Wakefield Elementary School student Kelsey Noka, 11, volunteers an answer.

The Journal / Bob Thayer

SOUTH KINGSTOWN — “Why do people think war can solve problems?” Robin Wildman asks her fifth-grade class at the Wakefield Elementary School.

“Because it’s a way to get power over the other side,” one boy responds.

“Is that showing bravery?” Wildman asks.

The class murmurs in indecision.

“Dr. King wouldn’t believe that was brave,” says Wildman, who has been building the philosophy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. into her lesson plans for nine years. King advocated “nonviolence as a way of life for brave people,” Wildman tells the class, although she adds that they and their parents have the right to their own opinions.

The class goes on to explore how King’s teaching can be, as fifth grader Lila Ludvigsen puts it, a “guide to help you with your problems” so “you know what to do.”

Should you tell the teacher if a friend is cheating on a test?

King wanted people to “know and do what is right, even if it is difficult,” says Wildman. And he taught his followers to “avoid hurting the spirit and body of yourself and others.”

The children suggest that someone who cheats hurts his spirit because he doesn’t learn.

Wildman’s curriculum for the social and emotional development of children is one of several ways the message of King’s lessons for living has been kept alive in Rhode Island through the Center for the Study of Nonviolence and Peace Studies at the University of Rhode Island.

Bernard LaFayette, until recently the center’s director, introduced Wildman and her then-fifth graders to King’s teachings in 2001, even guiding them on a civil-rights tour to places such as Birmingham, Montgomery, and Selma, Ala., that summer. One of the children who went to Alabama with Wildman and LaFayette in 2001, Michaela Cashman, returned to Wakefield Elementary last week to talk to the current crop of fifth graders about her life as a sophomore at URI, where she works part-time at the Center for Nonviolence and has helped start a Student Nonviolent Involvement Committee.

And the influence of LaFayette and his center has spread far beyond Wakefield Elementary.

Laura Baracaldo, 30, who once worked as a strategist on issues of armed conflict with the defense ministry in Colombia, had been studying in Washington when she learned of the annual summer institute at the Center for Nonviolence.

“We see conflict is always there” in Colombia, and “we think it can never be overcome,” she said. LaFayette inspired her to search for concrete ways to apply King’s principles of nonviolent conflict resolution.

Today she is a graduate student in education and an outreach worker in an elementary school in Central Falls, where the Center for Nonviolence is teaching impulse control and empathy to kindergartners as part of a program called Second Steps.

Second Steps uses pictures to help frame conversations that teach children to recognize feelings, then stop to think and talk about them, rather than striking out when they are angry, Baracaldo said.

Paul Bueno de Mesquita, interim director of the Center for Nonviolence, said URI has been working in elementary schools in Central Falls for the last 2½ years, at the behest of Supt. Frances Gallo, who requested a preventive program in nonviolence.

With a grant from the U.S. Department of Education, Second Steps is leading to an overhaul of the entire guidance program in the Central Fall School system to encompass healthful social and emotional child development, beginning at the preschool level, according to the liaison between URI and the district, Ronald DiOrio.

In the meantime, Bueno de Mesquita and others from the URI center helped launch a four-month-long project called Raise Your Voice, which will use the arts to spread King’s work in secondary schools in Providence, Pawtucket and Central Falls, well as adult-education classes for immigrants at the International Institute.

A recent daylong seminar on Raise Your Voice at the URI Providence campus introduced about a dozen middle school, high school, and adult-education teachers to King’s approach to conflict resolution, helping them examine the types of clashes that occur in their schools and ways to resolve them.

Working through April, with additional classroom assistance from facilitators with a range of expertise, the teachers will guide middle and high schools students in writing poetry or songs that incorporate King’s teachings.

The creators of Raise Your Voice are Risa Gilpin and Dorothy Bocian, principals of Cultural Connections, a consulting firm that obtained a grant of $12,500 from the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities to implement nonviolence training through the arts.

At the introduction to Raise Your Voice, the teachers got the message that their work is relevant from someone whose classroom is on the streets: Teny O. Gross, the executive director of the Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence, who works to defuse gang tensions in Providence.

“While I’m putting my finger in the dike,” said Gross, “I need to have things change in the schools and the rec centers.”

For Tamar Paull and Michael Coppola, teachers at Community Prep in Providence and participants in the seminar, the project will add to studies of social justice and nonviolence as a path to reconciliation.

Megan Thoma, an English teacher at Hope High School, said she hoped that Raise Your Voice would help her teach her students “to think outside themselves,” not only to communicate with each other but to “see other people’s point of view.”

gmacris@projo.com