Disrupting Hierarchy in Education: Learning Partners Collaborating for Peace and Social Change

• In Event: Advancing Peace and Justice Through Humanizing Processes in Education

Abstract

This paper explores how students and teachers disrupt hierarchy to collaborate on social change projects that lead to stronger cultures of peace and justice. In this project, we define teachers and students as learning partners. There is much theorization of Freirean concepts but not as many illustrative examples that document actual projects of implementation. This paper showcases how learning partners implement Freirean concepts that are fundamental to critical peace education by documenting various social change projects.
At the larger project’s core is Paulo Freire’s theorization of students and teachers working toward co-liberation. He characterizes the teacher as a student and the student as also a teacher, and articulates their co-intervention in the world as praxis, a synergy between critical reflection and action to effectuate social change. This paper critiques banking education (i.e. education models and practices where knowledge transfer is unidirectional, from teacher to student, and where knowledge regurgitation from the student is the educational goal), and centers problem posing education (i.e. education models and practices that view knowledge production as intentionally co-constructed between the teacher and student). The overall project–as humanizing, social justice education–views disrupting hierarchies as a decolonial imperative in fostering revolutionary relationalities; relationalities that reflect diverse interdependencies and interconnectedness toward a broader culture of peace.
Modes of Inquiry & Data Sources: In this paper, we show how teachers and their students also have to co-document their social change projects. As curators of the larger project, we, the paper’s presenters, model what we ask of the learning partners; that is, two of us are former students of the third presenter, and together we navigate the challenges of hierarchies between teacher and student as we work with other learning partners. The architects of the social change projects use a range of modes of inquiry: e.g. participatory action research, autoethnographic analyses, and discourse analyses of classroom practices and assignments, to name a few.
These social change making projects are in K-12, university, and non-formal educational contexts. Learning partners are quite diverse: undergraduate and graduate students, youth advocates, professors, artists, curators, founders and leaders of NGOs, and elementary school teachers. Topics explored also cover a broad terrain: community education, public writing, using media for popular education, adolescent and youth development, climate change education, peace and justice leadership development, revolutionary nonviolence, literacy teacher education, citizenship education, development of Latin American Studies, palliative care, reflections on identity and subjectivity, anti-racism education, trauma-informed pedagogy, wellness, and art curation.
Significance: This diversity of learning partners, contexts, and social change making topics interrogates universalizing inclinations as regards to social change, and demonstrates how disrupting hierarchy as a humanizing educational praxis can be successfully implemented across many spheres to work towards broader cultures of peace and justice.

Authors

• Hakim Mohandas Amani Williams, Gettysburg College

• Hana Huskić, Gettysburg College

• Christina Noto, SOAR Colorado