Abstract:

This project was constructed on the notion that being activity engaged with the concepts of peace greatly boosts ones chance of actualizing them. Reardon (2000) suggests that explicitly studying the fundamental terms of peace education is an essential part of understanding and authenticating it. Set in a series of Japanese university language acquisition classes, a four-part investigative and collaborative lesson was devised wherein student agency would define, expand and negotiate understandings of various key terms in peace education. These initial lessons then inspired an interactive project, coined the Peace Wall project, at the two-day school festival event where students and other guests shared their ideas of peace and placed them on a communal space for deliberation. Since its inception four years ago, student volunteers from these classes have helped to create new themes and background activities for the Peace Wall project formulated from classroom collaborations. In classes, we have conducted surveys and discussions to explore how students understand peace and how they might expand it with the help of others through peace linguistics activities. The efficacy of this project, we believe, lies in passing on agency to students and other participants by allowing them to collaboratively express themselves through interpersonal and small group dialoging about aspects of personal, local and global peace. This project also shows how the artificial barrier of the classroom can be traversed with experiential interactive learning wherein students share and develop critical understandings with the larger community.

The presentation will feature the collaboratively constructed classroom lessons, analysis of subsequent student feedback and the configurations of the Peace Wall projects along with an analysis of over 500 data points gathered from them. Through this project we hope to add to the growing body of evidence that shows the need for dynamic peace education that challenges students to reinterpret their understandings of the world around them and develop skills for overcoming problems and achieving solutions in a peaceful manner. We posit that a second language-learning environment can provide an adequate space to support these explorations into peace studies and its various connotations.

References:
[1] Reardon, B. (2000). Peace education: a review and projection. In Oxford, R. (Ed) Understanding Peace Cultures, Information Age Publishing Inc. 2014.

Keywords:

Language acquisition, Student agency, Collaborative learning, Peace education.