Engaging in topics around violent extremism: Experiences of Canadian secondary school teachers

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Protest and social justice in religion, education, and society across varying national contexts

Proposal

Introduction:
This paper is part of a larger research project on how educational actors in Canadian schools comprehend and deal with violent extremism (VE).

Radicalization to VE has been an urgent issue in the West, especially since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. ISIS pushed Western countries to intensify their CVE (Countering Violent Extremism) initiatives. Until 2016, most investigations and academic research had focused on Islamist/religious terrorist groups (Silva & Deflem, 2020; U.N. General Assembly, 2015). Since the Trump administration, there is a sharp rise in hatred and violent events against minority religious groups both in the US and Canada. Several domestic right-wing nationalist, White supremacist, and militant religious groups are now on domestic terrorist lists.

Since the mid-2000s, several European countries started to emphasize the importance of educational institutions in promoting ‘softer’ approaches to counter-terrorism. The UN adopted similar measures (Ragazzi, 2017). If education is about preparing future generations for potential challenges, social change in the broader curriculum must address protective factors that can mitigate risks leading to violence. This makes teachers the focus.

Multicomponent approaches to inclusion and safe schools have been adopted by many schools in Canada and the US, but there are no programs that focus on VE, and what is most worrisome is that teachers are not prepared to discuss the ideologies and implications of terrorist attacks despite the curiosity and vulnerability of students.

Part of a larger empirical research project, this study focuses on how teachers engage in or approach the topic of VE.

Relevance:
Violent extremism is justified by the presumed moral superiority of the group and their aims. Education must be able to counter this narrative and do so on persuasive moral grounds. The marginalization of our youth needs to be tackled at many levels, including the education system.

Using the sociological method in Comparative Education, this paper studies this global educational problem, namely VE, in its social context. Those who become extremists spend a considerable number of years in schools where they are socialized. Extremists, particularly religious extremists (ISIS, various Christian Fundamentalist groups, Buddhist, Hindu and Sikh militants), have used education to indoctrinate their groups, and all of them have been involved in terrorist acts. We assume that the soft power of education can be proactive in preventing and combating extremism (Ghosh et al, 2017).


THEORY/CONTEXT
When discussing violent extremism, education's role in countering such destructive behaviour is generally not considered. So far, countering VE in North America involves coercive and aggressive state measures (hard power). Education has been gravely neglected as a soft power that can be proactive rather than merely reactive by making young people resilient from extremist ideologies, and worldviews. Yet extremist groups have widely used their own forms of education (indoctrination) to spread their radical ideologies in Western societies (Ghosh et al. 2017. While emphasizing the urgency of capacity building in teacher education programs concerning VE, we stress the importance of two theories in this paper: The Ethics of Care (Noddings, 1984, 2001) and Moral Disengagement Theory (Bandura, 1999, 2002). Caring is basic to human life. In education, it involves the affective domain and a relational approach to human development. This is necessary to prevent marginalizing vulnerable students because a sense of exclusion could contribute to the alienation of young people from mainstream society, and healthy social norms and values. This can lead to moral disengagement that may inspire various anti-social activities, including VE. Moral Disengagement theory (MDT) suggests that individuals get drawn into inhumane conduct by morally justifying the context. These perspectives are essential to analyzing the empirical data collected from teacher interviews.

INQUIRY
The narrative data for this study was collected through semi-structured interviews of 30 Canadian secondary school teachers in Montreal, Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver metropolitan areas between 2016 and 2022. Snowball sampling enabled us to get participants because most school boards were reluctant to participate.

Our analysis relies on interpretivism, which seeks to understand the constructed knowledge through a process of interpretation rather than direct evaluation in a positivistic way. This implies that our data will be narrative and qualitative, which involves discourse analysis that questions the factors behind narratives. Narrative and Discourse Analyses are insightful in exploring people's subjectivities, voices, and identities that cannot be easily analyzed through statistical methods (De Fina, 2003; Souto-Manning 2014).
The data was analyzed through thematic analysis while strictly relying on inductive rather than deductive reasoning (Maxwell, 2005; Butler-Kisber, 2018). We used N-Vivo software to help in this process.
FINDINGS
Our findings show that most teachers have a broad understanding of what violent extremism means, while a few of them think it is limited to Islamist extremism. Except for four, most teacher participants are not comfortable when it comes to teaching about it. However, they unanimously believe education can play a significant role in preventing VE, and the topic should be discussed in class. Their reluctance to discuss it is due to a lack of training and knowledge on the topic, absence of support from administrators, and fear of reprisals from parents. They have several approaches to dealing with deviant behaviour. Some also admitted that certain teachers are Islamophobic.

These findings support the objectives and premise of this study that education can play a significant role in preventing extremism. Teachers are the medium in schools, and the medium is the message. So, the role of teachers and their proper training are essential in the multifaceted effort to prevent students from becoming extremist citizens.

CONTRIBUTION
Although it is widely acknowledged that education can play a significant role in preventing violent extremism (Aly et al., 2014; Davies, 2008; Ghosh et al., 2016, 2017), there are very few empirical studies on education’s role in thwarting extremism or discussion on how policy actors and teachers are responding to this issue (Baak et al., 2022). Our study fills an important gap in the literature. As an empirical study on the voices and experiences of Canadian secondary school teachers around the issue of VE, it will make a significant contribution to this field of research.

Authors

• Ratna Ghosh, McGill University

• Maihemuti Dil Dilimulati, Concordia University (Montreal, CANADA)

• Helal H Dhali, Bishop's University