GCE Youth Action Month – Dialogue Series

Dates: 14, 21 & 28 October 2021 (Every Thursday)

Platform: Zoom Webinar

Register here: https://bit.ly/GCEYouthActionMonth

COVID-19 has highlighted the deep structural inequalities that exist across our contextual realities, across all regions, particularly those within the “developing” regions of the world. It has also presented the world with a moment to pause and reflect on its ways of working and how we define normalcy. Despite the diversities and nuances that underpin the human lived experiences and realities of those across the developing world, the legacy of colonial violence remains the golden thread that finds itself embedded in all of our contextual realities as the root cause of the inequalities that we face in our contemporary reality.

The legacies of colonial violence have deeply embedded and embodied impacts on the lived human rights of all human beings but more specifically on POC youth, adolescents, students, children, indigenous peoples, persons with disabilities, those that are often described as ‘other.’ Repression and Resistance are two trends that have emerged throughout the Covid-19 crisis, particularly about young people’s responses to authoritarian rule, political violence, and the repression of active citizenship among human rights defenders and civil society. The criminalisation and shrinking of space for youth and student-led social justice organising have been seen to be on the rise during this “new normal” we find ourselves facing.

As GCE grows and strengthens its youth and student engagement, it becomes imperative to create brave spaces and platforms for youth and students to lead discussions, document perspectives, co-create strategies, and develop shared agendas for education advocacy and activism within the GCE as a movement.

The Youth Action Month under the #ReclamingOurEducationAgenda engagement series is a stepping stone toward institutionalising youth and student involvement in conceptualising, implementing, and driving the shared agenda of achieving transformative, quality, and inclusive education for all. The engagement series will allow the movement to get a sense of what youth and students are thinking, experiencing, and demanding about their futures.

By centering decolonisation, feminism, and intergenerational solidarity, in our engagement series, we aim to link education financing, transformative education, and decolonial praxis. These engagements will allow for the documenting and collecting of youth and student perspectives, which may form the basis of our GCE Youth Engagement Strategy. The end goal is a robust and genuinely representative process that may lead us into the 2021 Global Student & Youth Caucus, where our strategy and our shared vision may be realised through planned actions and collaborations in 2022 and beyond.

The Youth Action Month will be a 3 part dialogue series every Thursday during October. The Youth Action Month will allow us to:

  1. Build linkages and collaboration opportunities among young persons to create a better representation, critical engagement, and shared agendas within the movement. This engagement series will allow for solidarity building and collaboration planning toward student & youth-led activities across regions and the membership. Finally, we believe that these engagements will encourage an organised, robust, and strengthened representation of youth and students in the GCE youth constituency and beyond the movement.
  2. Build capacity through knowledge exchange and dialogue for young persons to develop a shared language when it comes to education financing, transformative education, and decolonisation of education. This engagement series seeks to co-create a progressive, politicised GCE youth & student constituency that leads the agenda of the broader movement.
  3. Build shared approaches and strategies for youth & student-led advocacy, action, and policy influencing within national, regional, and international contexts. This engagement series will support the GCE to implement broad-based student and youth-led action and dictate future strategies within GCE as a global education movement.

GCE encourages its members and those connected to the movement to get involved and support the Youth Action Month by contributing to content, encouraging youth and students within your network to be part of these convenings, suggesting speakers, and promoting the event series as far and wide as possible, to ensure that we reach youth and student organising where it counts!

Dates: 14, 21 & 28 October 2021 (Every Thursday)

Platform: Zoom Webinar

Register here: https://bit.ly/GCEYouthActionMonth

Stay tuned for more information and the final programme!

Share this article

The Global Campaign for Education (GCE) is a civil society movement that aims to end exclusion in education. Education is a basic human right, and our mission is to make sure that governments act now to deliver the right of everyone to a free, quality, public education.