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Session Submission Summary

Part 1: Advancing peace, justice and human rights through community-engaged praxis in education

Sat, March 28, 1:15 to 2:30pm, Hilton, Floor: Fourth Floor - Tower 3, Union Square 18

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

In this session, we examine several new directions in critical peace, social justice, and human rights education theory, practice, and scholarship that cultivate community-engaged praxis in education, and in particular, consider how local communities engage their past, presents and futures to advance peace, justice and human rights in a divided world. As scholars whose work and teaching both critically engage these fields and grapple with these concepts, the panelists consider their distinctions and overlaps to frame the challenges and possibilities of implementing community-engaged praxis in diverse sites and contexts. We understand community-engaged in this context to involve members of a community in partnerships - with each other and/or an outside individual or group of researchers, practitioners, artists etc. - that demonstrate characteristics such as mutual feelings of trust, shared power and decision-making, a reciprocal relationship of learning and teaching, and an open exchange of ideas with the aim of creating systemic and societal change (Haddix, 2015; Mikesell, Bromley, & Khodyakov, 2013). As Shah (2020) states, community-based approaches center the knowledges of community partners (i.e non profit actors or the people who access programing) rather than traditional academic knowledge (p. 14) and disrupts traditional hierarchical power structures such as those of researcher and participant or practitioner and community member.

We take up these intersections in this session to provide a bridge for those whose work rests at the nexus of these fields and view it as a launching point for ongoing robust critical engagement and work. Our panels feature papers from practitioners, scholars, educators, artists, and community-based organizations across the globe who are involved in community-engaged peace, social justice, and/or human rights education partnerships for transformation and social change. We conceptualize community-engaged partnerships in many ways, including but not limited to collaborative participation in social movements, school programs, community-based organizations, extracurricular clubs, research projects, arts initiatives, theoretical contributions, professional development opportunities, educational initiatives, and civic actions. We highlight research, projects and theoretical contributions which center community-engaged praxis working toward equity and justice in both community and formal education settings. In particular, we feature partnerships that emphasize and center youth and community participation, transformative agency, and empowerment as means to not only improve educational outcomes within their respective cultural and political contexts, but also ones that work towards building cultures of peace, human rights, and social justice writ large (see Hantzopoulos & Bajaj, 2021). We amplify those engaged in “community-based” pedagogies, approaches that understand community members are not just a source of knowledge, but active participants in transformation (Shah, 2020). These approaches are heavily grounded in Freirean notions of praxis that flip and/or blur the traditional notions of hierarchy that frame pedagogy, research and action (Friere, 1972; Williams et al, 2024).

To this end, the panelists, drawing on theories and audience participation, unpack these key ideas that are often associated with the theory, research, scholarship, and praxis of these fields in responding to three overarching questions:

(1) How do participants’ perspectives, identities, knowledge(s), experiences, histories, traditions, and contexts contribute to the ways in which the concepts of community-engaged praxis in critical peace, human rights, and social justice education are understood and conceptualized?

(2) How do larger cultural, political and economic forces and institutions that shape quotidian existence contribute or detract from the ways that community-engaged praxis in critical peace, social justice, and human rights education is contextually embodied, experienced, and/or practiced?

(3) How can practitioners and scholars re-think their efforts to engage in peace education research and community-engaged praxis by resisting the totalizing and universalizing aspects of the field and considering the primacy of localized realities? In turn, how can this then shape global priorities?

As peace, human rights, and social justice education become more widely accepted and mainstreamed, it is increasingly critical for scholars and practitioners to interrogate how localized experiences both shape and challenge some of the normative assumptions, discourses, and practices that frame the origins of the fields. By examining the ways in which formal, non-formal, and informal educational spaces are reimagining education through community-engaged partnerships and initiatives, scholars and practitioners gain deeper insight into restructuring and improving education for a more equitable and racially and socially just world that is grounded in comprehensive peace in these polarizing and divided times.

The session will open with the chair introducing the purpose and framing of the panel and the panelists. Each of the four papers will then take 13-14 minutes to present their research in relation to the overarching questions. The discussant will then pose a few questions that put the papers in conversation with each other. The panelists, together with audience participants, will then discuss the implications of the research and large group discussion for the development and re-conceptualization of critical peace, social justice, and human rights education, research, and praxis.

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Individual Presentations