Partnering for Transformation in Schools and Beyond

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.

“Partnering for Transformation in Schools and Beyond is a timely contribution that powerfully demonstrates how community-engaged learning can reanimate peace, social justice, and human rights education as lived, relational, and transformative praxis. By bringing together diverse voices and contexts, the volume offers both critical depth and practical insight, making it an invaluable resource for scholars, educators, and community partners committed to education as a catalyst for social change.”
—Michalinos Zembylas, professor of education, Open University of Cyprus

“Community-engaged praxis is central to the transformative promise of peace, human rights, and social justice education. This timely and path-breaking book offers deep insight into the theories that undergird community engagement, as well as chapters that offer evidence-based examples from university, school, and community-based partnerships. This must-read book offers a conceptual and pragmatic guide for all who believe in the emancipatory potential and power of education.”
—Monisha Bajaj, professor and chair of international and multicultural education at the University of San Francisco, and coauthor of Humanizing Education for Immigrant and Refugee Youth

“This book is an important read for educators and activists engaged in community partnerships. The authors collectively reveal essential conditions for critical, liberatory praxis in community settings, including the centering of local and marginalized voices; decoloniality; disruption of hierarchy; and reflective practices of knowledge, courage, care, and imagination.”
—Felisa Tibbitts, Chair in Human Rghts Education and UNESCO Chair in Human Rights and Higher Education, Utrecht University (Netherlands)

“’Community-engaged learning’ and ‘transformation’ almost have been standardized as parts of undergraduate education in the U.S., with multiple meanings, intentions, purposes, and goals. What’s unique about the multiple engagements presented by the contributors to this edition? They offer both deeper meanings and individual and institutional implications, as interrelated and necessary elements of taken-for-granted concepts like identity, community, and engagement. This body of work updates some decades-earlier understandings of education as resistance and a method for progressive social change by emphasizing liberation as a collective endeavor and outcome and reframing the role of schools and teachers as activist accompaniment.”
—Margo Okazawa-Rey, professor emerita of social work, San Francisco State University

“In these challenging times when the foundational principles of peace, social justice, and human rights are being threatened worldwide, we all urgently need this book as a guide for moving forward. Partnering for Transformation in Schools and Beyond stands out in uniquely bridging classrooms and communities, educators and artists, scholars and activists on a path toward liberation.”
—Susan Roberta Katz, professor emerita, international and multicultural education, University of San Francisco