Composition Forum 40, Fall 2018
http://compositionforum.com/issue/40/

Dreams of تويزة/Twiza as Transnational Practice: Managing Risk, Building Bridges, and Community Partnership Work

Ahmed Abdelhakim Hachelaf and Steve Parks

Abstract

تويزة/Twiza is a tricky word to translate from its original Berber.

In its simplest meaning, تويزة/Twiza speaks to the collective effort of a community to support each other. To speak of تويزة/Twiza is to call forth, then, the collective material practices which enact the values of a civil society. As Edward Said highlighted decades ago however, when terms (or theories) travel, they take on different meanings, losing some conceptual frameworks while adding others. The act of translation, of traveling, then, is also the act of re-constellation of community practices within a different local moment.

And here is where the term gets difficult to translate.

For the past year, Parks and Hachelaf have been engaged in a transnational discussion about what it means for تويزة/Twiza to be an organizing term of their collective community partnership work in the United States and Algeria. To date, their collaborative enactments have included developing dialogues among their undergraduate students as well as creating a network of international scholar/activists to create civil society workshops for students on the African, European, and North American continents. (For a sample of this work, see https://www.jossournextgen.com)

Rather than seamless borders and common meanings emerging from the work, however, they have discovered that when this traveling term is enacted within local contexts situated across international borders this very geographical specificity alters the possibilities (and complications) of community partnership occurs. Now placed under erasure, تويزة/Tawayiza, the term stands as in as a placemarker for the dream of a common “community” and the specific embodied alliance work required by that very dream.

Indeed, the insights drawn from تويزة/Twiza have also placed under erasure previous articles and community publications, published by Parks, which worked within a nostalgic sense of border crossings. For when Parks and Hacleaf first met, Parks was engaged in a project focused on an anti-gentrification campaign as well as a project documenting the experiences of activists in the Arab Spring. (It is in the latter project where they authors met.) The result of this period were two publications, an article titled, Sinners’ Welcome, and a book titled, Revolution by Love. The former argued for the need to train students how to be community organizers, framing it as a central goal of partnership work. The latter documented the harsh political conditions in which activists in the Middle East/North Africa operated.

While the publications represent a “act locally, think globally” type stance, these works were not seen as in dialogue with each other - the call for student to become activists not located across a geographical context in which this very call posed risks for students and teachers. Or to frame it slightly differently, taken together, the works highlight how many of the key terms within our field, such as “community engagement,” “civic learning,” operate within a specific context that does not “travel” seamlessly. It is a lesson to consider as our field imagines it work as operating on a global stage.

In the following dialogue, Parks and Hachelaf discuss their work together, how global contexts shift the meaning as well as the risks of partnership work, and what, ultimately, they hope students might learn though global dialogues on the concept of civic society. In doing so they try to articulate a world where sinners are both welcome and revolution emerges out of a love for one’s community.

Biographies

Ahmed Abdelhakim Hachelaf, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Algeria

Hachelaf is an Educationalist and Civic Engagement Specialist focused on building capacity within educational institutions to support youth working for social change. He has also worked for national Algerian NGOs and supervised a nationwide active-citizenship program as well as the training of local NGO leaders on community service and leadership in three Algerian provinces. Hachelaf also founded an initiative that fights 21st-century illiteracy by teaching IT skills to women. This project allowed marginalized segments of society to benefit from access to technology and widened their opportunities. Hachelaf is also a frequent presenter on civic education and democratic schooling in the Middle East and North African region. In 2012, Hachelaf was chosen as a Leaders for Democracy fellow and subsequently was chosen to be the delegate of Algeria in a UN event in New York and most recently as a Caux Scholar in Switzerland. In 2017, Hachelaf was a Research Fellow at the Moynihan Institute at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, where he researches civic education and engagement.

