Journal of Transformative Education

This paper builds on experiences of working with radicalized community groups on the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland during the 1980s. This paper explores models of radicalization that understand radicalization as a struggle for recognition. Honneth, relying on Dewey, helps us elaborate connections between understanding and addressing the challenges of radicalizations today. Honneth’s recognition theory; his work on democracy and freedom that reinvigorates Dewey’s theory of democracy, are at the core of the argument presented here. Transformative learning (TL), having built on the work of these same allies, can be interpreted as a way of addressing distorted recognitions that motivate radicalized individuals and groups. The paper concludes with suggestions for addressing this phenomenon at the level of individual, community, and society.

The ideological underpinnings of the Great Replacement Theory, which frames Muslims as a threat to Europe, originated in Serbia and emboldened a wider narrative of anti-Muslim hate across Western milieus. The othering of Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks), an autochthonous ethnic group in Southeastern Europe, has contributed to the normalization of the alienation of Muslims throughout Europe, engendering Educational Displacement—an internalized sense of invisibility and devaluation within targeted individuals, diminishing their participation and trust in the societal institutions. In this complex socio-political and historical context, Bosniaks have nonetheless chosen to principally champion interfaith coexistence, offering an instructive and community-based model of resilience to hate and violence. The study investigates the Bosniaks’ affinity for coexistence by examining the underexplored case of interfaith solidarity and entente between Muslims and Jews in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1540 to the present.

This paper explores how the public and the private sphere are linked in the case of anti-Muslim racism. It helps us understand how individual assumptions can be shaped, limited and even distorted through media discourse. It illustrates how media coverage portrays Muslims and refugees in ways that reinforce stereotypes. In doing so, it unveils barriers and challenges to critically question these stereotypes and to potentially transform them. The paper begins with an analysis of how German media positions Muslim refugees and refugees from Muslim countries as a security and cultural threat to German and European societies. The analysis consists of theoretical foundations in Sociology of Discourse theory, orientalism and anti-Muslim racism as well as an overview of transformative learning. This paper helps us to better understand the negative role of media coverage in this context in an attempt to foster transformative learning.

In recent years, Western societies have witnessed a notable rise in populism, nationalism, and extremist ideologies, marked by the increasing dehumanization of specific social groups. This trend presents significant challenges to the preservation of civil liberties, particularly the freedom of action and speech for targeted groups, both within higher education institutions and K-12 schools. The study investigates whether access to such freedoms impacts students’ sense of belonging in school and society. Reduced belonging among certain groups diminishes social cohesion and heightens the risk of radicalization and targeted violence. Drawing from a comprehensive sample of N = 518,833 students from 18,819 schools in 68 countries or economies as defined by the OECD, this study reveals a significant insight: countries with more equitable access to civil liberties across all social groups exhibit the higher average levels of school belonging.

This paper offers an overview of the language of threat and a brief history of threat assessment as the prevailing approach to school safety in the United States. Following this, the limited applicability and efficacy of the language of threat is demonstrated with the help of the distinction between facing a threat and being labeled as a threat. The detrimental effects of labeling a student as a threat are explained by introducing Educational Displacement Theory and the accompanying model of radicalization. The concluding sections offer a shift from the language of threat to a discourse of belonging, utilizing Jack Mezirow’s notions of building a discourse and an empirical example of a violence prevention initiative—Project Belonging—where a discourse of belonging is centered in the curriculum and pedagogy. This inquiry hopes to catalyze further dialogue, scrutiny, and exploration into the language used within the field of targeted violence prevention.

This article explores the complex relationship between education, radicalization, and democracy. It examines the differentiation between education as a catalyst for radical social change and as a means of harmful radicalization. Using Vladimir Lenin’s efforts in the USSR as a historical case study and a metaphor, the article analyzes how radical educational reforms aimed at societal transformation can undermine democratic principles when driven by rigid ideology. The authors identify elements that were damaging to democracy historically: the “Silver Bullet” mentality of seeking a singular, simplistic solution to complex societal challenges, the systematic rejection of pluralistic perspectives, and the disturbing willingness to treat human beings as expendable in pursuit of ideological objectives. Contrasting Lenin’s radical educational model, the study introduces Hannah Arendt’s philosophical framework as a counter-perspective that prioritizes human dignity and democratic pluralism.

There is a fine normative line separating transformative learning and radicalization processes. Using in-depth auto/biographical narrative inquiry, the paper illuminates the importance of self-recognition in both: of feeling seen, understood and validated. But radicalization is ultimately about closure to the other and otherness, and fundamentalist acceptance of one truth and nothing but that truth. Transformative learning, on the other hand, requires an openness to doubt, uncertainty and willingness, forged in relationship, to recognize the other – symbolic and actual – in processes of lifelong and lifewide learning. Recognition too that there can be more than one victim, and that the other suffers and has the right to live and share valued space.

The paper aims to discuss the contribution of transformative learning theory and post-critical pedagogy perspectives to the field of radicalization studies. In the first part, the article examines a theoretical framework based on transformative learning theory to interpret the phenomena of radicalization. Examined through this lens, radicalization is an individual or collective process emerging from precritical thinking that can generate distorted ideological assumptions and polarized perspectives, that are potentially reflected in variegated, yet stereotypic-related actions and behaviors. Consistent with those arguments, in the second section, the article presents an illustrative case of an empirical research project investigating radicalization processes: the F.O.R.w.A.R.D. project. In the third part, the paper delves into the post-critical pedagogy to reinterpret educational perspectives that have been adopted in seeking to prevent the occurrence of radicalization phenomena.

The educational theories of the Brazilian pedagogist Paulo Freire have inspired different pedagogical approaches, such as Critical Pedagogy and Transformative Learning Theory. He has developed his work with communities and he has always stressed the fact that the “banking model” of education must be replaced by a dialogical one, in which there is a true and profound exchange among teachers and learners. In order to establish this exchange, Freire underlined that learning processes should always be inspired by the experience and by the real needs of the community. In the present study, we will analyze how some principles of Freirean theories can be applied to the prevention of radicalization leading to violence. The examples of how this community approach can be applied to the field of radicalization prevention will be taken mainly from the work done by the Center of Prevention of Radicalization Leading to Violence (CPRLV), located in Montréal, Canada.