Governance conflicts and peacebuilding citizenship in Bangladesh education: Curriculum spaces, youth voices, and teacher voices

• In Event: Round-Table Session 3
  In Round-table Session: Building Democratic Peace Through Handling Conflict in Schools? Evidence from México, Colombia, Bangladesh, and Canada

Proposal

How do selected young Bangladeshi citizens perceive and/or engage in democratic peacebuilding in response to governance conflicts—such as political polarization, disengagement, ineffectiveness and corruption—and the associated cultural, structural, and physical harm against diverse social groups? This paper reports on a study of how some students in a politically violent Muslim-majority context, Bangladesh, lived and understood various kinds of governance conflicts and the possibilities of peacebuilding. To explore potential school connections with lived experiences, this paper compares these students’ with some of their teachers’ understandings and implemented curriculum on related topics.
Curriculum can (re)shape citizenship roles by democratically addressing––or authoritatively ignoring––lived sociopolitical conflicts, and justice-oriented responses. Educational practices that exclude attention to lived social conflicts may contribute to (re)producing compliant citizenship (Davies, 2005; Vanner, Akseer, Kovinthan, 2016), and maintaining the status quo. In contrast, school-based participation in understanding contrasting viewpoints on social conflicts and democratic options for solving them can contribute to building citizens’ capacities to affirm justice and peace (ibid; Bajaj, 2016; Bickmore, 2014). Schools may––or may not––provide opportunities for building such capacities. Either way, young citizens’ lived experiences and concerns can be expected to help shape their understandings of social and political conflicts (including violence) and how to respond.
Peacebuilding––i.e. affirming democracy and justice in and through day-to-day citizen actions in response to conflicts (Bickmore, 2011)––is justice-oriented citizenship (Westheimer & Kahne, 2008). Both aim to build citizens’ capacities for democratizing undemocratic, unjust and violent societies: hence, peacebuilding citizenship. Peacebuilding citizenship education connects citizens’ understandings, feelings, and experiences of conflict with the implemented curriculum.
This paper is part of a doctoral thesis, allied with a larger international project called “Peace-Building Citizenship Learning in Comparative Contexts Affected by Violence: School Connections with Life Experience.” It presents findings from two focus group workshops with 16 grade 6–10 teachers and one focus group workshop with their 36 students in 4 schools (a boys’ school and a girls’ school in each of two cities) in Bangladesh. In separate groups of 4-5, teachers and students discussed their concerns about selected locally relevant social conflicts. Among other things, they discussed their experiences and concerns about these conflicts, how they might be mitigated or resolved, and their hopes and wishes about their implemented curriculum in relation to these problems.
This paper zeroes in on students’ concerns about some school and educational governance issues and some larger-scale political rivalry issues related to the governance of Bangladesh. Male and female students from both cities understood school and educational governance conflicts as competition between authoritarian and greedy teachers and their students over discipline, achievement, and money. Boys and girls from both cities described corporal punishment as direct violence in which non-compliant students are victims. Girls were less often severely victimized by such school-based violence than boys, and boys in the affluent city were far less severely victimized than boys in the less affluent city. Less privileged boys were also most often victimized by indirect violence––such as denial of quality education in school, and denial of opportunities to achieve due to inability to pay for private tuition.
None of the participating teachers expressed concern about any such school or educational governance conflicts. Instead, they all were worried about larger scale politicization of educational governance, such as political revisions of history texts that present biases against certain identity groups, and the teachers felt themselves to be politically on the spot. In contrast, none of the students expressed worries about any of the latter governance issues.
Social context and lived experiences also evidently shaped participating male and female students’ concerns and understandings about the direct and indirect dimensions of political rivalry conflicts (polarization that quite often escalated to violence, especially in the more affluent city). Here again appeared a gap: none of the teachers taught about these highly politicized conflicts, although the students wanted to learn about them.
A similarity between teachers’ and students’ discourses in all four schools was the way they described individuals’ religious moral decadence as the root cause of the escalation of both of these governance conflicts. They all agreed that Islamic moral corrections to certain individual behaviours would make educational governance, and the country’s overall governance, just and peaceful. The comparisons and contrasts among youths’ and teachers’ voices and perspectives in these four school contexts point to places where certain curriculum infusion and transformation could improve peacebuilding citizenship education in Bangladesh and similar contexts beyond.
References
Bajaj, M. (2016). In the Gaze of Gandhi: Peace Education in Contemporary India. In M. Bajaj, & M. Hantzopoulos, (Eds.), Peace Education: International Perspectives (107-122). London, GB: Bloomsbury Academic.
Bickmore, K. (2005). Foundations for peacebuilding and discursive peacekeeping: Infusion and exclusion of conflict in Canadian public school curricula. Journal of Peace Education, 2, 161-181.
Bickmore, K. (2011a). Policies and programming for safer schools: Are “anti-bullying” approaches impeding education for peacebuilding? Educational Policy, 25(4), 648-687.
Bickmore, K. (2011b). Keeping, making, and building peace in school. Social Education (“Research and Practice” section), 75(1), 42-46.
Bickmore, K. (2014). Peacebuilding Dialogue Pedagogies in Canadian Classrooms. Curriculum Inquiry 44(4), 553-582.
Davies, L. (2005). Teaching about conflict through citizenship education. International Journal of Citizenship and Teacher Education, 1(2), 17-34.
Vanner, C., Akseer, S., & Kovinthan, T. (2016). Learning peace (and conflict): the role of primary learning materials in peacebuilding in post-war Afghanistan, South Sudan, and Sri Lanka. Journal of Peace Education. DOI: 10.1080/17400201.2016.1213710
Westheimer, J. & Kahne, J. (2004). “What kind of citizen? The politics of educating for democracy.” American Educational Research Journal, Vol. 41, No. 2, pp. 237-269.

Author

• Ahmed Salehin Kaderi, OISE, University of Toronto