Partnering for Transformation in Schools and Beyond: Community-Engaged Learning in Peace, Social Justice, and Human Rights Education

This comprehensive book offers both theoretical and practical guidance for understanding and enacting community-engaged learning through peace, social justice, and human rights education.

With a focus on new directions in peace, social justice, and human rights education, this book examines how local communities engage in collaboration with scholars and practitioners to advance these educational approaches and movements. Chapters from educators, artists, researchers, students, and community-based organizations from across the globe highlight the challenges and possibilities of implementing community-engaged praxis in diverse sites and contexts. The authors conceptualize community-engaged partnerships in many ways, including collaborative participation in social movements, school programs, extracurricular clubs, research projects, arts initiatives, youth development opportunities, higher educational initiatives, and civic actions. The volume provides a broad array of community-based exemplars to illustrate the varied ways in which peace and human rights education can positively transform communities locally and globally.

Book Features:

• Examines how diverse educational spaces are being reimagined through community-engaged partnerships and initiatives, with the goal of creating a more equitable and socially just world.
• Offers a range of writing, including empirical case studies, research projects, reflective essays, theoretical treatises, and methodological insights.
• Disrupts top-down initiatives by centering local knowledges in the acts of transformation and liberation.
• Explores the intersections of critical peace education, social justice education, and human rights education to provide a bridge for those working at the nexus of these fields.
• All three editors are actively engaged in professional development with educators, universities, and K–12 schools, as well as community-based organizations.

Sandra Sirota is assistant professor in residence of experiential global learning and human rights and director of the Human Rights Close to Home program at the University of Connecticut. Amy Argenal is an assistant teaching professor of sociology in community-engaged learning and research at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Maria Hantzopoulos is professor of education at Vassar College, coordinator of Adolescent Education, and director of the International Studies program.