Peace Through Praxis: Re-designing EAL Composition Curricula to Promote Critical Peace Consciousness via Critical Media Literacy

Abstract

Currently forced to live under the omnipresent power of a neoliberal system (Martin, 2017), we are no longer "subject[s] of relationships" (Norton, 2014), but rather objects with minimal power to control our lives within the social norms and expectations we are expected to hold. “Power and politics, sexuality, spiritual and religious faith, the impact of media and the content of popular culture, war and violence, race and cultural difference are only some of the salient topics to the direction and quality of young people's lives, yet the sterility of the learning space today seems to exclude most of these things” (Shapiro, 2015, p.13). Educational settings are dominated by a hidden curriculum, which considers learners as object beings to be “gifted a world” without taking into consideration their views or experiences of the world (Freire, 1970). As an alternative, critical peace education (Bajaj, 2008) aims to enable students to become aware of the multiple forces that shape their world, and as they learn about the world, they can begin to exercise agency to change the world. When critical peace education is implemented via critical media literacy, which helps one to "critically analyze relationships between media and audiences, information and power" (Kellner & Share, 2007, p.4), then a step towards developing critical peace consciousness can take place since mass media is a powerful source of hidden messages and can provide the context wherein paradoxical circumstances related to peace can be examined and peaceful action triggered.In light of the connection that I see between critical peace education and critical media literacy, both of which draw on critical pedagogy, and my interest in integrating critical peace education into English-as-an-additional-language (EAL) classes, which is quite rare in the literature, I decided to conduct critical research through a situated qualitative case study. Through this research, I aimed to explore how, if at all, a peace-oriented EAL writing course anchored in the knowledge processes of a pedagogy of multiliteracies could help the EAL learners enrolled in my composition course to develop critical peace consciousness via critical media literacy in line with the augmented course objectives. The two main data sources for this study were the artifacts and the interviews from the students who agreed to participate. The teacher-researcher journal I kept was used as a subsidiary source of data to validate or challenge the findings derived from my analysis of the main sources. Findings show that the EAL learners increased their awareness on how media shape their understanding of peace and how they can contribute to peace glocally via their use of media and beyond. Moreover, such a peace-driven syllabus not only increased the language skills of the learners in my composition course, but also helped them make valuable connections to real life which shaped their perspectives and practice over time. This timely research brings insights for future pedagogical, curricular and administrative adaptations/choices. These insights call on the adoption of cross-curricular and cross-disciplinary perspectives to develop the critical peace consciousness of learners in second/foreign language courses, as well as the reconceptualization of teacher education and professional development activities to help teachers to become active agents of peacebuilding.