Steve Parks, Syracuse University, United States

Parks is the current Editor of Studies in Writing and Rhetoric (swreditor.org) and one of the founders of Syrians for Truth and Justice (stj-sy.org). His early work focused on the Students’ Right to Their Own Language, with a particular emphasis on the need to embed the politics of such a resolution into progressive community partnerships and publications. This led to his creating New City Community Press (newcitycommunitypress.com) in Philadelphia which links university classrooms, local communities, and publishing technologies in support of efforts to expand human rights. Currently, he is working with Syrian activists to record the human rights abuses of the current regime, ISIS, and militia active in Syria. He is author of Class Politics: The Movement for a Students’ Right to Their Own Language; Gravyland: Writing Beyond the Curriculum in the City of Brotherly Love; and co-editor of Circulating Communities: The Tactics and Strategies of Community Publishing. His most recent work is Writing Communities, a textbook designed to support writing classrooms become a site of community collaboration and publishing. He will join the English Department at the University of Virginia in 2019.

Dreams of تويزة/Twiza

Parks: I was thinking about when we first met five or six years ago. You were a Leadership for Democracy Fellow at Syracuse University. We were working on a book of personal narratives by democratic/educational activists who had been active in the Arab Spring, ultimately published as Revolution by Love. We had also both been active in civic engagement and community partnership work in our respective countries and communities. My memory is that we kept using similar terms, such as “civic engagement” or “civil society,” but having different definitions of what the term meant to each of us. It was our first attempt at translation, our first experience in how the meaning of terms shifted as they crossed borders and continents.

In some ways, the difficulty we faced finding a common understanding of terms like, “civic engagment,” led to our تويزة/Twiza Project. Initially, the project was to have our students talk on-line about the meaning of terms like civil society, human rights and gender equity. It’s grown since then to include universities in Kurdistan, London, and Morocco, as well as set of proposed workshops which will bring students together in a common place in Algeria to develop engagement proposals for work in their local communities.

At the heart of it all, though, was our struggle to find a common conceptual framework for terms like “civil society,” “civic education,” and “community partnership.” That is, I think we both want to believe in the possibility of creating a space through terms like “civic engagement” in which a different type of dialogue about concepts such as human rights or gender equity is possible - even while we recognize how these terms like “civic engagement” operate differently across the global/political economy. I’m also increasingly aware as to how the focus on community partnership in the U.S. is continuous with an ideology of exploitation of 2/3 world workers, particularly women. In the face of such political complexities, though, we still want, I think, to imagine the possibility of a transnational community grounded in broad concepts of human rights, civil society, equality.

Hachelaf: I think it is true that we both imagined the possibility of a common framework, a dream about what it might offer in terms of transnational justice work. When we first started talking, I defined civic education as an attempt to link what is learned in school with addressing the needs and concerns of society. In this way, civic education acknowledged the future role of students in developing their communities as well as, perhaps, the role of teachers in fostering this role. Such an education, focused on school-community partnerships, would serve both students’ social development and expand the possibilities of civil society within a particular community. The ultimate objective of this kind of education, whatever the discipline, would be fostering citizens who are capable of functioning in society in a positive way, individuals who contribute to the good of the country, to humanity at large.

As we have learned together, however, one of the main elements to consider when it comes to the “value” and “work” of civic education is the local and national culture. To my mind, cultivating leadership and civic engagement in my context is so different from cultivating it and practicing it elsewhere, such as in the United States. In Algeria, there are so many cultural considerations and parameters to think about when it comes to risk-taking, decision-making, being outspoken, and engaging in public space. For purposes of safety and modesty, I think that there are many limitations to an individual’s ability to be public in this way, to take such risks.

Parks: When you first started to frame the complications of our collective work this way, I’m not sure I fully understood. But over the course of this project, I have had partners in the Middle East/North Africa arrested and placed on trial for supporting such work—the international dialogue and the focus on human rights, for example—sometimes even when initially their governments had actively supported the project. And I know of other partners, faculty and students, who out of a belief in the value of dialogue in a civil society, have been followed by government officials or harassed for taking public stands for their education or labor rights. Clearly there is some space for this engagement work, your own pedagogical work in Algeria proves that, but my sense is a different set of civic literacy skills are necessary then might be taught in the United States context.

