This paper discusses findings from focus groups with youth who attend schools located in underpri... more This paper discusses findings from focus groups with youth who attend schools located in underprivileged surroundings in one large multicultural city in Canada and in a moderately large city in México, examining their understandings and lived experiences of migration-related conflicts. In the Canadian context, participants framed these conflicts as a problem of racist attitudes towards immigrants in an otherwise welcoming city. In the Mexican context, emigration was understood as a questionable individual dream to overcome precarious economic conditions, which often brings about violence to those travelling and family fractures for those who stay. We identify the tensions between these dominant narratives about issues of transnational mobilityusually also present in intended curriculum-and students' first-hand, every day, local-globalized citizenship experiences with ('in' and 'out') migration in each setting. In addition, we examine youths' own imaginaries of citizenship, contrasting the sense of agency and identity positions they express in each of these differently situated but structurally connected contexts in the global pattern of migration. In doing so, this work shows the limited opportunities youth have to make sense of their lived (globalized) conflicts beyond their own localized cultural explanations. We argue that connecting the recognition of cultural differences and positions in the world with the power imbalances and historically structured global inequities revealed by issues such as migration is crucial for educational efforts in citizenship education on global issues. Migration is a window into the concrete realities of globalization-including conflicts between those who move and those who stay, competition for employment, movement of capital in search of cheap labor, and struggles for citizenship. Dominant discourses of mobility and education are epitomized by demands for global knowledge economy capabilities and by depoliticized notions of humanitarian ethics. However, young people's actual political, economic, and socio-cultural concerns and experiences of transnational mobility vary from place to place, revealing tensions with the usual intended school curriculum explaining this globalized world. In this paper, we explore how understandings of global mobility take different shape for youth in underprivileged spaces in urban Canada (global North, receiving immigrants) and México (global South, sending emigrants). Comparing the ways these youth locate themselves in relation to their actual experiences with migration-a shared global event, linked with important social conflicts in both contexts-, we argue, reveals something of how they imagine their own and others' citizenship in the face of transnational phenomena. This allows us to localize the experience of globalization in relation to specific spaces of citizenship, and thereby to challenge typical curriculum notions of globalization driven by hegemonic economic or cosmopolitan goals.
Building durable peace through education requires addressing the gender ideologies and hierarchie... more Building durable peace through education requires addressing the gender ideologies and hierarchies that encourage both direct physical aggression and indirect harm through marginalization and exploitation. Although formal education systems are shaped by gendered patterns of social conflict, enmity, and inequity, schools can help young people to build on their inclination, relationships, and capability to participate in building sustainable, gender-just peace. In this paper, we draw from focus group research conducted with youth and teachers in public schools in Mexico, Bangladesh, and Canada to investigate how young people understood the social conflicts and violence surrounding them and what citizens could do about these issues; and how their teachers used the school curricula to address them. The research revealed that gender-based violence was pervasive in students' lives in all three settings, yet the curriculum the teachers and students described, with minor differences between contexts, included few opportunities to examine or resist the gender norms, institutions, and hierarchies that are the roots of exploitation and violence.
2019 Conference of the Canadian Society for the Study of Education, Jan 27, 2019
This paper examines learning opportunities for peacebuilding offered in the context of daily less... more This paper examines learning opportunities for peacebuilding offered in the context of daily lessons in regular public schools surrounded by violence. Publicly funded schooling can exacerbate as well as mitigate direct and indirect systemic destructive conflict. Yet, public schools also provide opportunities for advancing democratic peacebuilding social transformation. What understandings and learning opportunities about the roles people could play in handling conflict and peace are embedded in local curriculum guidelines and in teachers’ implemented curriculum? How do these perspectives compare with young students’ understandings and concerns, rooted in lived experience of direct and indirect violence (and peace)? What promising building blocks emerge for peacebuilding education? The paper draws from a multi-year research project, “Peace-Building Citizenship Learning,” examining intersections and disjunctures between the lived experiences of youth (age 10-15) and their teachers’ implemented curriculum, in selected elementary and intermediate public schools in marginalized urban communities experiencing violence in Mexico, Bangladesh and Canada.
Theory and Research in Social Education, Jul 1, 2002
... Reviewed by KATHY BICKMORE, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of T... more ... Reviewed by KATHY BICKMORE, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, Canada M5S 1V6. ... Classroom structures make a difference: The same student may participate actively and feel comfortable in one classroom, but not in another (Phelan et. ...
