Transformative and Peacebuilding Approaches to Interrupting Injustice: Reflecting on Teachers’ Classroom Praxes

Classroom teachers transmit values through the roles and relations of power their students inhabit within daily classroom activities. Teachers' relations to historical truths and global crises shape how they invite and facilitate students’ constructive study of multiple and challenging viewpoints. Done constructively, teachers’ pedagogies can facilitate the engagement with otherwise marginalized voices. However, where done poorly, such pedagogies can reinforce the social exclusion of those whose perspectives are unheard. Contentious issues, such as settler colonialism and sociopolitical conflicts, can become transformative pathways to educating students and building just and peaceful relationships. This kind of restorative justice approach, to centring equity through dialogue, challenges dominant neoliberal and conservative ideologies and can shift how educators approach and respond to conflict in ways that build peace and promote inclusion. In this interactive session we first present our respective viewpoints and perspectives on transformative and peacebuilding pedagogies in relation to the demand that education interrupt injustice, and then we invite audience members to join the conversation.