Impeding or Enriching Education for Just Peace? Teachers' Implemented Curricula in Mexico, Bangladesh, and Canada

• In Event: 34.078 - Expanding Traditions of Civic Education and Social Cohesion: International Perspectives

Abstract

What is the relationship between teaching toward shared values and engaging with the social differences and inequalities at the heart of social cohesion challenges, in different cultural settings? This paper compares the ways some Mexican, Bangladeshi and Canadian teachers represented social differences relevant in their contexts, and endeavored to foster peaceful social relations across those differences, in part by teaching cultural and religious values.

Social conflicts have various indirect dimensions, underlying direct violence or peaceful cohesion: social-structural inequity, cultural misrecognition, and political processes of representation in globalized and local decision-making (Fraser, 2005; Galtung, 1990; Ross, 2007). Public schools can offer opportunities for students to engage dynamically with difference, to build capabilities for addressing all these dimensions of what Galtung (1996) calls ‘positive’ (sustainable, just) peace (Davies, 2011; Horner et al., 2015). However, education for social cohesion often emphasizes universalized values and individual responsibility for ‘negative peace’—desistance from violent or offensive behavior (Cox, Bascopé, Castillo, Miranda, & Bonhomme, 2014; Joshee, 2004; Kennelly & Llewellyn, 2011; Ross, 2010; UNESCO, 2014; Young, 2011). This paper probes the tension between teaching shared values and building capacity for engagement with difference in multidimensional social transformation.

The paper is drawn from a multi-year study of intersections and disjunctures between youths’ lived experience and their teachers’ implemented curriculum, in purposively selected elementary and lower secondary public schools in contrasting urban communities experiencing social diversity and non-war violence, in México, Bangladesh and Canada. Focus group workshops elicited 10-15-year-olds’ understandings of various locally-relevant social conflicts, their causes, and what they thought individuals and collectivities could do to transform them. Interested teachers in these schools participated in a separate series of focus group workshops, discussing their perspectives on what their students need to know, and on how they were teaching, for peace and citizenship. We examine the implications of the divergent ways participating students, and their teachers’ lessons, narrated what citizens could and should do in response to social conflicts.

This paper zeroes in on how the educators’ curriculum-in-use approached questions of social diversity and cohesion, such as poverty and relations with indigenous communities—highlighting the uneasy intersections between teaching values and addressing social-structural and political dimensions of these conflicts. In Bangladesh, participating teachers emphasized teaching the moral precepts and exemplary narratives of Islam—for instance, that it is immoral to treat women disrespectfully and commitment to materially aid the poor. In México, the teachers taught a set of abstract values principles linked to interpersonal behavior—for instance, short stories illustrated the value of respect, honesty, or solidarity (inclusive cooperation). In Canada, the teachers emphasized multicultural awareness and character education, through stories of exemplary individuals ‘making a difference.’ In each setting, students’ discourses overlapped and contrasted with their teachers’. Comparing the ways values, social differences and cohesion were taught in these contrasting contexts enables us to articulate alternative comprehensive or narrow approaches to value-laden education for building peace.

Authors

• Kathy Bickmore, OISE/University of Toronto

• Ahmed Salehin Kaderi, McMaster University