Authors: Anne Ryan and Tony Walsh
Suddenly the images of the bombed ruins of a Gaza shop front, perhaps a café, flashed across the news screens. Rags of ruined blinds fluttered in the breeze.
Instantly I was back in a narrow, busy laneway in old Jerusalem and a sidewalk café fifteen years ago. We[1] were visiting Jerusalem as part of an educational research project. Blissfully relaxing in the sun’s heat and watching, watching as the multi-coloured crush of people in the narrow medieval street streamed by. Dark clothed and somber, Hasidic men bent purposefully towards prayer; camera toting tourists eyed them curiously as they wandered, talking, looking. Groups of Palestinian women laughing, chatting, baskets full of produce came from the market. Bright eyed kids racing in and out; swift arrows of colour between the adult crowds. Handcarts and motor bikes threaded a hazardous way down the street. A bizarre stream of Western pilgrims appeared toting a large cross, responding to a loud rosary. The midday call to prayer resounded from a nearby minaret mingling with their words. Each group seemed insulated, bounded in their own reality. The smells of roasting coffee beans, strong mint tea and frying meat next door mingled – sensory overload, as pungent aromas and noise, noise, noise enveloped us.
A group of Israeli soldiers stopped at the corner. They propped their machine guns against the wall and they surveyed the crowds – and us. One addressed his peers in loud New York tones. They were young and jumpy …and very, very near. Suddenly there was an explosive bang close-by. The soldiers grabbed their guns. The streaming crowds froze. Fear chilled our faces, congealed our limbs. And moments of time passed slowly by…. That time it was only a back-fire. Minutes later life returned to normal; the crowds streamed swiftly on their way.
We have often recalled that day packed as it was with so much to marvel at and so much to fear. We have often wondered what bearing these experiences coupled with current events in Palestine and global conflicts in general should have on how we approach education?
We have been writing about and researching education for many decades. Essentially, we believe that education’s main purpose is to help learners to understand their world, so that they are empowered to transform what is oppressive rather than accept it or adapt to it[2]. This includes understanding why conflict exists and what might be reasonable and appropriate responses to that conflict. We also believe that mainstream education often leaves learners ill equipped to either understand or address big global challenges such as war.
We believe that if education focused on understanding how power operates in society – and between societies – it would enable a far more fluent appreciation of the complex nature of human experience and particularly of conflict. It would raise awareness of how individuals, groups, nations become positioned in relation to each other. And would emphasize how conflict – and most particularly conflict interventions – require an understanding of these positions.
It seems to us that education that interrogates power is ever more needed in a world where disinformation and misinformation are increasingly evident and where what is ‘true’, what is ‘good’, what is ‘right’ are far from clear cut.
Even as we watch the awful events unfold in Palestine our thoughts often return to that day at the café in Jerusalem where we observed something of the overt nature of power. It was explicitly expressed in the actions and demeanour of the soldiers. They had the guns. Their power, although apparently placidly accepted by those going about their daily lives, was nevertheless fragile. The response to the ‘back-fire’ that could have been a gun shot or a bomb blast spoke of an awareness of the potential of resistance and challenge to the existing order that the soldiers were protecting.
Power is of course not always so easily observed. Mostly it is hidden, occluded within the everyday. We believe that a vital task of education is to reveal those occluded dynamics of power, marginalisation and oppression – those ‘on-going repetitive citations of the known order, citations that offer some a viable life and at the same time deny it to others’ (Davies 2008, 173)[3]. Without an emphasis on the interrogation of power education becomes mere compliance ‘a process of transferring the values and practices which are embedded in a specific culture and are particularly associated with the assumptions, values and maintenance of the power elites of that society.’[4]
[1] The ‘we’ refers to Tony Walsh and Anne Ryan who in partnership with the administrative and academic staff in the University of Bethlehem explored the challenges and opportunities inherent in diversity.
[2] This is essentially a Freirean philosophical position
[3] Davies, B. (2008) ‘The Ethics of Responsibility.’ In Phelan, A. and Sumsion, J. (Eds), Critical Readings in Teacher Education. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
[4] Ryan, A. and Walsh, T. (2018) Reflexivity and Critical Pedagogy. Leiden: Brill p1
Anne Ryan is Emeritus Professor at Maynooth University. She was chair of the Department of Adult and Community Education from 2005 to 2018. Anne has worked in developing countries that experience extreme poverty (such as Bangladesh and Central Africa) and those that are war-torn (such as Afghanistan) and she has worked with disadvantaged communities in Australia and Ireland. These experiences convince her of the potential of adult and community education to empower communities to respond to the critical challenges facing twenty-first century societies in ways that ensure their voice is heard by decision-makers.
Tony Walsh was, until recent retirement from Maynooth University, lecturer and sometime Head of the Department of Adult and Community Education; he continues as Director of the Centre for the Study of Irish Protestantism and is a Fellow of the Young Centre for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College, Pennsylvania,. A licensed systemic constructivist psychotherapist he is engaged in writing, consultancy and research inquiry engagements in the US, the UK, Palestine and Ireland (including Northern Ireland). Current research emphases include i) the experience and culture of the Irish Protestant minority; ii) narrative study of the Old German Baptist Brethren, (an Amish-like Plain church in the US); iii) the role of reflexivity in radical adult education iv) narrative and autoethnograpic inquiry.
Department of Adult and Community Education Maynooth 