Peacebuilding Education into Critical Multimodal Literacy in the English as a Foreign Language Classroom

• In Event: Virtual Roundtable Session 3
  In Refereed Roundtable Session: Transforming Schools and Classrooms: Leadership, Literacy, and Technology in Diverse Educational Contexts

Proposal

Guerilla groups in Colombia are creating videos on TikTok inviting teens to join their ranks which caused around 159 adolescents from poor rural communities enlisted by the first half of 2024 (Krygier & García, 2024). This social media trend along with poverty and violence in their communities are exacerbating adolescents' hostile behaviors. To prepare students to face situations like this from a critical perspective, this research studies the role of integrating peacebuilding education into Critical Multimodal Literacy (CML) in the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom.

Peacebuilding, defined as measures to prevent conflict and foster lasting and stable harmony (OECD, 2008), has been shown to reduce violence by giving students opportunities to engage in tolerance and inclusive practices (Avery and Hahn, 2004). CML explores different dimensions (re-storying, acknowledging and shifting power relationships, etc.) to understand how readers participate in the meaning-making process of a multimodal text (print, digital, social media, etc.) (Alford & Yousef, 2023). Although extended research has been conducted separately on peace education (Lauritzen, 2016) and multimodal literacy (Cappello et al., 2019), the integration of peacebuilding into CML needs further research (Gachago et al., 2014). Peacebuilding and CML can complement each other when analyzing how language along with the multimodal elements of multimodal texts foster and sustain either peace or violence.

This empirical mix-methods study seeks to launch a line of research integrating peacebuilding education into CML so that students may critically decipher messages of violence and respond to them by creating alternative texts that promote peaceful coexistence in the EFL classroom. This is crucial in the EFL classroom where social media is often recruited to enhance students’ engagement (Wang, Wang, & Li, 2022) and language learning. To conduct this research I interviewed 5 EFL teachers and am surveying around 100 students from public high schools in Colombia in order to answer the following research questions: What are EFL teachers’ and students’ perceptions of the role of peacebuilding education in the EFL classroom? and What strategies do EFL teachers use to teach high school students to decode, analyze, and transform multimodal texts that contain violent messages?.

Initial findings from the teachers’ interviews suggest that although teachers make efforts to address conflict resolution among students, these actions are not consciously planned as part of peacebuilding education within their EFL classrooms. Instead, they tend to occur as responses to current issues affecting their students. Teachers also acknowledged not being familiar with the CML framework, however, it appears that two of them are already implementing strategies related to critical thinking. Their efforts, nevertheless, are often hindered by the students’ low English proficiency, which forces teachers to focus more on literal comprehension to ensure students understand the language itself.

This roundtable conversation aims to generate new insights and foster critical dialogue about how teachers can integrate peacebuilding education not only in the EFL classroom but also in any other school subjects and how the CML framework can offer specific tools to teach students to critically analyze and transform violent media content into peaceful multimodal texts.

Author

• Johanna Avila, Michigan State University, College of Education