Drawing upon focus group research with youth and teachers in selected Mexican, Bangladeshi, and C... more Drawing upon focus group research with youth and teachers in selected Mexican, Bangladeshi, and Canadian urban public schools, this chapter illustrates the intersecting direct (physical) and systemic (injustice-based) violence they endured. We theorize and probe ways ordinary school education may address the dimensions and causes of destructive conflict, to strengthen to young people’s capabilities to contribute to building sustainable just peace—demonstrating strengths in each context and a major gap common to all three.
An examination of six urban Canadian school districts' policies and cocurricular programs for saf... more An examination of six urban Canadian school districts' policies and cocurricular programs for safe and inclusive schools shows contrasting implicit patterns of citizenship education. Peacekeeping-oriented districts relied heavily on standardized control and exclusion to achieve school safety, and allocated few resources to affirming diversity. Peacemaking-oriented districts supplemented peacekeeping with some regularized opportunities for students to learn to manage conflict and diversity. Peacebuilding-oriented districts provided relatively comprehensive and inclusive programs of conflict management and anti-bias education, embracing conflict and diversity as natural learning opportunities. Clearly such system-level policy reflects prevailing understandings of problems that need fixing, not necessarily actual practice. The paper argues that the implicit, daily patterns of human relations and conflict management in school districts are powerful socializers, and powerful constraints on the explicit education for peacebuilding citizenship conducted in individual programs and classrooms.
This article examines the representation of conflict, diversity, peace, and justice issues in sel... more This article examines the representation of conflict, diversity, peace, and justice issues in selected mandated curriculum guidelines, grades 1 10, for three Canadian provinces. These curricula, grounded in prevailing assumptions, reflect political will and influence resource availability for teaching. Prominent among them is a neutral discourse invoking Canadian ideals of multiculturalism that emphasizes harmony, marginalizes conflict and critical viewpoints, and presents injustices as past or virtually resolved. Because relatively little attention is given to actual instances of social conflict, violence, or marginalization, these curricula limit students' opportunities to practice with constructive democratic conflict and peacebuilding.
This research examines the implementation and effects of a peer mediation program in twenty-eight... more This research examines the implementation and effects of a peer mediation program in twenty-eight urban elementary schook The Center for Conflict Resolution, a program of the Cleveland, Ohio, public school& provided intensive training and follow-up support for teams ofpeer mediators and adult advisers at each school. Trainers were youths ?om the same community. Qualitative and quantitative evidence indicate that this program significantly improved the average eightto eleven-year-old student? understanding of and inclination to use nonviolent conflict resolution and his or her capacity to achieve in school. The study outlines the speczjic commitments @om administrators and other staffmembers that were required to develop and implement equitable, efective, and sustainable programs. ntil the last few years, little systematic research was available regarding U the implementation or effectiveness of conflict resolution programs, including peer mediation, in schools. However, one kind of evidence has existed for years: on-the-ground educational practitioners' interest in and commitment to peer mediation has fbeled the rapid spread of these innovations. Educators have voted with their feet. Thousands and thousands of new programs have been adopted and diversified in schools across Ohio (Ohio Commission on Dispute Resolution and Conflict Management, 1997) as well as across the United States, Canada, and much of the world (CREnet/
In this appreciative response to Jennifer Hauver's article about elementary children's negotiatio... more In this appreciative response to Jennifer Hauver's article about elementary children's negotiation of analytic frames in deliberative dialogue during input into a school governance decision, Bickmore argues for the value of such agentic, citizenship-relevant learning opportunities in public schools. She points to their unfortunate infrequency (to the detriment of socially just democracy) in economically and racially marginalized communities. The concept of analytic frames is compared with the notion of interests-desires, needs, concerns, and ethical principles-underlying each party's proposals in integrative negotiated conflict resolution theory. Questions are raised about the roles played by cultural context and status inequalities within dialogue groups. Bickmore concludes that both Hauver's research methodology and her pedagogy of listening intently to children show enormous potential for enhancing transformative democratic education. This article is in response to Hauver, J. "State your defense!" Children negotiate analytic frames in the context of deliberative dialogue. " Democracy & Education, 25(2), Article 3.
