Teacher has a Nobel cause
Published: March 6, 2006
Was the Dalai Lama naughty as a kid?
You bet, though not as naughty as some winners of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Steele Elementary first-grade teacher Ellen Casey’s students are introduced to Nobel Peace laureates as they were as youngsters, full of fears and mischief.
“Do you have to be a perfect child to make a difference?” she asks.
“No,” comes a chorus of young voices.
On the classroom walls are children’s drawings of the laureates: the Dalai Lama grinning ear-toear. Desmond Tutu with colorful balloons representing skin colors. Rigoberta Menchu Tum at work in coffee fields when she was a little girl.
The students easily point to Guatemala and Nepal on a map. They can rattle off the names of indigenous Indian tribes and exotic rain-forest birds.
It’s all part of Casey’s lesson plan.
“They learn about the country, the people, the food, the politics, the economics,” Casey said. “They understand the economic impacts of what Tutu did when they had the boycotts against South Africa. They get that.”
Casey got the idea 10 years ago when her daughter, Elizabeth, then 12, was a “kid reporter” for a Disney online service, writing stories about celebrities visiting Colorado.
“Her first interview was to meet and write about the Dalai Lama. She wrote about many different people — in sports, in theater,” said Casey, who took her daughter to the interviews.
Casey was impressed with the laureates and started researching their upbringings.
“I thought it would be interesting to write about their childhoods and let children know that they were just little kids like they were, that they didn’t have easy lives, but they did grow up to make a difference,” she said.
She later met more laureates when Elizabeth was in high school and went to Denver every year to participate in PeaceJam, an international education program for older youths to work with the Nobel Peace winners.
“They need to learn it as children,” Casey said. “I want peace to be a way of life for children. It’s the regular people who make a difference. Change starts in the home. It is not done globally, it is done locally. You can’t stop the war in Iraq, but you can make peace on the playground. You can’t find Osama bin Laden, but you can calm down a friend who is angry.”
Casey expanded her research and in 2000 published a teachers manual, “Peace in Our Hands.” It is written to Colorado state curriculum standards for history, reading, writing, math, science and art.
Other schools now use her curriculum, and in the summer she teaches it to Colorado College master’s degree students.
She covers different laureates every year, but always begins with the Dalai Lama, born Tenzin Gyatso.
The poor farmer’s son was a peacemaker at an early age.
As first-grader Noah Kiemel explains: “There were these boys picking up dirt and throwing it at this little boy. The Dalai Lama was only 3 and he stood next to him and the other kids dropped the dirt and walked away.”
“I can’t believe how little of a kid can do that,” said Carmen Bachofen, 7.
It rubs off.
Said Casey, “I hear them on the playground saying, ‘The Dalai Lama wouldn’t do that.’”
He had his moments, though.
He fought with his brother during the arduous fourmonth journey for monk training at age 6.
In the palace, where he was the only child, he sometimes made too much noise. He broke a music box. And he didn’t always mind the monks.
The religious and political leader of the exiled Tibetan people won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989.
Casey’s students learn about Desmond Tutu, not as bishop of Johannesburg, but as a boy about their age.
“There was a white man across the street, and he tipped his hat to Desmond Tutu’s mother and Desmond Tutu was surprised. That was during apartheid,” Carmen said.
Tutu saw hope.
His campaign to resolve apartheid in South Africa earned him the 1984 Nobel Peace award.
“He got the prize for stopping apartheid and getting it so white people could be there and brown people could be there, too,” Carmen said.
“Apart-hate,” as 6-year-old Zoe Morton puts it.
Rigoberta Menchu Tum was a Quiche Maya Indian whose tribe was denied educational opportunities.
“They couldn’t go to school. They couldn’t have good homes,” said Jonas Conn-Parent, 7. “She wanted to talk to the (Guatemalan) government, but she couldn’t do it because they speak their own language, but when she grew up she did, and everything ended up peacefully.”
The campaigner for social justice and the rights of indigenous peoples won the prize in 1992.
Coming soon: 1976 laureate Betty Williams, co-founder of the Northern Ireland Peace Movement.
“She had a very bad temper and got sent to bed often without her supper,” Casey said.
Williams’ headstrong determination served her well. The Belfast office receptionist helped end the region’s rampant violence.
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