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…

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…

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.…

Democratic dispositions and skills can be taught by giving students complex political questions to address thoughtfully. Social studies curriculum in North America is constructed around avoiding controversy and thus suffers from a narrow and sometimes stifling viewpoint. The core of the historical narrative presented in public schools has been…

Contends that pluralistic democracy relies on conflict of ideas and participative decision making. Reports on case studies of two different approaches to teaching world studies. Finds that both approaches encouraged students to participate actively, but others remained silent during the discussion. (CFR)

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…

Drawing on two case studies from a larger qualitative study of four public high school teachers modeling conflict-management approaches in their social-studies classrooms, this article focuses on teachers' treatment of a key concept (the idea of rights) that captures the individual's confrontation with the political society. Tolerance and…

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…

This research involves case studies of four public high school teachers handling and modeling the problem of inclusion in their social studies classrooms. In interpreting and implementing social studies curriculum, teachers represent to their students particular images of citizenship, leadership, and the political system in which these are…

What does it mean to teach children to be "good citizens," for example, in conflict resolution and service learning activities? This study addressed that question by examining contrasting conceptions of "good citizenship" that were enacted in several peer conflict mediation programs implemented in urban elementary schools. In…

Thanks to the Winning against Violent Environments (WAVE) mediation program, many of Cleveland, Ohio's public high school students have the right and responsibility to resolve most of their own conflicts, nonviolently, with peer assistance instead of adult punishment. WAVE allows adults to work on educational tasks and students to develop…