Schools can play an important part in helping diverse young people see themselves as citizens. Th... more Schools can play an important part in helping diverse young people see themselves as citizens. This paper examines a broad range of school-based learning opportunities that influence young people's development of knowledge and inclinations for handling conflict. The ingredients for conflict resolution can be taught. Like violence, nonviolence is a learned behavior. As public concern over violence increases, school leaders often respond with what has been called "negative peacemaking," the premature use of bargaining or settlement procedures before underlying problems have been solved or understood. The goal is avoidance, not problem solving. In contrast, "positive liberty" procedures involve the presence of active democratic participation. These alternative emphases in education for citizenship are the conceptual framework for reviewing the research on a range of school-based conflict resolution training programs to examine the relative space given to negative peacemaking and positive liberty in school practices. Violence prevention and anti-bullying programs generally involve narrowly focused training in social skills and anger management. Many of these interventions single out particular populations, disproportionately ethnic minority males, considered to be "at-risk." School peer conflict resolution programs are popular, and, if properly presented, can move beyond negative peacemaking to broaden the positive liberty students experience. Making student governance activities relevant gives students the opportunity to engage in democratic decision making and helps develop an understanding of conflict and its resolution. Conflict resolution may be taught explicitly. Controversial subject matter may be damaging to some students without careful attention to inclusive and respectful instructional processes, but the inclusion of controversial and conflictual questions can bring previously silenced young people into pedagogical conversations. Conflict resolution can easily be infused into literature, mathematics, and science classes as well
It is important to discuss sexuality with elementary students. Elementary teachers can help child... more It is important to discuss sexuality with elementary students. Elementary teachers can help children learn to share public space with people who are similar and different from themselves. This should include discussions of homosexual people. One reason to discuss sexuality in elementary schools is that it is already present in students' lives (via public spaces, media, and peer groups). Sexuality is present and visible in public images experienced by virtually all Western children, and value judgments are implicit in these images. Curriculum resource materials and teaching strategies employ these value-loaded images long before they admit to talking about sex. Gender role socialization, including the accompanying devaluation of homosexual identities, is an inevitable element of how children are guided to behave by the hidden curriculum of peer interaction and school activities. Often teachers who make independent choices to discuss this controversial issue are presumed homosexual and thereby at risk of job loss. There is no evidence that explicit sex education leads to increased sexual behavior, but teachers do not get much latitude to teach about sexuality. Questions of sex, gender, and homosexual identity can fit into elementary curriculum in many places. Many recent curricula emphasize respect and tolerance for diversity. The mini-society of elementary classrooms becomes more inclusive when all members respectfully interact with diverse individuals and unfamiliar ideas. (Contains 44 references.) (SM)
This paper discusses findings from focus groups with youth who attend schools located in underpri... more This paper discusses findings from focus groups with youth who attend schools located in underprivileged surroundings in one large multicultural city in Canada and in a moderately large city in México, examining their understandings and lived experiences of migration-related conflicts. In the Canadian context, participants framed these conflicts as a problem of racist attitudes towards immigrants in an otherwise welcoming city. In the Mexican context, emigration was understood as a questionable individual dream to overcome precarious economic conditions, which often brings about violence to those travelling and family fractures for those who stay. We identify the tensions between these dominant narratives about issues of transnational mobilityusually also present in intended curriculum-and students' first-hand, every day, local-globalized citizenship experiences with ('in' and 'out') migration in each setting. In addition, we examine youths' own imaginaries of citizenship, contrasting the sense of agency and identity positions they express in each of these differently situated but structurally connected contexts in the global pattern of migration. In doing so, this work shows the limited opportunities youth have to make sense of their lived (globalized) conflicts beyond their own localized cultural explanations. We argue that connecting the recognition of cultural differences and positions in the world with the power imbalances and historically structured global inequities revealed by issues such as migration is crucial for educational efforts in citizenship education on global issues. Migration is a window into the concrete realities of globalization-including conflicts between those who move and those who stay, competition for employment, movement of capital in search of cheap labor, and struggles for citizenship. Dominant discourses of mobility and education are epitomized by demands for global knowledge economy capabilities and by depoliticized notions of humanitarian ethics. However, young people's actual political, economic, and socio-cultural concerns and experiences of transnational mobility vary from place to place, revealing tensions with the usual intended school curriculum explaining this globalized world. In this paper, we explore how understandings of global mobility take different shape for youth in underprivileged spaces in urban Canada (global North, receiving immigrants) and México (global South, sending emigrants). Comparing the ways these youth locate themselves in relation to their actual experiences with migration-a shared global event, linked with important social conflicts in both contexts-, we argue, reveals something of how they imagine their own and others' citizenship in the face of transnational phenomena. This allows us to localize the experience of globalization in relation to specific spaces of citizenship, and thereby to challenge typical curriculum notions of globalization driven by hegemonic economic or cosmopolitan goals.
