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Resource conflicts in Mexican and Canadian youths’ lives and schooling: (Foreclosed) opportunities for peacebuilding citizenship?

Tue, March 27, 5:00 to 6:30pm, Hilton Reforma, Floor: 4th Floor, Don Alberto 4

Proposal

What understandings about the social conflicts they live—and what sense of agency and options for addressing these challenges—do marginalized young people bring to school?  How do their teachers’ perspectives and implemented curriculum (dis)connect with these youths’ perspectives—creating or impeding opportunities for peacebuilding citizenship learning? Framed by the conflict theories of Marc Howard Ross (2007) and Johan Galtung (1990) and the justice theory of Nancy Fraser (2004), we zero in on the young people’s and teachers’ perspectives about social conflicts over tangible interests: social-economic distribution, contamination and scarcity.
A multi-year research project, “Peace-Building Citizenship Learning” (PBC), examined intersections and disjunctures between youths’ lived experience and their experienced curriculum, in purposively selected elementary and intermediate public schools in marginalized urban communities experiencing violence in México and Canada. Through focus groups, we elicited 10-15-year-olds’ understandings of locally-relevant social conflict problems, their causes, and what they thought individuals and collectivities could do to transform them. Interested teachers in each school participated in separate focus groups, to reflect on how they understood and taught (or not) about the same social conflicts and the possibilities of citizenship for sustainable peace. We listened for the ways participants imagined that people like themselves, through their roles as citizens, might be able to take action to transform or mitigate such visible, tangible conflicts (indirect violence) affecting their communities. We compare the divergent ways participating students and teachers took up these questions: assessing the gaps and potential bridges between implemented curriculum and students’ lived experiences. On this basis, we interpret how schooling might build (or foreclose) youths’ capacities for democratic peace-building participation, in the face of the social conflict and violence surrounding them.
In general, we found a curious disjuncture.  The young people clearly identified, based on experience, the social-political anatomy of these interest conflicts—the actions and concerns of various actors, especially vulnerable parties (such as women, children and indigenous people), and some perpetrators of harm (such as business owners and criminal gangs).  On the other hand, when asked what people like themselves could do about such problems, participating students mostly reverted to a contrasting analysis—based not on social-political causes or remedies but on individual responsibility, rules (compliance or punishment), and hopelessness. In Mexican schools, students showed concern about many resource-related conflicts close to their lived experience—including labor exploitation, poverty, drug trafficking, and pollution. In contrast, Canadian students showed less immediate concern about resource conflicts—including poverty (homelessness) and environmental issues such as pipelines—and generally positioned themselves as spectators. Importantly, youth in the contrasting contexts often expressed a stronger sense of (individual) agency in relation to some kinds of conflicts (such as pollution), which they had had opportunities to study in school, compared to others (such as labor exploitation or government corruption) that were generally ignored in their classrooms.
Teaching in both settings addressed primarily issues of direct confrontation (peer aggression) and values (character), rather than issues of social-structural injustice. Teachers (especially Mexicans) identified some social-political factors in issues affecting their students, but their proposed solutions (like students’) generally defaulted to individualistic choices. Although some Canadian teachers recognized poverty as an issue that affected their students, they mostly avoided addressing it in class, beyond passive, distant empathy.
Thus, in each setting, we found many gaps and a few bridges between school teaching and participating students’ feet-first knowledge of (direct and indirect) conflict and violence. Students generally recognized how resource conflicts worked, showing compassion for the victims of unjust relations (including at times themselves). Student participants, primarily in México, argued that, in their experience, governments tended to aggravate, more than mitigate, resource conflicts. Both students and teachers exhibited considerably less clarity regarding collective action or governance activity that might mitigate or transform these conflicts, reverting instead to neoliberal discourses of individual responsibility (see Apple, 2010; Hayward, 2012; Schmeichel, 2011). Discourses of conflict (including injustice) rang out clearly, while discourses of collective democratic action for peace were miniaturized and muted.
The paper reflects on the implications of these findings for peacebuilding education, arguing for intensifying pedagogical attention to navigating an array of admittedly-imperfect democratic processes to address the conflictual causes of indirect violence, which in turn may help to reduce the roots and shoots of direct violence. The differences within as well as between national contexts enable us to rethink north-south (and conflict or peace zone) dichotomies, and thereby to contribute to nuanced theory and research informing the relationships among conflict, peace, democracy and schooling.

References

Apple, Michael W. (2010). Global crises, social justice, and education. Taylor and Francis, ISBN 9780203861448.
Davies, Lynn. (2011). Can education interrupt fragility? Toward the resilient citizen and the adaptable state. In Karen Mundy & Sarah Dryden-Peterson (Eds.), Educating Children in Conflict Zones: Research, Policy and Practice for Systemic Change—A Tribute to Jackie Kirk (pp. 33-48). New York: Teachers College Press.
Fraser, Nancy. (2004). Recognition, Redistribution and Representation in Capitalist Global Society [Nancy Fraser interviewed by H. Dahl, P. Stoltz, & R. Willig]. Acta Sociologica, 47(4), 374-382. doi:10.1177/0001699304048671
Galtung, Johan. (1990). Cultural Violence. Journal of Peace Research, 27(3), 291-305.
Hayward, Bronwyn. (2012). Children, citizenship, and environment : nurturing a democratic imagination in a changing world. New York, NY: Routledge.
Ross, Marc Howard. (2007). Cultural Contestation in Ethnic Conflict. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Schmeichel, Mardi. (2011). Feminism, Neoliberalism, and Social Studies. Theory & Research in Social Education, 39(1), 6-31. doi:10.1080/00933104.2011.10473445.

Authors