Peace Education for and With the Critical Margins

• In Event: 31.069 - Pedagogy of Vulnerability: Peace-Building in Practice Across Higher Education

Abstract

This paper reports on a 3-year long critical participatory ethnography with DREAMERS in a Unityville public schools. A Peace Education curriculum developed by high school teachers is contrasted with a radical social justice orientation to peace from the margins of legalized immigration rhetoric and values. Researchers conducted over weekly observations and interviews, focus group interviews, and engaged directly with teachers and students in everyday activities. The findings indicate a basic disjuncture between teachers’ conceptions of peace education that addresses cultural differences and the students’ conceptions of peace education as social justice. This fissure has consequences for how peace education is delivered and embraced (or not) with youth at the margins of contemporary school life.

Author

• Barbara Dennis, Indiana University