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. Publicly-funded schools can be (but often are not) part of the solution to such challenges (Bickmore, 2014; Davies, 2011). This paper is drawn from a larger ongoing project probing 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 marginalized 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. Citizenship, peacebuilding, and the role of formal education in contributing to each are contested, malleable ideas shaped by cultural, political, economic and social factors. Formal education is a project of nationstates, thus citizenship and peace-related education in publicly-funded schools often emphasizes nationalist loyalty and compliance to dominant norms, perhaps especially in countries affected by armed conflict (Bush & Saltarelli, 2000; Quaynor, 2012). Paradoxically, education is also associated with the development of democratic agency. Democratic processes are conflict management processes-deliberative dialogue and collective decisionmaking in the face of difference, disagreement and ideological struggle. To flourish, democracy requires an adequate level of social peace, just as building and sustaining just peace requires democracy. Democratic processes and roles (including legislative, judicial and communitarian-dialogic) are designed to prevent or redress violence by equitably handling social-political conflicts. Although they are inextricably connected, conflict analysis distinguishes violence (harmful actions and effects) from the conflicts that underlie them (the disagreements, competing needs, and factors provoking or encouraging those actions), in order to focus on solvable problems more than symptoms. Beyond the presence or absence of direct violence, social conflicts have two crucial dimensions: social-structural concerns revolving around tangible interests (competing desires and needs, such as access to natural resources or economic opportunities), and psycho-cultural concerns embedded in beliefs, narratives, and interpretive elements of relationships such as (dis)trust or bias (Ross, 1993, 2010). Another dimension sha...

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The notions of democracy, peace-building and citizenship are all contested and multifaceted in the literature in terms of their meaning and their application in schools and other learning settings. This article is an attempt to explore the trajectories of democracy, peace-building and citizenship education in conflict zones, societies transitioning out of violent conflict and relatively democratic societies. After delving into the intersectionality of democracy, peace-building and citizenship education, the article highlights essential theoretical and practical peace-building citizenship approaches including education for humanization, human rights education, culturally relevant pedagogy and pedagogy of hope. In addition the author theorizes the components essential for the attainability of democratic peace-building citizenship education.

This article presents a six-session course the author developed as an integral part of a doctoral research to explore two small groups of teachers’ initial understandings of democratic peacebuilding citizenship through eliciting their narratives of practice and their emerging understandings after voluntarily participating in this non-formal professional learning initiative. Another aim of the study was to explore how their involvement in the course facilitated their own professional learning. Teacher participants were from different private schools in two relatively contrasting contexts, one in the Greater Cairo Area in Egypt and one in the Greater Toronto Area in Canada. This course sets an exemplary participatory approach to inform future research in teacher professional learning for democratic peacebuilding citizenship education in post-conflict zones, societies transitioning out of violent conflict and relatively democratic societies.

Education for democratic peacebuilding citizenship includes four essential components: handling conflict, practising dialogue, recognizing diversity, and building a pedagogical community. Teachers can help one another to interpret, to learn, and to implement these pedagogical practice dimensions, in order to equip their students with democratic agency and values to participate in peacebuilding social change. This comparative case study research examines how two groups of private school teachers-four in the Greater Cairo area and three in the Greater Toronto area-voluntarily embarked on two journeys of non-formal professional learning to improve their teaching for democratic peace. The researcher developed and facilitated a six-session collaborative, reflective dialogic professional learning course for democratic peacebuilding, and studied each group of teachers' pedagogical practices. Introduction, Problem Statement and Research ObjectivesAn integral part of the peacebuilding process, during and after armed conflict, is to (re-)establish infrastructure to (re-)build healthy relationships and to nurture creative ideas and mutual understanding for social transformation (Maiese, 2003;Lambourne, 2004;Gill & Niens, 2014). Teachers are the cornerstone of schooling, who can effectively assume roles to support social change (Ginsburg & Kamat, 2009). Teachers who are transformative intellectuals view their students (and themselves) as democratic agents, question processes of knowledge production, and engage in dialogue to enhance critical knowledge building for themselves and their students (Giroux & McLaren, 1986). However, at present teachers themselves find scarce opportunities to engage in this very kind of authentic, active, dialogic