Hachelaf: I live in a context that is very much affected by trauma and violence (Evans/Phillips). For a long time, my own culture used to encourage heroism and leadership, to say “no” in the face of oppression, to challenge authority, do charity and speak up. Here, I am thinking of a proverb that goes: “Say the truth even if it is bitter”, and “You cannot have a shred of faith if you go to bed well-fed while your neighbor is hungry.” Because of numerous traumatizing experiences, such as the Black Decade - - a period of armed conflict among different elements of Algerian society that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths - there has emerged a rhetoric of what I call deferism and prioritization of safety, quietism over boat-shaking (Evans/Phillips). So, while a lot of community solidarity is taking place in an unsystematic way, civic engagement is lacking in schools and in society at large.

I’m thinking of a popular saying that goes, ويل لمن أشارت إليه الاصابع ولو بالخير,. Essentially, this means that being publicly active exacts a high price. And for those who gain public recognition, even if they’re doing good things, these individuals can pay a double price. For this reason, you are right that education focused on civic engagement in this context requires different strategies and effort. Risk-taking and mistakes are not perceived the same way in my context. And thereby civic and political engagement should be researched and practiced in the light of a different perspective.

Parks: This makes me wonder how prevalent the terms civic engagement, civic education, or civic leadership are in the Algerian education system. I would say in the US it’s only in the past couple decades that we have talked this way, in part because of the push by conservatives to defund state functions, though there is also surely the progressive legacy of John Dewey that was drawn upon as well (Dewey). I guess the two of us, we, use those terms, but do they actually circulate in Algerian schools and universities?

Hachelaf: The concepts behind those terms such as “civic leadership,” “community engagement,” “public service,” exist through synonyms and practices that are akin to these ideals. For example, sTwiza is a community practice in Algeria that is somewhat similar to the U.S. trope of farmers getting together to help build a new barn for their neighbors. This tradition can help support such pedagogical and classroom work. And there are universal aspects to the educational practices that we all advocate, like the value of civil society. This work, however, exists with different labels and are enacted in indirect ways. Making these concepts more systemic and more productive and purposeful is the challenge. That is, people are used to solidarity and community work and supporting each other. From a young age, people were doing it, hearing and reading about this, but I don’t think that in educational systems these are deliberately developed or they are systematically encouraged by education policymakers and practitioners.

Parks: Is it your sense that when teachers try to teach students to be civically engaged, to be part of their community, that they use more terms from that emerge from Algerian culture, like, or do you think they use terms like civic leadership. I’m trying to figure out if “civic leadership” as a US/Western framing can describe these practices in Algeria?

Hachelaf: In my previous research, I analyzed the official documents of the Algerian education system. Just to be clear, the Algerian education system is public, free, compulsory, and centralized. The whole system is run by the Ministry of National Education which designs the syllabi and curricula as well as decides what pedagogical practices are authorized. Of course, teachers still possess a small amount of autonomy. And our universities have even more autonomy, though they are accountable to the university administration and oversight committees that can exercise some levels of censorship. Still, if I teach communication and public speaking at the university, I can decide what topics I can include taking into account the risks of publicly focusing on particular subjects.

Such work is harder in the schools. My analysis of the education system showed that many of these texts contained buzz words like democratic, intercultural, global, environmental citizenship, etc. but that the concept of community service did not exist. Although people perform such efforts outside of the school because of cultural solidarity concepts mentioned earlier, like Twiza, community service as it’s is practiced in the United States is totally absent in schools. Students typically do not engage in public actions around community issues as part of their classwork. We do not think of it as a pedagogical practice. Perhaps there is a lack of awareness for how community involvement at an early age will translate into political Involvement and later life social involvements. Or maybe some elite circles actually know that passivity and disengagement at an early age will lead to more politically and civic passivity at later age. There are many studies that establish that link and maybe there are policy makers who don’t want this engagement to happen at a later time.

