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Additions to External Review Services

Two of the services PJSA would like to offer are, first, a stock "state of the discipline" summary that programs can download into their own external review documents. This will save individual programs a great deal of research, effort and time. This will be updated annual by the PJSA board member charged with overseeing the external review facility. The second service PJSA will provide is a list of people who can serve as external reviews.

Please provide your ideas or reflections on what services should be added to the PJSA external review service.

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Reflections on Developing Standards

Evaluation raises the issue of a discipline's standards which is a delicate subject because it inevitably moves a discipline in the direction of establishing a canon. This is not something all justice and peace scholars want to see happen. In an effort to make sure that movement in this direction does not stifle new thinking or create an "in" and an "out" crowd, participants in the workshop discussed this issue at length and concluded that each academic discipline thinks about standards in its own way.

At one end of the spectrum is the very structured approach taken by law and medical schools. At the other end is a much looser approached used in the field of medical ethics and philosophy. There was consensus that peace and justice studies should adopt the second approach (with perhaps an additional set of criteria for programs which also specialize in conflict resolution for the purposes of certification).

It was further suggested that this looser approach might be furthered by developing a "self study template" that justice and peace studies programs could use to generate thoughtful discussion in advance of inviting an external reviewer to visit. Such a template could be framed in very different ways.

Some possibilities include:
• 1) a set of core competencies that all programs should have
• 2) a set of core competencies all graduates of such programs should have
• 3) a definition of key questions programs should address
• 4) a definition of core problems (of violence and injustice, etc.) that all programs see as their object of study
• 5) a list of "best practices"
• 6) a list of key actors and theorists

Please respond to this thread with your ideas about which approach (or combination of approaches) to developing standards is most attractive and why?

Are there other possible approaches to developing standards?

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Scholarship on Program Review

Please provide titles of studies and readings that help to address these issues.

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Connections with Other Organizations

Please provide your ideas about the links between PJSA, USIP and ACR.

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Other Ideas

Any other other good ideas or references!!??

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