Peace-Building Citizenship Learning in Bangladesh: Teachers' and Students' Understandings of Lived Human Rights Conflicts

• In Event: Democratic Citizenship in Education Paper Session 2

Abstract

This paper qualitatively studies selected grade 5–10 Bangladeshi teachers’ and their students’ lived concerns and knowledge of human rights conflicts. In separate focus group workshops, 16 teachers and 58 students from 4 schools discussed what human rights conflicts mattered to them, how they worked, and what citizenship options were available to them. Comparisons demonstrated some gaps between how these teachers and their students understood democratization and peacebuilding, despite wanting ‘real’ democracy and peace. Further, by merely complying with mandated curricula and thus ignoring the scope of democratic citizenship, most teachers seemed to help to reproduce the escalated human rights conflicts. Instead, peacebuilding citizenship education requires democratic engagement with the curriculum and young citizens’ lived experiences of those conflicts.

Author

• Ahmed Salehin Kaderi, University of Toronto