Trust building in the promotion of peace and intercultural dialogue among adolescents in international summer camps

This article aims to offer both a theoretical contribution and examples of practices of trust building in peace education. The analysis regards international summer camps established in Italy. Each camp is attended by four delegations of ten adolescents coming from different countries; aiming to promote adolescents’ ability in conflict resolution, peaceful relationships and intercultural dialogue. In analysing interactions, we follow the basic methodology of Conversation Analysis, which consists in working on naturally occurring interactions and more specifically on the contribution of single turns or actions to the ongoing sequence, with reference to the context. The analysis concerns the design of turns (actions) produced in the interaction and the organization of the sequences in which educators’ and adolescents’ turns are intertwined. We aim to understand if and in which ways education is effective in enabling adolescents to communicate, creating conditions of trust and trusting commitment, mutual humanization, and mutual recognition of needs. Our data exemplifies two different ways of promoting trust and communication: 1) the educator coordinates the direct interactions between adolescents, who cooperate in constructing a joint narrative; 2) the educator acts as a mediator of contacts among adolescents, promoting their alternate participation in the interaction in triadic exchanges.