Education as Humanisation

Dialogic pedagogy in post-conflict peacebuilding

Scherto Gill, Ulrike Niens

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138502574
• eBook ISBN: 9781317238492
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Over the past decades, there has been a consistent and poignant ambiguity with regard to the role of education in the context of post-conflict and divided societies working towards building peace. Most recently, global developments, including the after-effects of the Arab Spring, the devastating wars in Syria, and the refugee crisis in Europe, have directed our attention once more to the part that education can play in building peace at many levels.

In this context, it is timely to create a space for a focused inquiry and scholarly debate about peace-oriented pedagogies and how they might affect the post-conflict reconstruction in divergent settings. Thus both the subject and the content of this book are important in the light of the current needs in many societies emerging from conflicted community relations. In particular, they propose a refreshing and transformative view of peace based on a humanising conception of education and dialogic pedagogy as a key avenue for peacebuilding.

Through both conceptual inquiries and empirical case studies, the book will appeal to educational thinkers, researchers, practitioners, policy-makers, NGO workers, and the public in re-examining some of the key concepts identifying pivotal underlying issues in the field. Furthermore, by offering a principled, persuasive conceptual framework and by problematising implementations and interventions in practice, this book can serve to provoke more appraisals, evaluations, and constructive critiques of humanisation and dialogic pedagogy in peacebuilding education.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education.

Education as humanisation: a theoretical review on the role of dialogic pedagogy in peacebuilding education

Scherto Gill^a and Ulrike Niens^b

^aCentre for Research in Human Development, Guerrand-Hermès Foundation, Brighton, UK; ^bSchool of Education, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK

In this literature review, we explore the potential role of education in supporting peacebuilding and societal transformation after violent conflict. Following a critical analysis of the literature published by academics and practitioners, we identify the notion of humanisation (as in the seminal works of Paulo Freire and others) as a unifying conceptual core. Peacebuilding education as humanisation is realised by critical reflection and dialogue in most curricular initiatives reviewed, an approach aimed at overcoming the contextual educational constraints often rooted in societal division and segregation, strained community relations and past traumas. We argue that education as humanisation and critical dialogue can offer pedagogical strategies and provide a compelling conceptual framework for peacebuilding education. Such a conceptual framework can serve as a basis for research in the area, especially in contexts where educational institutions tend to be structured to dehumanise.

Introduction

Peacebuilding through education has been identified as one of the major challenges in promoting Millennium Development Goals and building long-term, sustainable peace in post-conflict and divided societies (Oxfam 2008; Save the Children 2008; UNESCO 2011). The importance of education for peacebuilding has been recognised in such societies, as evidenced, for example, by the recent International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-violence for the Children of the World (2001–2010), which declared formal and informal education as necessary means to instil in children and young people the knowledge, values, attitudes and skills required for living peacefully together.

However, despite the growing appreciation of the role of education in promoting a culture of peace, there remain an array of ambiguities in terms of our understanding of the key concepts involved. There is also a lack of compelling theories that underpin education for peacebuilding across the academic disciplines. Furthermore, it is increasingly recognised that education ought to play a key and proactive role in creating a culture of peace in schools and communities, yet where there are peace-related programmes in formal and informal educational settings, they are often born out of the need to meet immediate demands for intervention and hence lack in theoretically informed strategies and rigorous evaluation (Bajaj 2004). The situation thus reinforces the oft-lamented disconnection between peacebuilding practice, theory and research (UNICEF 2011).

In this article, we review and analyse key issues in peacebuilding educational initiatives in order to identify a theoretical framework that helps to bridge the above divide. The article first explores literature relating to peacebuilding and the role of education in peacebuilding, followed by an investigation into some of the existing peace-oriented pedagogical practices, especially within post-conflict societies. In doing so, the review identifies a major theoretical underpinning of peacebuilding education, as in Paulo Freire and others’ seminal works, on critical dialogue and education as humanisation. We conclude that recognising these ideas and their theoretical contribution to the field is crucial to conducting empirical research that can further develop our understanding of how peacebuilding education can be implemented effectively in divergent socio-political and educational contexts.