Parks: My sense is that in the United States, there is more overlap then you might imagine. Universities are clearly seeing community engagement as a way to frame their public mission—universities imagine themselves to be teaching students how to build and support open civic societies premised on individual volunteerism not government intervention. So, if you talk about such pedagogies as teaching individuals that volunteering will make things better, then, you are on solid ground in schools or universities. But if you talk about such pedagogies as students organizing collectively with communities to create systemic structural change, then you have the elite equivalent here, such as politicians and conservative think tanks, criticizing the University for teaching “politics.” In some ways, it’s a different form of passivity. It’s a move towards individuals learning to accept the general power structure.

In fact, at times, I think, there is too much enthusiasm for this type of “civic” work. I was teaching a class framed around community engagement where we worked with a community that was in the process of being gentrified by developers. About fifty-four million dollars were being pumped into the neighborhood with little to show for the long-term residents. The university had framed the project as its “intervention” to support the city. Within such a framing, civic engagement pedagogy became students bringing their education to “save the community.” For that reason, some of my students felt totally justified in rushing into the neighborhood to “help the residents,” assuming their education gave them a unique purchase on issues facing the community. In this scenario, I’d argue that the real risk was faced by the community which the danger of having their insights and ideas enveloped in academic framings of their problems, then turned into student essays about the power of “volunteerism’ to change society. In fact, one of the issues of that course community project (at least at the outset) was the university too quickly adopting it and advertising the work of the students to the public and funders. (For how this university endorsement quickly changed when the structural critique/activism emerged, see Parks, Sinners Welcome.)

I also wonder sometimes that when we frame “community engagement” project, assessing the gains versus risks, if we don’t imagine our students as “citizens.” That is, much of the rhetoric of such work is framed around creating engaged citizens, but many of our students are undocumented or, to be blunt, even if born a citizen have not had access to its imagined benefits. So that when we imagine the goals of the work, I wonder how much we are asking them to consider how their own identity, and sometimes privilege, impact their sense of the work. To what extent are we supporting a reflective politically nuanced sense of engagement as an intersectional, ally-based practice?

Hachelaf: In that sense, I would just want to start by saying that I don’t advocate for community service as it is practiced in most of education systems in the world today, even the type that is practiced in the United States. I think that this feel goodism and this sort of pseudo-generosity students feel when they perform community service without reflection and critical action is not enough. Learning happens when you think about what you’re doing. We don’t learn from the actual experiences, we learn from the process of rethinking and reliving and pondering about our experiences. Community service and voluntary service, if it’s not coupled with critical thinking and if it’s not really working hand-in-hand with community, then it is not education. Students need to think about reasons why poverty exist in the first place and not just about the service delivery model being used in that project. There has to be an honest and open dialogue about why these phenomena exist and how it is related to power, privilege, and social stratification. Civic leaders do not only deliver services, leaders think about the root causes or marginalization and poverty and challenge them

Parks: This makes me think about how one of my goals in our work has been to ask my students to reflect upon the push for “volunteerism” in the United States within a global context. Without painting too broadly here, I think U.S civic engagement needs to be seen as part of the neoliberal agenda of dismantling the state as protector and foisting that responsibility off onto non-profit organizations, religious institutions, and individuals. That “good feeling” students get is deeply enmeshed in the same desires which are restructuring the global economy for the benefit of western corporate capital. That was part of my goal for our student dialogues. I wanted them to speak to students on the “other end” of these policies, enacted in the Middle East and North Africa region, and see how their privilege of “doing service” was connected to issues being confronted by your students. Where does the U.S. commitment to supporting human rights end? How does their community service act as an alibi for these larger abandonments of human rights for the sake of the profit-motive?

Hachelaf: In some ways, I share this hope of having my students engage in an analysis of how their community, its status and sense of rights, is enmeshed in larger systemic networks, both national and international. I must approach such work, however, differently. You have told me that in your class, you have students read essays which would be seen as highly political and critical of the state. I’m am less convinced such direct focus on systemic issues is possible in Algerian classrooms. As I said earlier, I will use a public speaking class as a space in which they can speak freely. As a result, they bring political issues as speech topics, such as role of the political system in the corruption existing currently in Algeria. Or they talk about the fourth re-election of the current president. Or the meaning of the Arab Spring.

