Peacebuilding Citizenship Education in a Muslim Majority Context: Challenges and Opportunities in Bangladeshi Public Schools

Globally, many young citizens are disengaged from constructively transforming conflicts and affirming just peace (Kassimir Flanagan, 2010). In Bangladesh, lived experience of polarized political affiliates’ and others’ violent engagement in conflicts often contributes to many citizens’ avoidance of formal politics (Riaz Raji, 2011). Schools can help to reduce––or to reproduce––those patterns of violence and citizen disengagement (Davies, 2011). Dialogue, in educational settings, about lived social and political conflicts and potential solutions—in relation to their own identities and contexts—may help citizens to develop peace-building capacities (Lederach, 1995; McCauley, 2002). This doctoral thesis studies opportunities and challenges for peacebuilding citizenship education embedded in the existing curriculum of Bangladesh, juxtaposed with selected students’ and teachers’ concerns and understandings about selected social conflicts and what people can do about them in their own contexts. Research methods involved document analysis and focus groups with young adolescents and with teachers, in girls’ and boys’ public schools in two cities. Bangladeshi curriculum mandates analyzed in this research do offer opportunities for studying various social conflicts. However, participating teachers’ implemented curriculum tended to ignore multiple viewpoints about human rights and governance conflicts. Participating students and teachers had difficulty identifying social-structural dimensions of the conflicts that they or their families had not directly experienced. All participants were familiar with patterns of direct harm, and sometimes also identified some cultural dimensions, as they described parties and their viewpoints in conflicts that mattered to them. Religious moral factors were prominent in how they described causes and escalators of these conflicts. Beyond suggesting individuals’ religious moral correction, very few participants showed familiarity with democratic problem-solving options that could reduce violence and transform these social conflicts. Thus, in this Muslim-majority context, participants understood the dimensions and solutions of social conflicts in religious-moral terms: Islam provided the vocabulary with which participants talked about mutual responsibility, justice, and the possibilities of peace. The thesis argues that classroom opportunities for critical analysis of multiple viewpoints and of available options to solve social and political conflicts—including their religious dimensions—would increase participants’ opportunities for citizenship learning and peacebuilding engagement.Ph.D