Teaching About the Violent Past

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Education plays a vital role in fostering reconciliation and teaching peace in conflict-affected societies. In particular, teaching about the violent past from multiple perspectives helps replace fear and hatred with mutual understanding. While conflict-history education has been explored across sub-Saharan Africa and beyond, curricular reforms often overlook teachers—despite their key role in achieving success.

Building on insights from education sciences, sociology, political sciences, memory studies and social psychology, this book introduces a novel and interdisciplinary framework to analyse secondary school teachers’ engagement with conflict-history education, using both qualitative and quantitative methods. It focuses on three distinct locations—Kenya, Côte d’Ivoire, and the Democratic Republic of Congo—that differ in the intensity of violence experienced and the time elapsed since conflict ended.

This practice-oriented book aims at identifying teachers’ needs to feel confident and competent in driving reconciliation in their classrooms and provides actionable policy recommendations and teaching strategies to support them in this essential role.

Line Kuppens is an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam, and visiting fellow at the Centre for Research on Peace and Development, KU Leuven. Her research focuses on peace education.

Justin Sheria Nfundiko is an associate professor at the Université Officielle de Bukavu and Université Catholique de Bukavu. His research focuses on the role of education in consolidating peace.