But in doing so, I understand that this is a risky task. I often think about the risk I am taking as well as the risk my students might face as a result of my encouragement to speak freely. My experience is that society as a whole, and parents in particular, exercise an immense pressure on the revolutionary teacher. I think the task of such a teacher is finding the very thin line that exists between what is risky and what is too risky. I often review over and over again my instructional materials and think a lot about their potential impact. At the end of the day, it is the moral responsibility of the teacher to teach and not jeopardize the safety of students. We should go out of the comfort zone and extend it bit by bit but a little bit away from the panic zone.

Parks: It seems to me, then, that as a teacher, you try to create a classroom that is safe for students, so they can explore how far they can go in terms of public criticism. In a sense, then, when you’re teaching civic leadership you’re teaching them how to understand the political terrain and how to find those narrow spots that they can sort of push for some type of change without risking themselves. Although not about the Algerian context, I know that when we were creating the Revolution by Love book, I was struck by the amount of times participants spoke about the original moment of political persecution they faced was in speaking out as a student on campus about a cultural or political issue. It’s probably a bit different in Algeria, but I think these moments highlight how ‘civic engagement’ creates different threats/possibilities dependent on where it is instantiated. I’m not sure I made the connection to my work in the United States on civic engagement while working on this book project. In some ways, perhaps, I was in a dream state about what was possible in the United States.

I also think in the US there can be the appearance of more freedom to speak openly. If you’re a white middle-class student, you often have a broader terrain to safely enact your politics in a classroom or community project. I think Black Lives Matter, among other movements, have demonstrated that if you’re African-American, it’s a much different terrain. In the Trump era, if you are of Latino descent, you move about in a country that is incredibly hostile to you.

So, for me, it was interesting to me that when our classes started to talk to each other, there seemed to be an attempt to claim common sensibilities, based on their experiences, between the Latino, African-American and Algerian women students around issues of safety, though gender might also have been a determining factor there. They seemed to want to consider how oppression, while enacted locally, shared some common traits. And it was interesting to see how they attempted to think through what a transnational feminism might entail (though they didn’t use those terms), what a sense of alllyship, intersectional action might entail.

In some ways, it demonstrated a civic engagement pedagogy necessarily invested in the unique embodied experiences of the students, drawing out complicated sets of relationships and actions in response. It is through their bodies, in some sense, that these strategies were worked out (and through). Any dream of a “common framework” really means the hard work of intersectional alliance building, made more difficult by the different material practices each person involved can (or can’t enact) safely.

In that way, we are both teaching that civic leadership is political intersectional literacy focused on the possibility of change. And then part of that teaching is learning what political acts can connect that literacy with allies and partners who produce results but that also minimizes risk - actions that do not put some students, some bodies, in harm’s way because we have failed to think through the multiple contexts in which our actions occur. So, in a sense, we are using “community engagement” or “civic society” as organizing terms for our work, but attempting to push back against the way the terms seem to generalize (perhaps globally) about what constitutes the materiality of such work.

This leads again to the value of such terms in our work. It highlights the need to explore the usefulness of “community partnership” in authorizing local projects focused on civil society and human rights. (And it should be evident now how “human rights” is an equally complicated word.) As I started to talk about earlier, I taught a class focused on an anti-gentrification campaign. While initially popular with the university, as the systemic actions started there was a point where the university started to follow my students around the community. Eventually, I lost all my funding. My chair, though, defended the class (and me) on the basis of it being grounded in community partnership pedagogy focused on civil society. In this sense, these pedagogical terms acted as a shield. You said earlier the Algerian schools do not invoke the term, but do you use civic engagement as a key word for your work in your local institutions? Or since the term emerged within U.S. institutions, do you embed your pedagogy around other key terms?

