Social Justice Activism

community, while respecting the primary mandate of education. Such collaborations can
foster innovation, creativity, and participatory approaches.
Engaging NGOs or other community organizations not only amplifies a
school’s GCE and RoL efforts and ensures that the community benefits from them, but
also provides learners with practical, real-world learning experiences in the social work
space. Behavioral and action-oriented GCE competencies are developed and nurtured
through these connections to community organizations, providing learners with
examples of good citizenship in practice.
The following learning opportunities outside of the school context include:
Youth-led action: Young people have a fundamental role to play in bringing a
CoL and integrity in all areas of society. Policymakers and educators can engage
with youth as partners for development projects, initiatives or responses that
address crime and violence at the school, community, regional and national
levels. Youth-led action includes youth organizations’ initiatives
against corruption, youth integrity networks, peaceful demonstrations, and
expressions through art against crime, drugs and violence. Learners can also
participate in Youth-Led Participatory Action Research where young people
identify a problem of concern, gather data and make recommendations to
policymakers.
Family-focused programs: Education programs geared toward prevention or
intervention for youth populations at high risk from violence or crime often involve
parents. Evidence shows that parent involvement can increase the success of
violence and crime prevention programs in schools because of the added
reinforcement that learners get at home.
School-community partnerships: Another interesting way to integrate GCE values
into learning at the local level is by building communityclassroom
partnerships with local NGOs or existing community efforts. Building
partnerships with community organizations is critical to GCE efforts. Such
partnerships need to be maintained and sustained long term to have a real
impact on the community. Learners will be involved in localized, hands-on
learning while understanding the principles of good community action and that
social work efforts must be scalable as well as sustainable. School administration
and NGO staff can work together to ensure the terms of the partnership are clear
and the goals are attainable.
Inter-school collaborations: In addition to collaborating
with community organizations and NGOs, schools can collaborate and learn from
each other. Just as peer education is meaningful for learners, peer institutions
have a critical role to play in helping schools to implement effective
practices. Schools can replicate programs, collaborate on inter-school events
and initiatives, and create a network to more easily share local RoL and CoL
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