Peacebuilding, Citizenship, and Identity

As communities around the world continue toattract international immigrants, schools have become centers for learning howto engage with people’s multiple ethnic and cultural origins. Ethnoculturalminority immigrant students carry diverse histories and perspectives—which canserve as resources for critical reflection about social conflicts. Thesestudents’ identities need to be included in the curriculum so that diversityand conflictual issues can be openly discussed.

Immigrant children embody the many issuesconfronting today’s youth in a global, transnational, and interconnected world.Drawing on in-depth empirical case studies, this book explores the classroomexperiences of these children. Varying in social and cultural capital, theycontend with social and cultural conflict influenced not only by globalpolitics and familial prejudices, but also by structural exclusion in Westerncurricula.

In democratic peacebuilding education, diversestudents express divergent points of view in open, inclusive dialogue.Negotiating their multiple identities, such children develop skills formanaging and responding to that conflict, thereby acquiring tools to challengedominant hegemonic systems of oppression and control later in life.

In vivid classroom depictions, the reader learnsof many outcomes: Young, quiet, and marginalized voices were heard. Dialogicpedagogies encouraged cooperation among students and strengthened classcommunities. What is more, the implicit and explicit curricula implemented inthese diverse classrooms served to shape how students interpreted democracy inmulticultural Canada.

The diverse experiences of the young people andteachers in this book illuminate the innermost landscapes of multiculturalclassrooms, providing deep insight into the social and cultural challenges andopportunities that ethnocultural minority children experience at school.