Peacebuilding as a transformative process

Peacebuilding is difficult to define as a concept and to achieve in practice (Lambourne 2004; Morris 2000). In order to better understand the concept of peacebuilding for our own purpose, we have chosen not to enter the minefield of contested definitions. Instead, we focus on the literature that conceptualises peacebuilding as a transformative process.

Galtung (1975) introduced the notion of peacebuilding, and distinguished peacemaking and peacekeeping as the immediate responses to conflict from peacebuilding as a means to build a sustainable peaceful future. Peacebuilding thus goes beyond the notion of ‘negative peace’ (as an absence of war) and involves the development of ‘positive peace’ characterised by conditions in a society that promote harmony between people, including respect, justice and inclusiveness, as well as ‘sustainable peace’ that incorporates processes to address the root causes of violent conflict (Galtung 1976).

Similarly, Lederach (1998) stresses the importance of conceptualising peacebuilding as part of the greater process of sustainable social transformation, firmly rooted ‘in the relationship of involved parties’ (75). In this regard, peacebuilding strategies must stress the centrality of building relationship and relational transformation alongside structural transformation. For Lederach, lasting peace is a creative vision of human society at the heart of which are reframed relationships between people, institutions, social space and the natural environment, as well as re-imagined relationships between our past, present and future.

Many authors join Galtung and Lederach in recognising the importance of peacebuilding as a transformative process. Mitchell (2003) considers such transformation as located within structural, personal and relationship changes towards engendering the moral growth of the society. Maiese (2003) advocates a holistic understanding of peacebuilding (materialistic, socio-political, cultural, philosophical, local and international, institutional) that concerns the entire civil society and the individuals within it, that promotes human values and that is future-oriented and hope-inspiring. This holistic view of peacebuilding is based on an understanding of conflict and its root causes, relationship building and reconciliation and how these concepts play out in human society (Lederach 2003, 2005).

Indeed, such conceptualisations of peacebuilding may be seen as idealistic and utopian in their unsubstantiated hope for the potential role of education in promoting long-term sustainable peace. Critics of this view might point out that they may actually hinder the development of realistic strategies to reduce conflict and division, fail to address political and cultural constraints and imbalances and thereby serve to maintain the status quo (Bekerman 2012). However, we would argue that hope and idealism are essential for pedagogical attempts to promote positive human relationships, foster a sense of common humanity and, ultimately, to make the world a better place (Hansen et al. 2009).

The role of education in peacebuilding

It has been proposed that education should be regarded as a critical component of societal transformation after violent conflict (Collier and Hoeffler 2002; Smith and Vaux 2003). Exploring the existing debates, we focus on the role of education in peacebuilding, which incorporates educational strategies aimed at transforming societal divisions and conflict into peaceful and sustainable relationships. This is in line with how UNICEF (2011) defines education for peacebuilding as:

framed in terms of a development role for education through reforms to the education sector itself and by contributing to political, economic and social transformations in post-conflict society. (7)

Theories put forward by Galtung (1976), Lederach (2005) and others have influenced some of the definitions of peacebuilding education adopted by international organisations, although UNICEF (2011) points out that peacebuilding theories did not have a strong enough influence on relevant educational programmes and that a thorough analysis of the role of education in peacebuilding is underdeveloped.

Indeed, there have been numerous efforts to review the divergent literature relating to the role of education in peacebuilding in order to develop a theoretically informed approach in the international realm (e.g. Save the Children 2008; UNESCO 2011; UNICEF 2011). The UNICEF (2011) review identified three distinctive areas of discourse when discussing the role of education in peacebuilding, whereby only the latter maps clearly onto the conceptualisation of peacebuilding as a process that may transform societies in the long-term: (1) education in emergencies, which concerns the protection of children and a response to the negative impacts of conflict on their education; (2) conflict-sensitive education that does not reinforce inequalities or fuel further divisions amongst people and communities; and (3) education that actively supports peacebuilding through reforms that contribute to political, economic and social transformations in post-conflict society and through a focus on change in attitude, values and norms. Similarly, Smith (2010) identifies distinctive roles of education within the overall context of peacebuilding: preventative, protective and transformative. The transformative role is particularly relevant to post-conflict societies, where education also has an explicit focus on cultivating students’ sense of justice and peace and thereby changing individual attitudes as well as transforming society. The UNESCO International Commission on Education for the Twenty-First Century (Delors et al. 1996) proposes four main pillars of learning, including: ‘learning to know’, ‘learning to do’, ‘learning to be’ and ‘learning to live together’, thus emphasising a holistic concept of education and stressing the importance of education in building a more peaceful world.

