The collected papers of internationally renowned peace scholar and educator Dr. Betty A. Reardon are now preserved and available to scholars in the Ward M. Canaday Center for Special Collections, located on the fifth floor of Carlson Library.
Dr. Dale Snauwaert talked about the work of Dr. Betty Reardon, who waited to speak during an opening event at the Canaday Center for Special Collections, where her papers are now preserved.
Reardon is founder of the Peace Education Center at Columbia University. She has been instrumental in the establishment of peace education institutions and programs around the world. Reardon has produced an extensive body of scholarship and curricula that define the fields of peace studies and peace education.
The Reardon Collection consists of publications, unpublished manuscripts, curricula, reports, scholarly presentations and correspondence from the 1960s to the present. The collection, which is 13 linear feet in size, has been extensively organized by graduate students from the Judith Herb College of Education. A guide to the collection is available online at www.utoledo.edu/library/canaday/HTML_findingaids/MSS-226.html.
“The general purpose of peace education, as I understand it, is to promote the development of an authentic planetary consciousness that will enable us to function as global citizens and to transform the present human condition by changing the social structures and the patterns of thought that have created it,” Reardon wrote in 1988’s Comprehensive Peace Education. “This transformational imperative must, in my view, be at the center of peace education. It is important to emphasize that transformation, in this context, means a profound global cultural change that affects ways of thinking, world views, values, behaviors, relationships and the structures that make up our public order. It implies a change in the human consciousness and in human society of a dimension far greater than any other that has taken place since the emergence of the nation-state system, and perhaps since the emergence of human settlements.”
The Reardon Collection is a project of the Center for Nonviolence and Democratic Education, supported by the UT Department of Educational Foundations and Leadership in the Judith Herb College of Education and the Biosophical Institute in Cleveland.
“The Reardon Collected Papers is an invaluable resource for peace studies scholars, peace educators and historians,” said Dr. Dale Snauwaert, UT associate professor of foundations of education and director of the Center for Nonviolence and Democratic Education, who has worked closely with Reardon. “The collection mirrors the development of the field of peace education and peace studies from 1960 to the present. We are honored to have Betty Reardon’s collected papers archived in the Canaday Center for Special Collections and to have the opportunity to organize her papers as a special project of the Center for Nonviolence and Democratic Education.”
“We are pleased to preserve this important collection of personal papers. It will be of great use in the future to scholars of peace education,” said Barbara Floyd, director of the Canaday Center.
For further information, contact Snauwaert at dale.snauwaert@utoledo.edu or 419.530.2478. Scholars wishing to use the collection can contact Floyd at 419.530.2170.
