Consortium for Peace Studies

Workplace conflict is a significant issue for community service professionals. As more professions work toward developing interdisciplinary teams and culturally responsive practices, the potential for the escalation of conflict may increase as different professional value systems and conflict management strategies converge. However, although they are often expected to respond proficiently to conflicts, many community service professionals may not have had sufficient training in policies, practices, and structures that can provide alternative and transformative approaches to conflict management in diverse contexts. This article presents results of an exploratory study with interdisciplinary community service students who took part in a conflict resolution course at a diverse university in a metropolitan city in southern Ontario, Canada. The findings show that most of these community service–related professionals dealt with conflict on a daily basis, much of which was escalated by cultural conflict, lack of professional resources and development, and limited training in transformative peacebuilding practices. Most participants found that cultural diversity and gender influenced how they responded to conflicts in their various settings. The findings have important implications for how issues of culture and diversity are addressed and included in conflict resolution training programs.

As communities around the world continue to attract international immigrants, schools have become centers for learning how to engage with people’s multiple ethnic and cultural origins. Ethnocultural minority immigrant students carry diverse histories and perspectives—which can serve as resources for critical reflection about social conflicts. These students’ identities need to be included in the curriculum so that diversity and conflictual issues can be openly discussed.

Immigrant children embody the many issues confronting today’s youth in a global, transnational, and interconnected world. Drawing on in-depth empirical case studies, this book explores the classroom experiences of these children. Varying in social and cultural capital, they contend with social and cultural conflict influenced not only by global politics and familial prejudices, but also by structural exclusion in Western curricula.

In democratic peacebuilding education, diverse students express divergent points of view in open, inclusive dialogue. Negotiating their multiple identities, such children develop skills for managing and responding to that conflict, thereby acquiring tools to challenge dominant hegemonic systems of oppression and control later in life.

In vivid classroom depictions, the reader learns of many outcomes: Young, quiet, and marginalized voices were heard. Dialogic pedagogies encouraged cooperation among students and strengthened class communities. What is more, the implicit and explicit curricula implemented in these diverse classrooms served to shape how students interpreted democracy in multicultural Canada.

The diverse experiences of the young people and teachers in this book illuminate the innermost landscapes of multicultural classrooms, providing deep insight into the social and cultural challenges and opportunities that ethnocultural minority children experience at school.

Understanding generational diversity has important implications for building capacities for developing healthy intergenerational relations and social cohesion, and for challenging oppression. Preparing young people in urban communities to understand and empathize with older adults could have lasting benefits for engaging community members and families to come together to transform culturally divided urban spaces. This qualitative research project drew on arts-based approaches to examine how dialogue between youth and older adults in a community-based theatre education program sought to lessen intergenerational and intercultural divides. While forum theatre is widely used to challenge oppression, this article considers how it could also lead to further exclusion of marginalized voices, if facilitators and participants are both inadequately prepared to engage in dialogue. It offers practical suggestions for community educators in diverse urban settings, particularly in the use and application of the arts.

Ethnocultural minority immigrant students carry diverse histories, perspectives, and experiences, which can serve as resources for critical reflection and discussion about social conflicts. Inclusion of diverse students’ identities in the curriculum requires acknowledgement and open discussion of diversity and conflictual issues. In democratic peacebuilding education, diverse students are encouraged to express divergent points of view in open, inclusive dialogue. This ethnographic study with a critical perspective examined how three teachers in urban public elementary school classrooms with ethnocultural minority firstand second-generation immigrant students (aged 9 to 13) implemented different kinds of curriculum content and pedagogy, and how those pedagogies facilitated or impeded inclusive democratic experiences for various students. In these classrooms, peers and teachers shared similar and different cultural backgrounds and migration histories. Data included 110 classroom obser...