Cultures of Coexistence: Four New York City Elementary Teachers and Their Models for Teaching Peace

• In Event: 14.044 - Roundtable Session 2
  In Roundtable Session: 14.044-27 - Educating for Peace

Abstract

This paper presents qualitative data from four New York City elementary classrooms and focuses on how teachers create educational cultures of peace. Vignettes are reconstructed from two months of observational and interview data with attention to how teacher beliefs on peaceful co-existence manifest in the playing field of a child’s subject formation. Drawing from concepts of subjectification, this study asks: what conditions of possibility do teachers create when thinking about peace in their classrooms? How does this contribute to the production of various student subjects? Findings show that teachers create conditions that emerge from their particular theories about children and their capacity to exercise peace. They suggest that peace is located in relationships between self-and-others, self-and-the-law, self-and-society, and within oneself.

Authors

• Debbie Sonu, Hunter College - CUNY

• Molly Quinn, Augusta University