Building durable peace through education requires addressing the gender ideologies and hierarchie... more Building durable peace through education requires addressing the gender ideologies and hierarchies that encourage both direct physical aggression and indirect harm through marginalization and exploitation. Although formal education systems are shaped by gendered patterns of social conflict, enmity, and inequity, schools can help young people to build on their inclination, relationships, and capability to participate in building sustainable, gender-just peace. In this paper, we draw from focus group research conducted with youth and teachers in public schools in Mexico, Bangladesh, and Canada to investigate how young people understood the social conflicts and violence surrounding them and what citizens could do about these issues; and how their teachers used the school curricula to address them. The research revealed that gender-based violence was pervasive in students' lives in all three settings, yet the curriculum the teachers and students described, with minor differences between contexts, included few opportunities to examine or resist the gender norms, institutions, and hierarchies that are the roots of exploitation and violence.
2019 Conference of the Canadian Society for the Study of Education, Jan 27, 2019
This paper examines learning opportunities for peacebuilding offered in the context of daily less... more This paper examines learning opportunities for peacebuilding offered in the context of daily lessons in regular public schools surrounded by violence. Publicly funded schooling can exacerbate as well as mitigate direct and indirect systemic destructive conflict. Yet, public schools also provide opportunities for advancing democratic peacebuilding social transformation. What understandings and learning opportunities about the roles people could play in handling conflict and peace are embedded in local curriculum guidelines and in teachers’ implemented curriculum? How do these perspectives compare with young students’ understandings and concerns, rooted in lived experience of direct and indirect violence (and peace)? What promising building blocks emerge for peacebuilding education? The paper draws from a multi-year research project, “Peace-Building Citizenship Learning,” examining intersections and disjunctures between the lived experiences of youth (age 10-15) and their teachers’ implemented curriculum, in selected elementary and intermediate public schools in marginalized urban communities experiencing violence in Mexico, Bangladesh and Canada.
Theory and Research in Social Education, Jul 1, 2002
... Reviewed by KATHY BICKMORE, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of T... more ... Reviewed by KATHY BICKMORE, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, Canada M5S 1V6. ... Classroom structures make a difference: The same student may participate actively and feel comfortable in one classroom, but not in another (Phelan et. ...
Drawing upon focus group research with youth and teachers in selected Mexican, Bangladeshi, and C... more Drawing upon focus group research with youth and teachers in selected Mexican, Bangladeshi, and Canadian urban public schools, this chapter illustrates the intersecting direct (physical) and systemic (injustice-based) violence they endured. We theorize and probe ways ordinary school education may address the dimensions and causes of destructive conflict, to strengthen to young people’s capabilities to contribute to building sustainable just peace—demonstrating strengths in each context and a major gap common to all three.
An examination of six urban Canadian school districts' policies and cocurricular programs for saf... more An examination of six urban Canadian school districts' policies and cocurricular programs for safe and inclusive schools shows contrasting implicit patterns of citizenship education. Peacekeeping-oriented districts relied heavily on standardized control and exclusion to achieve school safety, and allocated few resources to affirming diversity. Peacemaking-oriented districts supplemented peacekeeping with some regularized opportunities for students to learn to manage conflict and diversity. Peacebuilding-oriented districts provided relatively comprehensive and inclusive programs of conflict management and anti-bias education, embracing conflict and diversity as natural learning opportunities. Clearly such system-level policy reflects prevailing understandings of problems that need fixing, not necessarily actual practice. The paper argues that the implicit, daily patterns of human relations and conflict management in school districts are powerful socializers, and powerful constraints on the explicit education for peacebuilding citizenship conducted in individual programs and classrooms.
This article examines the representation of conflict, diversity, peace, and justice issues in sel... more This article examines the representation of conflict, diversity, peace, and justice issues in selected mandated curriculum guidelines, grades 1 10, for three Canadian provinces. These curricula, grounded in prevailing assumptions, reflect political will and influence resource availability for teaching. Prominent among them is a neutral discourse invoking Canadian ideals of multiculturalism that emphasizes harmony, marginalizes conflict and critical viewpoints, and presents injustices as past or virtually resolved. Because relatively little attention is given to actual instances of social conflict, violence, or marginalization, these curricula limit students' opportunities to practice with constructive democratic conflict and peacebuilding.