Hachelaf: Within my context, I tend to use terms such as Twiza to indicate what community leadership could look like in our civil society. And for me, leadership is one thing, whether it is enacted in university, in the family, or in the political system. I think that if you want to develop leadership, or agency, in students, you have to free them from the manacles of that system or institution. The first manacle is you as a teacher. In Algeria, we have to stop being the authoritarian figure. There are many traditional practices in our classrooms that ultimately break a student’s ability to take risks and to speak out. If we want to develop civic leadership, we have to create an engaging atmosphere that respects students as present citizens not future citizens. We need to recognize them as individuals who are already formulating independent opinions and attitudes about the world that are worthy of being heard. Their voices must be heard inside the university and beyond. For this reason, as a teacher, I try to delegate power, for example, through peer-assessment, self-assessment, and self-directed learning projects. It’s also about giving them options, about the content, the objectives of the course. For this reason, we often negotiate the syllabus at the beginning of the year. These are all powerful emancipating practices that seem small but I think are highly important.

This is also why I encourage them to create their own spaces through clubs and associations, run totally by the students. Nobody should tell them what activities should be undertaken. Nobody should tell them how the activities should be done. In a sense, the student clubs are where they learn the material practices of building “civic societies,” premised on non-violence, and with “citizens” who fully participate in defining the rights, responsibilities, and mission of that space. So even though the name might be “Book Club,” it is actually, to invoke Nancy Fraser, a subaltern counter-public existing within the more restrictive nature of the university and Algerian society. In fact, my first attempt at helping students create a book club was seen as “dangerous” for this very reason and, perhaps for that very reason, was also replicated across the country. In this way, I think the term “leadership,” more than “civic engagement”, when seen within an Algerian context, can provide a “shield” which will allow certain civil society skills to be learned, indirectly, but of significant long-term use.

Parks: Just to return to our earlier conversation about risk. As a teacher, do you worry your students will take the lessons they are indirectly learning about leadership civil society as well as the material practices learned through student groups and take those lessons off-campus? When they have this great discussion in your class and then leave campus, do they find a disjunction as they go into other political spaces in the culture?

Hachelaf: I think there are many education and non-education officials who see a link between opening the eyes our students to concepts of rights inherent in civil society and students then engaging in non-violent actions, such as strikes inside and outside the university. I certainly see a connection. In fact, it’s what I believe I am doing. I am also saying these concepts do not have to appear in a lesson plan. I am teaching students how to do non-violent conflict. I am teaching students how to say “no” and challenge the status-quo of schools non-violently. And I think we have also a unique history of non-violence in Algeria given the reconciliation process that happened after the Black Decade. In that case, perhaps the reconciliation was not perhaps done in the right way. Still, the tradition of reconciliation, the peaceful resolution of conflicts, is a deeply held belief. It is an idea that everybody accepts. I think that there is a long history that can produced to support non-violent resistance.

In present Algeria, I also think political parties don’t want to rock the boat because most people don’t want to go back to the violence that happened during the Black Decade. In addition, there is also a sense of helplessness about the possibility of violent change because when we look at Syria, after seven years of war, there seem to be no good outcomes on the horizon for that conflict. So, we understand that violence clearly doesn’t work. Yet the absence of successful examples of peaceful political change in the region just feeds this sense of helplessness about change even more. As a nation, we’re still exploring what is the best theory of communal change for our country. And I think that the ability to navigate this thin line between challenging elements of the status quo from within the system and building agency that can produce small successes in the country may lead to a positive model of non-violent change for us to follow.

Everybody, then, seems to feels like there is an urgent need for change, but they don’t think that school should be the place where this this type of agency is developed. When we think of the social forces that produce the citizen, very few Algerians will think of the school as the place where you should start to build the citizen. I think that for many Algerians the school is just a place for professional preparedness, maybe teaching the values of belonging, but not so much about critical thinking, political socialization, and civic engagement.

I want to say that I agree there is a need for a peaceful model for social change as well. I just believe that the schools can be the site where this happens. And I think it can happen around terms like Twiza, terms like civic leadership.

Parks: I would say that in the U.S., for me, the universities were recast as sites to learn civic engagement as part of a conservative entrenchment of neoliberal frameworks nationally and globally. But it is a very narrow sense of citizenship—premised mainly on volunteerism and the primacy of individual over collective rights (or actual citizenship legal rights). You talked earlier about how these terms are not in the official documents related to schools as well as how universities provided only limited spaces to enact such work. With that in mind, I wonder sometimes if the set of concepts around community partnership and engagement, emerging from this context, can ever really do the hoped for collective work. Are the strategies really producing institutional change? Are they really fostering the types of collaborative work, locally and globally, that speaks to rights and equality?