Education has been proposed as a key component in societal healing (Smith and Vaux 2003), which ought to be given priority over macroeconomic and institutional reform in peacebuilding (Collier and Hoeffler 2002). Smith and Vaux (2003) add that education can provide a framework for teaching and learning about reconciliation that will have a long-term impact as it may help to avoid trans-generational transmission of societal trauma. Korostelina (2012) and McInnis (2008) explain that the transformative power of peacebuilding education lies in its potential to redress processes of dehumanisation, which are seen as root causes of societal violence and which also result in the denial of a group of people’s moral values and human rights. Most of the reviews mentioned above also stress the potentially significant contribution of peacebuilding education in overcoming conflicted collective histories and past trauma; in the development and maintenance of a culture of tolerance, diversity and inclusion; and in the establishment and promotion of democratic citizenship and critical engagement with politics and society.

Whilst education is often described as an inherently positive force, attention has been drawn to the controversial ‘two faces of education’, whereby education may play both a positive and a negative role in conflict and in peacebuilding thereafter (Bush and Saltarelli 2000). Concerns have been raised about the destructive role of education in perpetuating the root causes of conflict, such as inequality, negative intergroup attitudes and exclusion. This is particularly relevant in contexts where community divisions are sustained through structural mechanisms, such as unequal access to education, uneven distribution of resources or segregation, as well as pedagogical ones, including the use of history and textbooks for cultural and political purposes, oppression and repression (Buckland 2004; Bush and Saltarelli 2000).

Peace-oriented educational aims, such as cultivating students’ critical capacity to challenge inequality and injustice and developing their understanding of democracy and human rights, are considered to be in tension with formal education and schooling, which is seen as inextricably linked to the state and prevalent hegemonic powers (Bekerman 2012). Harber and Skade (2009) regard schools as, ‘dehumanising institutions that stress cognitive forms of knowledge over the affective, and that play down important inter-personal skills’ (184). Thus they question whether peacebuilding education can ever be, ‘truly compatible with, or comfortably coexist with, formal education as currently constructed in many parts of the world’ (184). Other reviews (Salmi 2000; Seitz 2004) have criticised formal education for its use of different forms of violence, including direct violence (e.g. corporal punishment, sexual abuse in schools), indirect violence (e.g. illiteracy, educational inequality), repressive violence (e.g. deprivation of political rights) and alienating violence (e.g. through curriculum content, exclusion of mother tongue and suppression of subject teaching). Vriens (2003) points out sharply that we must be suspicious about claims of education being the instrument for peace.

Adding to such concerns relating to formal educational settings is a perception of an over-emphasis of academic and public debates around peacebuilding education for children and young people, whereby the responsibility for societal transformation is not shouldered by adults, but by the future generation. Salomon and Cairns (2010) point out that, ‘the decision to focus on children ignores the fact that power is in the hands of adults, and it is how this power is used that will determinate the type of society children will inherit’ (2).

The conflicting roles of education in post-conflict and divided societies hence pose questions as to how education for peacebuilding can become a genuinely transformative process. Smith and Vaux (2003) argue that educational policies and practices must be critically examined in terms of their potential to aggravate or ameliorate conflict. Smith (2010) thus recommends that educational policies and programmes be actively adjusted to the needs of human development and include a re-thinking of educational governance, structures, content and pedagogies. Likewise, UNICEF (2011) proposes that c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction – Education as humanisation: dialogic pedagogy in post-conflict peacebuilding
• 1. Education as humanisation: a theoretical review on the role of dialogic pedagogy in peacebuilding education
• 2. Contextual and pedagogical considerations in teaching for forgiveness in the Arab world
• 3. Global citizenship as education for peacebuilding in a divided society: structural and contextual constraints on the development of critical dialogic discourse in schools
• 4. Articulating injustice: an exploration of young people’s experiences of participation in a conflict transformation programme that utilises the arts as a form of dialogue
• 5. Lebanese youth narratives: a bleak post-war landscape
• 6. Reconciliation through dialogical nostalgia in post-conflict societies: a curriculum to intersect
• Index