Convivencia and/or Democratic Peace-Building Citizenship? Conflict Education in Mexican, Colombian, Bangladeshi, and Canadian Schools

• In Event: Conceptualizing Convivencia in Formal and Nonformal Education Spaces Internationally

Abstract

Public school curriculum and discipline inevitably teach about peace, difference, and living together—through the ways they address or ignore various kinds of visible and systemic conflict. This paper describes learning opportunities—about which conflicts matter, and the roles various people may play in handling them—in contrasting contexts experiencing non-war violence. Implicit and explicit convivencia and social cohesion curriculum addressed some dimensions of some conflicts, but ignored others crucial to democratic peacebuilding.

Violent and nonviolent social conflicts have visible symptoms and underlying (in)justice dimensions: social-structural equity, and cultural beliefs about self and Others (Galtung, 1990; Ross, 2007). Equally important are the social processes of authority and voice for addressing those conflicts: democratic alternatives to violence require equitable conflict communication and decision-making processes (Fraser, 2005), which youth may learn (or not) in publicly funded schools (Davies, 2011, 2017; Lopes Cardozo, Higgins, & Le Mat, 2016).

Prevailing citizenship discourses often emphasize behaving as good individuals, over collectively engagement through public institutions to solve conflicts (Young, 2011). Education may present the citizen as responsible yet compliant, alienated from the social power dynamics and histories of injustices experienced (Cox, Bascopé, Castillo, Miranda, & Bonhomme, 2014; Kennelly & Llewellyn, 2011; A. Nieto & Luna, 2013). Similarly, some peace education initiatives emphasize cultural (individual beliefs and attitudes) dimensions of conflict, downplaying social-structural interest (equity) dimensions (Ross, 2010). Contrasting approaches to what Latin Americans call convivencia epitomize this contradiction: securitization and student mental health goals may squeeze out democratic participation and justice goals (Fierro-Evans & Carbajal-Padilla, 2019; Morales & López, 2019; Nieto & Bickmore, 2016; Perales Franco, 2018).

The paper draws from a multi-year research project, “Peace-Building Citizenship Learning,” examining intersections and disjunctures between youths’ lived experience and their teachers’ implemented curriculum, in purposively selected elementary and intermediate public schools in marginalized urban communities experiencing violence in México, Colombia, Bangladesh, and Canada. After document-based context study, in each school focus group workshops elicited 10-15-year-olds’ understandings of locally-relevant social conflicts, their causes, and what they thought people could do about them, and a series of teacher focus group sessions reflected on how they taught about these social conflicts and citizenship expectations for sustainable peace.

Participating teachers’ explicit curriculum and implicit teaching/discipline practices are compared to students’ experiences and across contexts. This paper zeroes in on the divergence between education framed as convivencia or social cohesion and other peacebuilding-relevant education.

Teachers primarily addressed values and symptoms of direct conflicts, rather than systemic injustice issues, emphasizing self-regulation for compliant convivencia over choices, skills, or collective action to transform conflicts. However, shining exceptions in each context illustrated ways teachers occasionally transcended narrow convivencia, such as dialogue circles and issue debates in language classes, history lessons on past conflicts, and science teamwork addressing community environmental problems.

The comparisons among classroom curricula in multiple national contexts enable analysis of demonstrably feasible spaces for convivencia and broader democratic peace-building education in regular schools.

Author

• Kathy Bickmore, OISE/University of Toronto