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Rights-based Approaches
The PILA network is part of a growing social justice organized
around an immigrant rights-based approach. In a report from
Just Associates and the Institute for Development Studies,
an emerging trend in development known as “rights-based
approaches” is identified:
“As development actors have expanded opportunities
to engage with governments and multilateral institutions,
they are strengthening their policy work and embracing and
using the human rights system to lend legitimacy to their
claims. At the same time, more human rights organisations
are seeking to learn about community development and participation,
which they have come to see as critical for engaging people
in claiming and exercising rights. It is in this convergence
between strands of rights and participation approaches where
we see the most potential for “rights-based approaches.”
(p. 3)
Analysis of Power
Inspired leadership starts with a commitment to collaborative
practice and an analysis of power relationships in society
and neighborhoods to raise people’s consciousness about
oppression and, particularly historical precedents that created
the root causes of such conditions. This reflection places
the educator at the center of the conversation by asking concrete
questions about power relations such as in teacher-student
relationships, in the institutional agendas of a university
or community school in relation to the classroom, and with
privilege issues of the instructor, learner and educational
institutions as in racial privilege and White entitlement
in the U.S.
The educator plays a major role in perpetuating or countering
social inequalities by their own “power arrangements
that result in greater or lesser access to educational resources
and, ultimately, influence students’ abilities to gain
economic and social privileges in society” (Bounous,
2001). An analysis of power is important for immigrant educational
programs. Immigrant’s social positionality as newcomers
to U.S. society and their legal status as citizens or non-citizens
create dimensions of power that in most cases criminalize
immigrants through fear and isolation.
Power With vs. Power Over
Educational institutions and social programs are not isolated
from the rest of society. They reflect the power inequalities
of the larger society by reproducing and perpetuating the
status quo (Freire, 1970). Bounous (2001) states that Mary
Parker Follett first wrote about “power with”
as a process of co-active power among people, and “power
over” represented a coercive power. Bounous continues,
“underlying ‘power with’ are assumptions
derived from systems theory that our world is constituted
of open, interdependent, and mutually influencing systems”
(p. 199). “Power over” sees power as a win-lose
proposition. In order for someone to have power, someone else
must be without. This is the traditional positivist paradigm
of domination and control. Whereas “power with”
establishes an alternative view of power as “accessible,
expanding and renewable rather than scarce.” (p. 199)
As we imagine alternative democratic spaces, educators have
to take in consideration their perspective and shift from
a coercive power to a co-active power with learners. In most
informal adult educational settings, a participatory, cooperative
and well-planned learning environment would go further in
establishing a democratic space than power over and control.
By designing and constructing collaborative spaces, educators
can build effective, organized and inclusive educational spaces
for learning and for implementing alternative educational
approaches.
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