Education, Justice and Memory

The Education, Justice and Memory (EdJAM) network comes together in order to contribute towards Sustainable Development Goal 4, which aims to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and to promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. A crucial part of SDG4 is its target 4.7, which specifies the kinds of skills, knowledge and attitudes that education should develop in all learners and includes knowledge and skills to promote a culture of peace and non-violence.
Current approaches to teaching about conflict and peace often fall short of meeting this challenge. Peace education often relies on generalised approaches that fall flat for learners since they do not enable connections between past and present injustice or violence that affect daily lives. Formal history education is often a space where violence is perpetuated, for instance when it promotes exclusive group identities; silences cultures and experiences; or legitimises conflict and injustice. Curricula often limit opportunities for students to develop knowledge and understanding of the specific historical, cultural, political and economic roots of the conflicts and violence that affect them, much less the skills to transform these conflicts. Where spaces do exist, teachers often lack training, resources and skills to support dialogue and difficult conversations. Existing research tends to concentrate on textbooks and curricula, meaning there is limited evidence of effective teaching and learning processes in schools and other spaces where learners apprehend the past.
However, alternatives exist. Creative and innovative practices, pioneered by teachers, artists, community educators, museum curators, and young people themselves offer engaging ways to connect learning about difficult pasts with skills and commitment to realising better futures. EdJAM works to amplify, connect, develop an evidence base about and share these approaches, drawing on the disciplines and practices of transitional justice, memory studies, history, heritage studies, politics and education and working with leading civil society partners in Cambodia, Colombia, Pakistan and Uganda who are doing this pioneering work. This focus enables EdJAM to connect to other SDG challenges, particularly SDG 16 (just, peaceful and inclusive societies) and SDG 17 (global partnerships) and to ensure that learners in our focus countries have a chance to develop the skills and knowledge to build a culture of peace.
EdJAM will support researchers in Cambodia, Colombia, Pakistan, Uganda and elsewhere in the global south, and researchers in the UK who are early in their career to develop their research capacity, to share new knowledge, and to shape future research agendas. It will commission research to identify and learn from creative approaches to teaching about the violent past through a series of small grants that will produce both academic and creative outputs (e.g. curriculum resources, museum displays, photo exhibits, online materials). EdJAM will also commission large grants to explore outcomes of creative approaches to teaching about the past, developing new ways of measuring progress towards SDG target 4.7.
EdJAM's work will be shared on an interactive webpage, in English, Spanish and other project languages as demanded. It will also run a series of events to connect its work to policymakers, educators, civil society organisations and researchers in Cambodia, Colombia, Pakistan and Uganda to ensure that connections are made to national curricula, teacher training and other important policy areas. It will share its work widely with the international community, especially those who make decisions about how SDG target 4.7 can be measured and how progress towards it can best be supported. EdJAM is founded on partnership working and collaborative knowledge production across our network - we will share our methodologies, learning and ethical reflections from these experiences of working together.