Voluntary Teacher Professional Learning: To Educate for Democratic Peace in Egypt and in Canada
Year: 2018
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Education for democratic peacebuilding citizenship includes four essential components: encounters with conflict, practice of dialogue, recognition of diversity and building pedagogical community. Teachers can help one another to interpret, to learn, and to implement these pedagogical practice dimensions, in order to equip their students with democratic agency and values to participate in peacebuilding social change. This comparative case study research examines how two groups of private school teachers—four of mixed faith in a Muslim-majority context (Cairo) and three Muslim teachers in a Christian and secular-majority context (Toronto)—voluntarily embarked on two journeys of non-formal professional learning to improve their teaching for democratic peace. The researcher developed and facilitated a six-session reflective and dialogic professional learning course for democratic peacebuilding, and studied how each group of teachers understood and taught democratic peacebuilding and how they participated in the learning processes of this course. Data included asynchronous discussion transcripts and semi-structured interviews before and after course participation. The teachers in both contexts described using similar dialogic pedagogies to teach for democratic peacebuilding citizenship (including constructive communication, active listening, discussions and debates), while addressing different types of conflicts relevant to each political-cultural context. In Egypt, a relatively authoritarian country, teachers chose to emphasize conflicts pertaining to inclusion and re-humanization of diversity and identity recognition, within and beyond their school communities. In Canada, a relatively democratic country, teachers chose to discuss one conflict issue with which they all particularly identified— Islamophobia—from the viewpoint of Muslim minoritized communities in Canada. Other conflicts they addressed were broad current and historical issues such as Syrian refugees and colonialism. Participating teachers’ dialogic interactions evidently promoted their understandings of and engagement with democratic peacebuilding. In particular, all seven teachers in both groups apparently gained awareness of how they could infuse conflict (resolution) and peacebuilding pedagogies into their entire interactions with students, including their students’ own roles and involvement in the classroom, versus limiting peace education to teaching discrete lessons. This comparative inquiry contributes to understanding the principles of quality teacher education and peacebuilding education practices, relevant both to conflict zones and to democratic, culturally diverse settler societies.
Source: TSpace (University of Toronto)
Author: Yomna Reda Awad
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3135393728