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…

Public education is one influence on how young people learn to navigate social conflicts and to contribute to building democratic peace, including their sense of hope or powerlessness. Social studies curricula, in particular, introduce core concerns, geographies, governance and civil society, and participation skills and norms. History education…

How do young people living in high-violence contexts express a sense of democratic agency and hope, and/or frustration and hopelessness, for handling various kinds of social and political conflict problems? The management of conflict is a core challenge and purpose of democracy, severely impeded by the isolation and distrust caused by violence.…

This paper discusses findings from focus groups with youth located in underprivileged surroundings in one large multicultural city in Canada and in a moderately large city in Mexico, examining their understandings and lived experiences of migration-related conflicts. Canadian participants framed these conflicts as a problem of racist attitudes…

Dialogue about social and political conflicts is a key element of democratic citizenship education that is frequently advocated in scholarship but rarely fully implemented, especially in classrooms populated by ethnically and economically heterogeneous students. Qualitative case studies describe the contrasting ways 2 primary and 2 middle-grade…

An examination of six urban Canadian school districts' policies and co-curricular 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.…

Knowledge and values for good citizenship are communicated through explicit subject-area curriculum, such as social studies, health, and language arts, and through the implicit models and practices embedded in a school's system of human rights protections and discipline practices. This paper presents the conceptual framework, and a few very early…

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…

Formal curriculum guidelines reflect prevailing understandings and political will, and help to shape the resources available for implemented curriculum. The understandings embodied in such public curriculum reinforce patterns of social violence and injustice, yet at the same time may provide diverse students with opportunities to develop…