News
March 24
The Leonard Carmichael Society (LCS) and the Zeta Psi fraternity began working this semester to teach area elementary school students about cooperation and conflict resolution through the Cooperative Games program at Tufts, commonly known as Peace Games.
The program, initiated by the Peace and Justice Studies program, sends small groups of Tufts student volunteers into three Medford elementary schools each week to teach the elementary school students cooperation and conflict-resolution skills through interactive activities.
Since the program kicked off its six-week session last month, groups of Tufts students have been visiting Columbus, McGlynn and Roberts Elementary Schools weekly and working with fourth- and fifth-graders, according to Dale Bryan, the assistant director of the Peace and Justice Studies program.
The Peace Games program is working to expand to a greater number of schools next semester, which will create a more flexible schedule and allow for more volunteers.
According to Bryan, the games aim to "foster social and emotional development."
The activities teach students "how to be co-leaders rather than boss leaders," he said.
To this end, Peace Games' activities emphasize collaboration over competition, according to Peace Game's volunteer coordinator Peter Federman, a junior and member of Zeta Psi.
"A cooperative game is a game that isn't about winning or losing," Federman said. "It's about completing the task at hand and learning how to work together."
Peace Games first began at Tufts in 2006 as a component of the Peace and Justice Studies program's Peace Developments project, spearheaded by Bryan. The program ran from the fall of 2007 to the fall of 2008, but hit a roadblock last spring due to lack of student leadership and funding.
For the first two years of Peace Games, students working through Tisch College served as organizers; then, after a brief gap in leadership, junior Jeffrey Stone, then-president of Zeta Psi, approached Bryan, about Peace Games' continuation.
Members of LCS and Zeta Psi met with Bryan last semester to coordinate and rejuvenate Peace Games, and Zeta Psi decided to make the cause an ongoing philanthropy project for the fraternity.
During the fall, LCS and Zeta Psi applied for and received a grant to fund the program through the Civic Engagement Fund, which is awarded by the Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service. Members of both groups then contacted local schools in Medford and organized the program with the administration for those schools, according to Eygenson.
The two organizations also agreed to appoint co-coordinators for the program each semester in order to provide "more sustainable leadership," according to junior Coza Perry, the LCS co-coordinator of Peace Games.
This is the first semester that both organizations have been directly involved in sending Tufts students into the Medford schools. Though just 12 students are currently volunteering, the program's coordinators have deemed this semester's efforts a success.
"The problem isn't that there isn't interest in it," Zeta Psi President Serge Eygenson, a sophomore, said. "The problem is that the schedule is very narrow."
Six of the current volunteers are brothers in Zeta Psi, according to Eygenson. More members were interested in volunteering but were unable to this semester because of scheduling conflicts, he said.
Tufts' Peace Games program chooses activities from the curriculum published by the Boston-based national Peace Games organization, although the Tufts program does not fall under the official jurisdiction of the national program.
The games are primarily mental and interactive, according to Perry.
"We're trying to get groups of younger kids to think in a new way about conflict," Perry said. "The idea behind it is … to give them something that they might have in common … and to give them a set of reasoning and cooperation skills that they can hopefully apply to real-life situations."
Perry cited as an example a game in which the elementary school students line themselves up from youngest to oldest by birthday without verbal communication. The students must use cooperation in order to complete the task.
Peace Games' culminating event this year is a booth at LCS's annual Kids Day.
Perry said that in the future, she hopes that the program can "have a culminating event either at Tufts or another location where all of the kids can come together and showcase the skills they've learned." She also hopes to expand the program to 12 weeks in the coming semesters.
According to the volunteers and coordinators of the program, Peace Games has been mutually beneficial for the volunteers and the kids.
"I have not been on the ground, but what I've heard from volunteers is the younger kids we're working with have learned a lot, and they're having a good time," Eygenson said. "They say the best way to learn a skill is to teach it, and Tufts students are walking away with a very good learning experience as well."
Bryan emphasized the importance of Peace Games to the Medford schools and the Medford community.
"There's a lot of interest in seeing this develop further from the school district because there's a lot of need," he said.
