Divided we teach? An Analysis of Teachers’ Perceptions of Conflict and Peace in Côte d’Ivoire

In the aftermath of violent conflict, peace education attempts to promote reconciliation by offering a peace-building narrative to counter prevailing conflict narratives. In this regard, many post-conflict countries have incorporated human rights, moral, and/or citizenship education in their school curricula. In general, these peace education efforts are confined to curricular reform, disregarding teacher training to ensure proper implementation. As such, peace education largely overlooks the agency and social identity of teachers. Just as their pupils, teachers have been impacted by the conflict and may have been educated according to conflictual worldviews. By failing to account for their perceptions of conflict and peace and its impact on pupils’ attitudes, peace education risks to undermine itself. In order to expose the problematic nature of this disregard and its deep rootedness, this article investigates teachers’ narratives on the violent past and the current peace in Côte d’Ivoire four years after the post-electoral crisis by applying a Categorical Principal Components Analysis on a sample of 984 secondary school teachers in Abidjan. Two conflict narratives remain vibrant revealing a persisting divide between supporters of the past President Gbagbo and of the current President Ouattara; the former evaluating the current peace more negatively than the latter. Moreover, narratives seemed to be informed by teachers’ social identity. The discrepancy between teachers’ perceptions of peace and conflict and the peace-building narrative is alarming: how is peace education to reconcile students if their teachers remain divided?nrpages: 40status: publishe