)
- Repair (we return to relationship after rupture)
If those conditions aren’t present, learning becomes performance, compliance, or survival.
Why experiential learning works (and why it’s not “extra”)
Outward Bound-style experiential learning isn’t “outdoor education.” It’s human education, because it doesn’t just teach ideas, it reveals patterns.
It shows you what you do when you’re cold, tired, unsure, or new in a group. It makes the hidden curriculum visible: who takes control, who withdraws, who over-functions, who gets overlooked, who repairs, who jokes, who becomes rigid. Then, if it’s facilitated well, it gives language and reflection so those patterns become learning rather than unspoken residue.
That’s why I learned more last week through the quality of discussion and the depth of participants than I would in a traditional classroom setting. Not because content was absent, but because the learning was relational and embodied, and therefore it stuck.
Process over product: the Hahn link that made everything click
Our Outward Bound leader, Flavio, returned to one message all week: process over product. He wasn’t saying “ignore outcomes.” He was saying that if you prioritise product too early, you get performance and protection, and people trying not to be seen struggling. If you prioritise process, you get honesty, risk, real learning, and real connection.
This is also Hahn, isn’t it? Hahn didn’t build a model for students to become good at reciting what they already know. He built a model for becoming capable in the unknown, through expedition, service, responsibility, and challenge that forms character.
Process over product isn’t a teaching technique; it’s a stance. It’s an agreement that uncertainty is not a problem to eliminate, but a space to learn inside, together.
Where this lands for me as an IB DP Visual Arts teacher
This is where I found pieces of my own puzzle.
The new IB DP Visual Arts syllabus explicitly requires inquiry, experimentation, and responsiveness. It asks students to work inside uncertainty rather than reverse-engineer tidy outcomes. I’m currently seeing many Visual Arts teachers struggle with that shift, not because they lack skill or care, but because we’ve all been trained inside a wider Industrial Age education culture that rewards product: polished outcomes, predictable routes, clean evidence, tidy stories.
So there’s a hard question underneath it all:
How can we teach students to hold uncertainty if we cannot hold it ourselves?
We can tell students to take risks and then design tasks that protect them from ever feeling uncertain. We can praise inquiry whilst steering them towards “good work” that fits a template. We can say process matters, but still reward polish, control, and a clean finish. Once you see that contradiction, it becomes difficult to unsee, because it means we’re modelling the opposite of what we’re asking of them.
This is why holding uncertainty isn’t just a student skill; it’s a teacher skill. Students can feel immediately whether we are performing certainty or modelling how to learn in public. When a teacher can remain human in the unknown, students don’t just understand what we’re asking, they trust it, because they can see we’re willing to do it too.
What “uncertainty” looks like in a classroom
When I say “stepping into uncertainty,” I don’t mean doing something reckless or dramatic. I mean the everyday vulnerability of learning: not knowing yet, feeling exposed, noticing your nervous system react, and choosing honesty rather than performance.
Uncertainty is the moment a learner thinks (mostly silently): I don’t get it. I’m lost. I’m scared to ask. Everyone else seems fine. If I admit this, I’ll look stupid.
That’s the moment where students either perform (fake it, copy, stay quiet, become disruptive, over-control), or they can be real (name confusion, ask for support, try again). The difference between those two responses is awareness.
This is where metacognition becomes practical: noticing what is happening in you whilst you’re learning. Awareness creates a pause. The pause creates choice, and peacebuilding is what happens when people repeatedly choose dignity, responsibility, and repair instead of acting out fear.
In simple terms:
- Without awareness: uncertainty → reaction → social friction (withdrawal, blame, dominance, shame).
- With awareness: uncertainty → choice → dignity and repair.
This is what it looks like when peacebuilding is alive in a classroom: students feeling safe enough to say “I don’t understand,” “you’re talking too fast,” “that instruction is unclear,” or “I need a different way in,” and teachers receiving that honesty without judgement or the subtle message of “you should know this by now.” Not perfect behaviour, but a culture where truth is safe, needs can be named, and learning doesn’t require pretending.
One high-impact way to practise this in “traditional” subjects
If you teach a subject built around right answers, you don’t need to abandon rigour. You just need to stop pretending uncertainty doesn’t belong. The moment students don’t know, something else becomes the real curriculum. The question is whether that moment becomes shame and performance, or awareness and choice.
Try this once a week: Uncertainty by design. Set a problem, text, or data set that is solvable but not immediately clear, and make the process visible, not just the answer.
Before they start: “Your job today is not speed. Your job is noticing what you do when you don’t know yet.”
During (pairs): “What are we assuming?” “What do we know?” “What’s missing?” “What’s a sensible next step?”
After (short reflection alongside the answer):
- What did you do first when you felt stuck (rush, freeze, avoid, control, ask)?
- What helped you move forward?
- What did your partner do that helped the process or the relationship?
This isn’t therapy and it doesn’t dilute content. It trains the capacities that keep communities peaceful: regulation under pressure, responsibility, honest communication, collaboration, and repair. In other words, students learn how to stay human with themselves and with each other inside uncertainty, which is exactly what the world is now asking of them.
Closing
If stepping into uncertainty is the curriculum, then peacebuilding is the culture that makes it possible. It starts with us, with our willingness to stop performing certainty and instead model what real learning looks like: honest, imperfect, and human.
A note of gratitude! I want to say a genuine thank you to the team who held this week so thoughtfully. Flavio Bollag led with a wonderfully calm clarity that kept pulling us back to what matters, and his insistence on process makes my heart sing. Pete Allison brought depth, perspective, and exactly the right amount of humour, grounding the work in Hahnian thinking without ever making it feel like a lecture. Feera Jouwsma was not only a support throughout the week, but inspired me greatly through the work she does with people with disabilities, and how she creates access to outdoor and embodied experiences that many assume are “not for them. And above all, thank you to Gergely Lovász, our facilitator and the connective tissue of the whole programme at RCN. Gery’s work in experiential learning, pedagogy, and innovation is the kind of leadership that genuinely shifts a culture, and I feel lucky to call him a colleague and a friend.
And one more thank you to the whole group. You brought warmth, humour, honesty, and real presence to a week that could easily have stayed “professional.” The conversations, the care, the willingness to be uncomfortable without losing kindness, and the way people looked after one another made the learning what it was. I came away tired to the bone, but eternally grateful.
