Cultivating Peace through Resistance: Teaching for Justice Across Borders and Histories

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

This panel explores how education can disrupt entrenched colonial narratives and foster critical global citizenship in a world marked by systemic inequities, racial capitalism, and historical erasure. Across four papers, we examine how educators and researchers are challenging the epistemic violence embedded in curricula, pedagogy, and collective memory to cultivate spaces of justice, resistance, and transformation.

The first paper theorizes a framework of Rooted Human Rights Education (HRE) that bridges global frameworks and local struggles, offering a critical lens for enacting transformative, justice-oriented global citizenship education. The second paper offers a critical content analysis of world history textbooks across multiple nations, revealing how colonial and liberation narratives are framed, silenced, or distorted, and what these patterns mean for student understanding of history and human rights. The third paper centers testimonios from the Salvadoran Civil War, documenting community memory as a counter-narrative to the dominant miseducation and historical erasure that continue to marginalize diasporic and local histories. The last paper presents an ethnographic study of The Sueños Program, a culturally responsive summer initiative for Latinx immigrant youth, where humanizing pedagogies and critical literacies foster belonging, joy, and empowerment.

Taken together, these projects contribute to ongoing conversations in comparative and international education that interrogate the structural and historical roots of injustice. All four papers utilize qualitative inquiry through methods ranging from community engaged collaborative ethnography to testimonios to text book analyses. By grounding theory in praxis, they illuminate how educators and communities can create pluralistic and justice-oriented cultures of peace that transcend borders and histories of violence.

Sub Unit

• 21st Century Educational Alternatives: Confronting Racial Capitalism, Patriarchy, Militarism, and the Climate Crisis

Chair

• Monisha Bajaj, University of San Francisco

Individual Presentations

• Rooted Human Rights Education as Critical Global Citizenship Praxis - Monisha Bajaj, University of San Francisco; David Andrew Tow, UNIVERSITY OF SAN FRANCISCO

• Testimonios as a tool for Preserving Collective Memory of the Salvadoran Civil War - Genesis Jasmin Morales, UNIVERSITY OF SAN FRANCISCO

• Singing and dreaming in xenophobic times: Latinx immigrant youth in a community cultural arts program - ROSA M JIMENEZ, University of San Francisco

• Disrupting Colonial Narratives for Peace: A Critical Content Analysis of World History Textbooks - Carmen E Barba, USF School of Education