Engaging with teachers’ difficult knowledge, seeking moral repair: the entanglement of moral and peace education

ABSTRACT

The paper explores how might teacher educators engage with teachers’ difficult knowledge and negotiate competing moral truths, when this effort obviously fails to provide adequate ‘answers’ or ‘solutions’. Although the paper is theoretical, this question’s point of departure is an incident from a series of teacher workshops in Cyprus. The question is explored from the vantage of two thinkers, Deborah Britzman and Margaret Walker, who, in different ways, theorize the moral challenges of engaging with difficult knowledge in ways that disrupt stereotypical categories of victims and perpetrators. It is argued that drawing on Britzman and Walker offers a pedagogical theory in peace and moral education that is less about offering definitive answers and settling the questions of moral wrongdoing and more about ‘staying with the trouble’, that is, staying with difficulty for regenerating thinking around issues of morality and peace education. The paper concludes by suggesting under what conditions peace education may function as transformative moral education.

KEYWORDS:

• Peace education
• moral education
• difficult knowledge
• moral repair

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The history of Cyprus is marked by the so-called Cyprus Issue, referring to the strife between the island’s two main ethnolinguistic communities – the Greek-Cypriot majority (about 80%) and the sizeable Turkish-Cypriot minority (about 18%). Following a period of interethnic violence in the 1960s, the conflict culminated in 1974 with a Turkish military operation, which resulted in extensive relocations and in the island’s de facto partition into two ethnically homogenized parts: the Republic of Cyprus, which controls the southern part and is practically dominated by the Greek-Cypriots; and the ‘Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus’ (1983), a formation that was declared legally invalid by the U.N. and is recognized only by Turkey. Despite the ongoing negotiations for a settlement under the auspices of the U.N., the partition still remains in place. However, since 2003, the opening of a few checkpoints in the buffer zone has allowed relative freedom of movement across the dividing line. The official narratives of the two communities in Cyprus provide competing perspectives of what happened in the past. The Greek-Cypriots view the Turkish military operation of 1974 as an issue of illegal invasion and ongoing occupation of the northern part of Cyprus and as evidence of Turkish aggression and expansionism, while the Turkish-Cypriots view 1974 as a ‘peace operation’ that saved them from the hands of Greek-Cypriots under which Turkish-Cypriots suffered, especially in the 1960s.

2. An important distinction between morality and ethics needs to be made from the outset of this paper. Although these terms are often used interchangeably, there is an important distinction that should be preserved in this paper. Morality and morals refer to principles and beliefs of an individual or a group regarding what is right and wrong. Ethics refer to the values (goods) which help an individual or a group decide what is right or wrong. In other words, whereas the moral pertains to what is right, the ethical pertains to what a group values as good. We are indebted to one of the anonymous reviewers for suggesting that this distinction be made clear.

3. An important distinction that is made in moral and ethical theory, especially pertaining to the philosophy of justice, is that between ideal and non-ideal theory. Ideal theory refers to the construction and justification of moral principles and norms; non-ideal theory refers to the question of how to respond to violations of those norms (see, e.g. Rawls’ theory of justice). In this paper, we are working in the area of non-ideal theory, as our focus is on how to respond to moral violation in terms of moral repair (i.e. Walker’s dynamic nature of morality). We are thankful to one of the anonymous reviewers for suggesting this distinction.

4. There are, of course, cases in which the distinction between perpetrators and victims is much more clear such as the Nazis and Jews in Second World War or Whites and Blacks in apartheid South Africa. In these cases, the challenge for moral repair is much more difficult; time, acknowledgement of fault and responsibility, apology or amends are some responses that could help reestablish moral relationships between victims and perpetrators, although there is never assurance that moral repair will be achieved, if these measures are taken (Walker 2006).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michalinos Zembylas

Michalinos Zembylas is Professor of Educational Theory and Curriculum Studies at the Open University of Cyprus. He is also Honorary Professor at Nelson Mandela University in the Chair for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation.He has written extensively on emotion and affect in relation tosocial justice pedagogies, intercultural and peace education, human rights education and citizenship education. His recent books include: Psychologized Language in Education: Denaturalizing a Regime of Truth (with Z. Bekerman), and Socially Just Pedagogies in Higher Education (co-edited with V. Bozalek, R. Braidotti, and T. Shefer). In 2016, he received the Distinguished Researcher Award in “Social Sciences and Humanities” from the Cyprus Research Promotion Foundation.

Zvi Bekerman

Zvi Bekerman teaches anthropology of education at the School of Education, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and is a faculty member at the Mandel Leadership Institute in Jerusalem. His main interests are in the study of cultural, ethnic and national identity, including identity processes and negotiation during intercultural encounters and in formal/informal learning contexts. He is particularly interested in how concepts such as culture and identity intersect with issues of social justice, intercultural and peace education, and citizenship education