Thursday, August 18, 2011

CRITICAL PEACE PEDAGOGY & CRITICAL PEACE EDUCATION – a reflection


Critical peace pedagogy & critical peace education cannot be divorced from one another.

Critical peace education is the result of applying critical peace pedagogy to issues about the development and degradation of peace.

Critical pedagogy is focused on providing students with the skills that make possess the capacity to critically analyse their realities with the aim of reaching realizations that can help them positively effect transformation of the realities. Freire’s concept of praxis has had a great influence on the practice of critical pedagogy. Learners are guided to critically examine local realities, thus understand why things are the way they are, how they came to be, use this information to deduce what can possibly be done to change them for the better.

Instead of dealing with generalizations, and issues in the global context, critical pedagogy aims at cultivating critical consciousness in learners by guiding them to analyse local realities through in-depth research and critical examination.

Empowerment of the learner (through building in him/her the capacity for critical analysis) is strongly linked to social transformation. It is only empowered citizenry that can question their realities, and thereby effect positive transformation upon reflection.

Critical peace education uses critical pedagogy to guide learners to examine societal institutions, and how power imbalances create structural violence in the society.

1 comment:

  1. Ibrahim,

    I agree with you. I think that students will be more connected to any curriculum if they see how it relates to their world. For example, we can study about wars and conflicts outside our own country which is all well and good. However, I think for young people it is more important to focus on their immediate environment.

    Gwen

    ReplyDelete

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This work by Ibrahim K. Oyekanmi (mallamibro@gmail.com) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.