Two Canadian academics are in Indonesia to help their local colleagues become part of an international network of anti-extremism workshops.

Ayaz Naseem and Adeela Arshad-Ayaz, both education professors at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, are on a whirlwind tour of Java to meet with people interested in conducting a Symposium on Teaching about Extremism, Terror and Trauma (TETT) in this country.

“Basically the idea was to create a series in which there were multiple voices on the issues of extremism and terrorism and radicalization and these are the voices that are usually not a part of the conversation on these issues because most of the conversations, we felt, were from a very securitized perspective,” Naseem said. He and Arshad-Ayaz have already organized three such symposia in Canada, the latest taking place at the end of September in Montreal involving teachers, trainee teachers, artists, students, parents and storytellers.

“This year what we also did was from the TETT platform we created a new space we called the ‘CLEAR Space’ that stands for ‘Creating Learning Against Radicalization’ and we created an institute at Concordia University in Montreal, a three-day institute with a number of workshops and each workshop had members of the community,” Naseem said. “Each workshop took one way of learning, especially the ones that would appeal to the youth.”

The workshops, he said, used social media interventions, artistic interventions, comic strips and what they called “selphilms” – one-minute self-filmed movies made with cell phones — to “kick-start conversations” about the dangers of radicalization and to promote diversity.

“We created something like 12 or 15 different pedagogical products that teachers can take to classrooms, parents can use to teach their kids about, against radicalization,” he said.

Naseem said that immediately after the September symposium people from Qatar, the Netherlands and Spain expressed interest in replicating the workshops.

“We basically operate from this belief that solutions have to be local,” he said. “While the general technique, the general idea is something that can be universal, the solutions must be local.”

Naseem said after arriving on Sunday he spent two days in Yogyakarta with colleagues who want to conduct similar workshops at two of the city’s universities. Before Naseem and Arshad-Ayaz return to Canada on Sunday, they are to attend the Oct. 25 to 27 International Conference on Education in Muslim Society, go to Bandung to meet with a peace institute and learn about Indonesia.

“We need to come here for an extended period and talk to people to understand their frame of mind and what’s going on,” Arshad-Ayaz said. “It is very dangerous to generalize. This is one of the reasons why we are here: to network and find out because there’s interest here and we have expertise there, but we are not saying we can just bring that and impose it.”

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