Community engagement

Abstract

Violent conflicts, resistance movements, and the humanitarian crises that are taking place across the globe reflect a need for peace and conflict studies to teach students about how to address social injustice and institutionalized oppression. Therefore, the purpose of this Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis study was to gain insights into peace and conflict studies' challenges in providing students critically reflective, experiential, and transformational learning opportunities for community engagement-based service-learning to preemptively address social injustice and institutionalized oppression. As such the research questions were structured to gain insights into how peace and conflict studies education is integrating service-learning, critical theories, and experiential and transformational learning to empower students to question the influence of the social order on perpetuating social injustice and institutionalized oppression. Through phenomenological interviews, this study explored the experiences of five peace and conflict studies educators. The study's five superordinate and nineteen subordinate themes revealed that the current education is inadequately using community engagement-based service-learning to provide students critically reflective, experiential and transformative education to help them learn about how to help communities in addressing the issues of social injustice and institutionalized oppression. This is probably the only study based on the experiences of peace and conflict studies educators and there is a dearth of literature regarding the use of community engagement for providing students experiential and transformative learning that is based on Critical Race theory. The study includes implications and recommendations that are associated with the paradigm shift that the education in peace and conflict studies needs to undertake. Keywords: community engagement, peace and conflict studies,critical race theory, experiential learning, institutionalized oppression, service-learning. social injustice, transformative learning