Building Community in Polarised Times

We were delighted to welcome friends of Facing History & Ourselves UK to ‘Building Community in Polarised Times’, our second annual panel with the LSE Faith Centre and Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity. Drawing from experiences both in and out of educational spaces, our panelists Mari Williams, Revd. Canon Prof. James Walters and Joey Hasson spoke of community as a double-edged sword – both a way of bringing people ‘in’ and, sometimes, a way of leaving others ‘out’.

The panel was chaired by Maël Lavenaire, Research Fellow in Racial Inequality at the International Inequalities Institute.

Mari Williams, a Facing History deputy headteacher at Heartlands High School in Haringey, London, spoke about her decades-long engagement with our training and resources. 

Mari first encountered Facing History in 2000, when she was invited to participate in a Holocaust and Human Behaviour (HHB) seminar in New York City. More recently, Mari worked with Facing History in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder to foster civil discourse in her classroom about sensitive topics: 

‘My role as an educator in polarised times is supporting young people to be able to ask questions, have discussions and understand each other and different points of view by creating safe spaces that allow their voices to be heard.

Revd. Canon Prof. James Walters, founding director of the LSE Faith Centre, focussed his remarks on the religious sphere. More specifically, on the paradox of religious communities being at once among the ‘thickest’ forms of cultural connection and among the most exclusive. Referencing his own work at the LSE Faith Centre bringing young people with diverse identity backgrounds and political commitments into conversation, James invited us to build what he called ‘safe stretch containers’ – places where we can bravely, collectively challenge ourselves to encounter new ideas.

Finally, Joey Hasson, Senior Programme Officer at the Sigrid Rausing Trust, spoke about his years of powerful advocacy work in both South Africa and the UK. Highlighting his and others’ hard-fought work to build bridges across differences – including a successful 2008 campaign with Equal Education to rebuild 500 broken windows at Luhlaza School in Khayelitsha, South Africa – Joey reflected on the importance of developing a ‘moral consensus’. He suggested that schools are the place to do that:

‘It strikes me that schools are revolutionary institutions, [...] places where people can feel that sense of connectedness, that sense of possibility that they can actually change things’.

After the event, we invited attendees to read our Fostering Civil Discourse guide, a great starting point for learning more about Facing History’s unique pedagogical approach. Revised in late 2022 amidst ongoing tensions around immigration, Islamophobia and antisemitism in the UK, the guide helps teachers build their own classroom communities across differences.