Our Publications | Peacebuilding Education

Please contact Kathy Bickmore to request any of the following papers in accessible Word (.docx) format.

Positive Peace in Schools

Keeping, Making, and Building Peace in School (PDF)

Bickmore, Kathy (2015). The ways conflicts are managed in classrooms and schools constitute a powerful hidden curriculum of citizenship — modeling, sanctioning, and guiding practice in particular relations of authority, status, and decision making. Analysis of policy and programming documents and over 90 interviews in three big-city Canadian school districts describes divergent priorities and tensions among three coexisting types of conflict management: peacekeeping (security control), peacemaking (resolution dialogue), and peacebuilding (justice transformation).

Citizenship and convivencia education in contexts of violence: Transnational challenges to peacebuilding education in Mexican schools (PDF)

Nieto, Diego & Bickmore, Kathy (2016). This paper examines teachers’ understandings of social conflicts, and their reported implemented curriculum, based on a series of focus group workshops with 5-6 teachers in each of 3 schools in marginalized, violent neighborhoods in one Mexican city. We argue that the imaginaries of conflict and democratic action shaping participants’ teaching practices are influenced by neoliberal discourses of citizenship, but we highlight some promising instances of dialogue and collective action lessons. This article is also available online in Spanish

Student Leadership Opportunities for Making ‘Peace’ in Canada’s Urban Schools: Contradictions in Practice (PDF)

Bickmore, Kathy & MacDonald, Angela (2010). Qualitative research on the range of anti-violence and peacebuilding-related programming in three large, diverse school districts illuminated contrasting approaches to student participation: teachers and administrators empowered differing sub-sets of students as ‘leaders,’ in differing ways, to help reduce violence and build peer conflict management capacity. The contrasting student roles that were implemented imply differing understandings of ‘peace’ and of citizenship.

Circle Dialogue Processes in Elementary Classrooms: Locations for Restorative and Educative Work (PDF)

Bickmore, Kathy (2013). Many restorative opportunities are relegated to the marginal curriculum of discipline, involving a few students outside the classroom rather than engaging a wider range of students, consistently, in discussing conflicts openly as learning opportunities. To consider what dialogic peacebuilding learning opportunities may look like when they are implemented in state-funded schools (in classrooms and beyond), and their consequences for diverse students, this chapter examines the ways three elementary teachers infused restorative talking-circle dialogues and related conflict education into regular, implemented curriculum and classroom practices.

Classroom peace circles: Teachers’ professional learning and implementation of restorative dialogue

Parker, Christina & Bickmore, Kathy (2020). Teachers’ implementation of restorative practices increased engagement of quieter and English language learner students;Preparation (for the content and the process) of questions teachers asked made a difference; Elicitation of talk about social conflicts in planned curriculum content increased opportunities for peacemaking dialogue; Coaching and mentorship beyond professional development training needed for supporting teachers to implement restorative practices.

Complexity in restorative justice education circles: Power and privilege in voicing perspectives about sexual health, identities, and relationships (PDF)

Parker, Christina & Bickmore, Kathy (2020). The focus of this article is on one teacher’s approach to using restorative justice peacemaking circles in teaching her intermediate health curriculum unit, situated in a school with a strong restorative justice initiative. In this restorative classroom, dialogue was integrated into regularly enacted academic as well as interpersonal curriculum; this interrupted, or at times reaffirmed, the status quo, relating to sexual health, inclusive sexual identities, and sociocultural relationships.

Peacebuilding Citizenship in Classroom Curriculum

Gender-based Aggression and Peacebuilding at School: Youths’ Experiences in Mexico, Bangladesh, and Canada.

Bickmore, Kathy & Kishani, Najme (2022). Building durable peace requires addressing the gender ideologies and hierarchies that encourage both direct physical aggression and indirect harm through marginalization and exploitation. This paper draws from focus group research with youth and teachers in Mexican, Bangladeshi and Canadian public schools. Gender-based violence was pervasive in students’ lives in all these settings. Yet, the experienced curriculum that teachers and students described included only few opportunities to examine or resist the gender norms, institutions, and hierarchies at the roots of exploitation and violence

Teaching Social Justice Amidst Violence: Youth and Enacted Curricula in Canada, Bangladesh, and México (PDF)

Bickmore, Kathy & Fathallah, Rim (2022). 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.

Globalized Local Environmental Conflicts in Mexican and Canadian Youths’ Lives and Schooling: Silenced Citizenship Questions (PDF)

Bickmore, Kathy & Barrero Jaramillo, Diana (2022). This paper focuses on the lived citizenship perspectives of economically marginalized youth in one Mexican and one Canadian city, and their experienced classroom curriculum, in state-funded schools in economically marginalized areas in the global South and North—about social conflicts in which tangible material (resource) interests are prominent. We listen to the students’ understandings of environmental and economic conflicts they experienced locally, and what they believed citizens like themselves could do to mitigate or transform the roots of those conflicts.

