Book Summary: Bringing together the voices of scholars and practitioners on challenges and possibilities of implementing peace education in diverse global sites, this book addresses key questions for students seeking to deepen their understanding of the field. The book not only highlights groundbreaking and rich qualitative studies from around the globe, but also analyses the limits and possibilities of peace education in diverse contexts of conflict and post-conflict societies. Contributing authors address how educators and learners can make meaning of international peace education efforts, how various forms of peace and violence interact in and around schools, and how the field of peace education has evolved and grown over the past four decades. Chapter Summary: By using data on school violence from field research in Trinidad and Tobago (TT), I argue that "in the knowledge production of 'school violence,' 'school' is subtracted as a descriptive [term], and in its place is hoisted the category of 'youth,' inscribed as the 'Other,' the predominant signifier of violence." In so doing, the predominating discourse about what constitutes school violence itself, and its drivers/'causes,' takes on a limiting and individualizing nature. As a result, the principal interventions that emanate from such a discourse are correspondingly narrow and therefore fail to reveal the structural violence in which "youth violence in school" is embedded. I posit this discursive violence as a lingering coloniality, and thus, as a blockade to the implementation of sustainable peace education in TT's schools.
Zero tolerance, punitive and more negative peace-oriented approaches dominate school violence interventions, despite research indicating that comprehensive approaches are more sustainable. In this article, I use data from a longitudinal case study at a Trinidadian secondary school to focus on the role of teachers and their impact on school violence; I show that institutional constraints are not fully deterministic, as teachers sometimes deploy their agency to efficacious ends. In combining Noddings' postulations on care and Freire's notions of praxis as a symbiosis of reflection and action, I explicate the nascent praxes of care of six teachers at this school, as they strive for more positive peace-oriented approaches to school violence. I characterize these praxes as nascent because they are not fully interrogative of the structural violence of the entire system. However, I do argue that these nascent praxes possess decolonizing and transgressive potentiality in the face of a logic of coloniality that reinforces hierarchy, exclusion, and marginalization in the Trinidadian educational system. I conclude by contending that these nascent praxes must be scaled-up to more mature, radical praxes, including the cultivation of a systemic praxis of care; in other words, a deeper and broader postcolonial peace education.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.