Hachelaf: The answer to that is necessarily complex. To go back to an earlier point about the centralization of the Algerian school system. You don’t have the authority to incorporate these issues and pedagogies into classrooms. If you teach, for example, English or Math or Science, you will have to teach the authorized program, you will have to finish it by the deadline. And this does not give the teachers the autonomy to teach other things that are as or more important for students to learn. At my university, I teach teachers-to-be. These teachers are going to work at Middle and Secondary public schools in different parts of the country. And I am trying to teach them how to take the civic engagement ideas from my classes and to incorporate them into whatever subject is being taught. Like for example, if you are teaching English, you will build into the curriculum environmental protection or poverty reduction community-engagement campaigns.

I think that no matter the subject, you are ultimately an educator at the largest sense of the word. You are a leadership trainer as a teacher. Teachers have to pass on the leadership skills to their learners. I think that leadership is about measuring risks, knowing what to do, it’s decision-making, risk-taking and studying the contexts. It is the basis from which civil society emerges and can be sustained. I think that you give them the tools to be civic leaders and it’s up to them to decide what to do in the future. I think that the only thing that we can provide as teachers is a safe, honest and open space for dialogue. You give them tools. You have to keep your fingers crossed they use them wisely.

Parks: In some ways, it is leap of faith. When I teach students how to do a community social-justice campaign, they learn all the basic strategies. I suppose my students could then use those strategies to elect the first woman governor of Pennsylvania or to effectively plan a neo-Nazi rally. My hope is that those strategies are so enmeshed in practices of listening, in equity in participation, in collective success, that the practices necessarily stop certain types of politics from being enacted. The act of collectively talking, debating, and deciding, is itself a form of politics.

In some ways, I’m also teaching a set of beliefs about civil society, a set of concepts that I hope will turn their skills to support equality and human rights. I’m not saying, “We’re going to use this to foment Marxist revolution,” but I am saying through my very pedagogy, that we will respect the equal rights of each other, understand them as necessarily having human dignity. So, in a sense, the ethos and skills learned are connected. You can’t use some of these organizing tools and end up a fascist—or so I like to believe.

Hachelaf: What I noticed from my humble experience is that when students have the opportunity to experience collective leadership, to create change through school clubs or campus protests, they show the value of this different model. And when they succeed, success breeds success. I think that also this generation is very different from the previous ones and the fear from risk and failure is less, because they are less traumatized of violence and less deterred. I belong to a generation that lived the Black Decade, witnessed the massacres, and paid a price that resulted from that period of political agitations. This generation is less deterred. They might yet produce the model of peaceful change that is needed in this current moment.

Parks: And on that slim reed of hope, let’s get back to our transnational work.

Works Cited

Bourdieu, Pierre, and Jean Claude. Passeron. Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture. Translated by Richard Nice, Sage, 2014.

Chomsky, Noam, and Otero Carlos Peregrín. Chomsky on Democracy & Education. RoutledgeFalmer, 2003.

Dewey, John. Democracy and Education: An Introduction to The Philosophy of Education. The Floating Press, 2009. eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost). Accessed 30 Nov. 2016.

Evans, Martin and John Phillips. Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed. Yale UP, 2007.

Ghandour, Dala, Emna Ben Yedder, Mohammed Masbash, and Steve Parks, eds. Revolution by Love: Emerging Arab Youth Voices. New City Community Press, 2014.

Hachelaf Ahmed Abdelhakim. Education for Citizenship in Algeria: Study of Beliefs and Practices with Special Reference to EFL Curricula. Dissertation, University of Algiers, 2018.

Parks, Steve. Sinners Welcome: The Limits of Rhetorical Agency. Reimagining the Social Turn, special issue of College English, vol. 76, no. 6, pp. 506-524.