Teaching Values for Comprehensive Just Peace? Teachers’ Curricula for Social Cohesion in México, Bangladesh and Canada (PDF)

Bickmore, Kathy, & Kaderi, Ahmed Salehin (2021). This chapter compares the ways several classroom teachers, in state-funded schools in Bangladesh, Canada and Mexico, endeavored to foster peaceful, democratic social relations across relevant social differences and inequalities—illustrating alternative (narrow or broad-based) approaches to values education for building peace. Within each context, most teachers’ enacted curriculum presented values uni-dimensionally, emphasizing compliant tolerance. Some teaching, however, connected social cohesion values with democratic justice foundations for sustainable peace.

Voices of Canadian and Mexican youth surrounded by violence: Learning experiences for peace-building citizenship (PDF)

Bickmore, Kathy, Yomna Awad & Angelica Radjenovic (2017). This paper probes the (mis)fit between young people’s lived citizenship and conflict experiences, and their school-based opportunities to develop democratic peace building capacities, in non-affluent local contexts surrounded by violence, in international comparative perspective. We report on focus group conversations with several small groups of students, ages 10-15, in 2 Canadian and 4 Mexican schools in non-affluent urban areas. Diverse participating young people tended to have a stronger sense of agency and hope in relation to some kinds of conflicts (such as environmental pollution) compared to others (such as unemployment and insecure work or drug-gang violence). In general, they did not feel that their lived citizenship knowledge was much valued or built upon in school.

Immigration and emigration: Canadian and Mexican youth making sense of a globalized conflict (PDF)

Nieto, Diego, & Bickmore, Kathy (2017). 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 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.

Creating capacities for peacebuilding citizenship: history and social studies curricula in Bangladesh, Canada, Colombia, and México (PDF)

Bickmore, Kathy, Ahmed Salehin Kaderi & Ángela Guerra-Sua (2017). This paper examines government-sanctioned social studies and history curricula in contrasting contexts of violent conflict and peace: Bangladesh, Colombia, México, and (Ontario) Canada. Our comparative analysis shows how these official curricula (de)normalize violence and militarism, present national identities as hegemonic/ exclusive or plural/ inclusive, and create opportunities for teaching/learning peacebuilding citizenship competencies such as conflict dialogue, human rights awareness, and engagement in collective processes of civil society and governance.

Artículos en Español

¿Cómo se maneja el conflicto, para permitir la construcción de una paz sostenible, en la educación ciudadana cotidiana? Perspectivas de jóvenes y profesores mexicanos afectados por la violencia. (PDF)

Bickmore, Kathy (2022). ¿Cómo comprenden los y las jóvenes estudiantes los conflictos sociales arraigadas en sus experiencias vividas de la violencia? Esta investigación muestra que existen espacios educativos viables para una ciudadanía democrática, constructora de la paz sostenible, en el currículo ordinario de las aulas escolares.

Políticas y programas para escuelas más seguras: ¿Las medidas “contra el bullying” obstruyen a la educación para la construcción de paz? (PDF)

Bickmore, Kathy (2013). Este estudio examina las prácticas contrastantes en relación a las iniciativas de seguridad, y a las prácticas de manejo de conflictos, implementadas en escuelas con mayor o menor grado de relaciones pacíficas. Señala unas redefiniciones potenciales de las políticas institucionales, con el fin de fomentar la construcción de la paz en las escuelas de una manera sustentable.

Enseñando Resolución de Conflictos por Medio de la Currícula Explícita y Implícita (PDF)

Bickmore, Kathy (2001). Como la violencia, la no violencia es un comportamiento aprendido. Puede ser enseñado. Los jóvenes aprenden acerca del manejo de conflictos tanto en las lecciones dentro de las aulas (el currículo explicita), así como en el “currículo implícita,” que incluye actividades estudiantiles, gobierno escolar, participación en eventos políticos y prácticas disciplinarias

Oportunidades de Liderazgo Estudiantil para Alcanzar la ‘Paz’ en las Escuelas Urbanas de Canadá: Contradicciones en la Práctica (PDF)

Bickmore, Kathy & MacDonald, Angela (2010). La gama de programas de lucha contra la violencia en tres distritos escolares canadienses sacó a la luz formas muy contrastadas de aproximarse a la participación estudiantil. Este artículo demuestra las oportunidades desiguales que tienen los estudiantes diversos para desarrollar su agencia de ciudadana y construir una paz democrática sostenible.