Teacher development for conflict participation: Facilitating learning for ‘difficult citizenship’ education

Also republished in: Bickmore, Kathy (2008). Teacher development for conflict participation: Facilitating learning for ‘difficult citizenship’ education. Chapter 36 (pp. 56-73) in J. Arthur & I. Davies (Eds.), Citizenship Education, volume 3: Towards PracticeA key to citizenship for socially just democracy is the development of capacity to nonviolently and equitably manage conflict. How are teachers educated and supported for this responsibility? This paper is drawn from a larger on-going study that compares implicit and explicit curricula, policies and programming for ‘peacekeeping’ (security), ‘peacemaking’ (dialogue and conflict resolution), and ‘peacebuilding’ (difficult citizenship — redressing social fractures and injustices that underlie destructive conflicts) in three urban Canadian school districts serving racially and culturally diverse populations. In particular, this paper examines the professional development-related opportunities available to teachers to support their facilitation and teaching for peacebuilding citizenship. The few teacher learning opportunities offered seem unlikely to enhance teachers' capacity to foster diverse students' development of agency for difficult citizenship. Much of the explicit professional development available in the schools examined emphasizes teachers' control of students and containment of disruption (peacekeeping), instead of their facilitation of diverse students’ participation in constructive conflict management (peacemaking and peacebuilding). Professional learning opportunities are often relegated to short, fragmented occasions, primarily during teachers’ volunteer time after school: this severely limits their potential to foster critical dialogic learning on the difficult issues of citizenship education practice.Funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canad