Possibilities for sustainable change: critical analyses of curriculum and pedagogy on peace, language & racial agency

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

This panel intends to examine how historical and current frameworks as reflected in curriculum and pedagogy encourage students to engage in meaningful discourses around complex social issues. Textbooks provide useful insights into normalized representations of race, conflict and peace. Moreover, pedagogy has direct impacts on students’ experiences inside and outside the classroom, as it has the potential to reproduce or challenge dominant social structures and language conceptualizations. While textbooks and pedagogy have been analyzed before on these themes, our papers offer new critical perspectives on how teachers and students are experiencing social justice in the classroom.

The papers use a variety of theoretical and methodological frameworks for their analysis. Through interviews, case studies and content analysis these papers seek to understand how curriculum and pedagogy reflect societal values, which affect students’ understandings of peace, language and agency. The first paper uses qualitative data to analyze how words and visual representations perpetuate understandings of the past as well as the future in North and South Korea. The second paper uses both content analysis of practitioner guides on translanguaging and qualitative data from interviews with teachers of emergent bilinguals, and applies an integrated framework of critical theory, world society theory and culturally sustaining pedagogy. The third paper employs a qualitative and transnational content analysis of history and social sciences textbooks for understandings of Blackness and subscriptions of the agency during slavery, apartheid and colonialism. These papers combine literature on reunification, peace education, translanguaging, critical pedagogy and racial agency.

The first paper focuses on South Korean history textbooks and how they present issues of war, peace and possible reunification in the past fifty years. The second paper explores teachers’ attitudes toward and understandings of translanguaging theory, pedagogy and accompanying curricular materials provided in the professional development of teachers who work with emergent bilinguals in the United States. The third and final paper interrogates textbooks as ‘politicized commodities’ in the United States, South Africa and Nigeria through a longitudinal content analysis of racial agency during historical moments of oppression. By examining themes of peace, language, and agency, these papers complicate traditional ideas of what curriculum and pedagogy can do to encourage students and teachers to engage consciously and authentically in society.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Individual Presentations

• Possibilities for a Peaceful Tomorrow: Analyzing the Discourse of War and Peace through South Korean Textbooks - Anne Stewart Huntington, Stanford University; Chealin Won, Stanford University

• The Transformative Potential and Shortcomings of Translanguaging as a Critical Pedagogy: Insights from Teachers of Emergent Bilinguals - Juetzinia Amanda Kazmer-Murillo, Stanford University

• Who Teaches Resilience?: An Interrogation of Racial Agency in the United States, South African and Nigerian Textbooks - Darion Wallace, Stanford University

• Education for global citizenship and sustainable development in social science textbooks - Jeremy Jimenez, SUNY Cortland; Julia Lerch, Stanford University; Patricia Bromley, Stanford University