This research examines the implementation and effects of a peer mediation program in twenty-eight... more This research examines the implementation and effects of a peer mediation program in twenty-eight urban elementary schook The Center for Conflict Resolution, a program of the Cleveland, Ohio, public school& provided intensive training and follow-up support for teams ofpeer mediators and adult advisers at each school. Trainers were youths ?om the same community. Qualitative and quantitative evidence indicate that this program significantly improved the average eightto eleven-year-old student? understanding of and inclination to use nonviolent conflict resolution and his or her capacity to achieve in school. The study outlines the speczjic commitments @om administrators and other staffmembers that were required to develop and implement equitable, efective, and sustainable programs. ntil the last few years, little systematic research was available regarding U the implementation or effectiveness of conflict resolution programs, including peer mediation, in schools. However, one kind of evidence has existed for years: on-the-ground educational practitioners' interest in and commitment to peer mediation has fbeled the rapid spread of these innovations. Educators have voted with their feet. Thousands and thousands of new programs have been adopted and diversified in schools across Ohio (Ohio Commission on Dispute Resolution and Conflict Management, 1997) as well as across the United States, Canada, and much of the world (CREnet/
In this appreciative response to Jennifer Hauver's article about elementary children's negotiatio... more In this appreciative response to Jennifer Hauver's article about elementary children's negotiation of analytic frames in deliberative dialogue during input into a school governance decision, Bickmore argues for the value of such agentic, citizenship-relevant learning opportunities in public schools. She points to their unfortunate infrequency (to the detriment of socially just democracy) in economically and racially marginalized communities. The concept of analytic frames is compared with the notion of interests-desires, needs, concerns, and ethical principles-underlying each party's proposals in integrative negotiated conflict resolution theory. Questions are raised about the roles played by cultural context and status inequalities within dialogue groups. Bickmore concludes that both Hauver's research methodology and her pedagogy of listening intently to children show enormous potential for enhancing transformative democratic education. This article is in response to Hauver, J. "State your defense!" Children negotiate analytic frames in the context of deliberative dialogue. " Democracy & Education, 25(2), Article 3.
Schools can play an important part in helping diverse young people see themselves as citizens. Th... more Schools can play an important part in helping diverse young people see themselves as citizens. This paper examines a broad range of school-based learning opportunities that influence young people's development of knowledge and inclinations for handling conflict. The ingredients for conflict resolution can be taught. Like violence, nonviolence is a learned behavior. As public concern over violence increases, school leaders often respond with what has been called "negative peacemaking," the premature use of bargaining or settlement procedures before underlying problems have been solved or understood. The goal is avoidance, not problem solving. In contrast, "positive liberty" procedures involve the presence of active democratic participation. These alternative emphases in education for citizenship are the conceptual framework for reviewing the research on a range of school-based conflict resolution training programs to examine the relative space given to negative peacemaking and positive liberty in school practices. Violence prevention and anti-bullying programs generally involve narrowly focused training in social skills and anger management. Many of these interventions single out particular populations, disproportionately ethnic minority males, considered to be "at-risk." School peer conflict resolution programs are popular, and, if properly presented, can move beyond negative peacemaking to broaden the positive liberty students experience. Making student governance activities relevant gives students the opportunity to engage in democratic decision making and helps develop an understanding of conflict and its resolution. Conflict resolution may be taught explicitly. Controversial subject matter may be damaging to some students without careful attention to inclusive and respectful instructional processes, but the inclusion of controversial and conflictual questions can bring previously silenced young people into pedagogical conversations. Conflict resolution can easily be infused into literature, mathematics, and science classes as well
It is important to discuss sexuality with elementary students. Elementary teachers can help child... more It is important to discuss sexuality with elementary students. Elementary teachers can help children learn to share public space with people who are similar and different from themselves. This should include discussions of homosexual people. One reason to discuss sexuality in elementary schools is that it is already present in students' lives (via public spaces, media, and peer groups). Sexuality is present and visible in public images experienced by virtually all Western children, and value judgments are implicit in these images. Curriculum resource materials and teaching strategies employ these value-loaded images long before they admit to talking about sex. Gender role socialization, including the accompanying devaluation of homosexual identities, is an inevitable element of how children are guided to behave by the hidden curriculum of peer interaction and school activities. Often teachers who make independent choices to discuss this controversial issue are presumed homosexual and thereby at risk of job loss. There is no evidence that explicit sex education leads to increased sexual behavior, but teachers do not get much latitude to teach about sexuality. Questions of sex, gender, and homosexual identity can fit into elementary curriculum in many places. Many recent curricula emphasize respect and tolerance for diversity. The mini-society of elementary classrooms becomes more inclusive when all members respectfully interact with diverse individuals and unfamiliar ideas. (Contains 44 references.) (SM)
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Papers by Kathy Bickmore