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Teachers, humility, and education reform: An emerging theory of change

Tue, March 27, 8:00 to 9:30am, Hilton Reforma, Floor: 4th Floor, Don Emiliano

Proposal

In areas affected by armed conflict, governmental and non-governmental agencies turn to education as a critical approach for social reconstruction. They invest in continuous efforts to design and reform curricula and learning activities to ensure that educational provisions foster social cohesion and active citizenship. However, top-down approaches to educational change are often impeded by political conflicts and bureaucratic procedures.
In Lebanon, the history education program of study is the only subject that was not reformed after the 1975-1990 civil war. The government gridlock over consensus on a grand narrative has left schools still teaching a history program last published in 1971. In citizenship education, studies have found that the highly prescriptive curriculum and textbooks limit any efforts to facilitate dialogues over topical issues on human rights and democracy (Shuayb 2015, Author, 2012, 2014). Dominant pedagogies of memorizing historical accounts and ideal constructs of citizenship further handicap students from becoming citizens empowered with the knowledge and approaches to manage conflict or collaborate to address social injustices.
Alongside government efforts to reform citizenship education programs, civil society organizations have designed and implemented numerous educational interventions through the globalized movement for peace building, social cohesion, conflict management and active citizenship. Civil society and international organizations have invested heavily in developing supplemental curricula for teachers. Yet their work is generally unsustainable. We have observed, however, that supporting teachers, and even a certain profile of teachers, can generate new approaches to learning and develop curricular materials that provide learners with the opportunities to engage in critical pedagogies.
We argue that education reform – even for the most contested of educational programs – requires a new theory of change. By drawing on Hansen’s (2017) concept of ‘bearing witness’ we observe that teachers who exercise humility in their work can act as agents of sustainable change through grassroots professional movements. We present the profiles of two civics and two history teachers who participated in reform activities initiated by civil society or their school and illustrate how this characteristic is exemplified in teachers’ professional lives.
These teachers received professional development support to critically review and develop their teaching materials and classroom approaches. While one of the civics teachers struggled within herself to try new approaches and invite learning mentors to facilitate reflective dialogues about her classroom (Others and Author, 2011), another civics teacher (Author, 2017) and two history teachers (Author and others, 2013) have demonstrated the capacities of teachers as curriculum makers and agents of change. They have not only reimagined their curricula and developed new materials through their classroom teaching and critical reflections with mentors, but the history teachers have moved to become facilitators of history education development projects for other history teachers across Lebanon.
References
Author (2012)
Author (2014)
Author (2017)
Author and others (2013)
Hansen, D.T. (2017) Bearing witness to teaching and teachers, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 49:1:7-23.
Shuayb, Maha (2015). "Human rights and peace education in the Lebanese civics textbooks." Research in Comparative and International Education 10 (1):135-150. doi: 10.1177/1745499914567823.
Others and author (2011)

Authors