Are you an educator? Are you looking for ways to help your students link their ideas about justice in the world to practical ways to make positive change? Then I recommend that you invite members of Community Peacemaker Teams into your classroom.
I did just that. Last spring, two CPTers came to my classroom. I’m a professor teaching community development and social service work at the post-secondary level in Toronto. In a second-year course called Global Politics, we unpack current trends and realities faced by communities, considering their historical roots within conquest, colonization, empire and imperialism. Our goal is to link issues faced at the local level to global, people-centred organizing for the rights of people and the planet itself. I can’t think of a better way to make these connections than having these students learn directly from CPTers.
The session with Tameem Tamimi, a member of CPT’s Palestine Team, and Rachelle Friesen, CPT’s Canada Coordinator, deeply moved our students. These speakers unpacked how injustice is experienced by local communities in Palestine and Turtle Island, and they also recounted how these same communities – with support from a global network – resist the violence they face. The stories Tameem and Rachelle told of their experiences as peacemakers in Hebron, Toronto, and Grassy Narrows, provided the students with examples of how to live a life focused in building a more just world.
Rachelle was with us in-person in the classroom while Tameem joined the class through videoconferencing from an internet café in the West Bank. Students thoughtfully engaged with the guest speakers about the work of CPT and how it links to a global project of building a just world. Afterwards, students told me that the personal stories and thoughtful analysis that Tameem and Rachelle shared with help them further develop their own understanding of the role of local communities and the telling of stories – combined with global resistance – are fundamental to the building of resistance movements to state violence.
