CHAPTER 4: Bringing Peacebuilding into the English Language Classroom
Valerie S. Jakar, Shaanan Academic College of Education
Alison Milofsky, United States Institute of Peace

In this chapter, we consider the intersection between peacebuilding and English language teaching. We begin by sharing our personal paths to peacebuilding and we then provide general guidelines for bringing peacebuilding into the classroom. We highlight examples of peacebuilding in practice to illustrate the implementation of these guidelines.

Introduction

What does it mean to teach peace? How do we engage language learners in difficult conversations around identity, conversations that encourage individual and group reflection and lead to social change? How do we privilege the stories of our students when those stories bring conflict front and center in our classrooms? As educators, we have to challenge ourselves to think through our assumptions, to open ourselves to multiple perspectives on tricky social and political topics in order to create a space that welcomes our students to do the same as we teach for peace.

Teaching peace is a commitment. It is hard and it is constant and at the same time it feeds the soul. Those who choose to bring peacebuilding into the classroom often have their own journey to share, as do the authors of this chapter. In order to understand the perspectives presented here, it is important for us, the authors, to share who we are and how we came to the work of social justice and peacebuilding (two overlapping concepts). Self-reflections are a critical step in engaging in social justice education. Knowing ourselves helps to create a mindfulness that encourages us to think about how we see and interact with our students and our peers around social issues. And this reflection can facilitate the creation of a space in which our students feel comfortable exploring who they are and how they fit in the world.

Alison Milofsky

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
—Martin Luther King Jr.

My formal path to social justice and peacebuilding began when I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Slovakia from 1996 to 1998. While there, I developed a hyper-awareness of the discrimination the Roma face on a daily basis. For 2 1/2 years I worked as a teacher trainer in the pedagogical faculty of a university, preparing my students to be English teachers. My own teacher education in a master’s program in TESOL equipped me to teach these students the English language and to prepare them to teach others, but nothing in my past experience shaped my ability to address the discriminatory views of my students and my colleagues. My attempts at having rational conversations to address their othering of the Roma did nothing to shed light on the plight of the Roma or on my students’ deep-seated prejudice. I needed a different knowledge base and a new set of skills to engage those around me in conversations about identity, othering, discrimination, and the conflicts that can arise when groups mistrust one another.

When I left the Peace Corps, I left the formal classroom as well and began working at a nonprofit organization that has, as part of its mission, prejudice awareness and reduction. My job included providing workshops for students and teachers on combating discrimination (Milofsky, 2014). What I learned from this work is that hate is not rational and, therefore, attempts at rational discussions to address hateful attitudes are ineffective. I also learned that empathy and understanding the lived experience of those different from ourselves is key in building relationships and breaking down barriers. Today, I try to incorporate this understanding as a facilitator of intergroup dialogues around race and gender for undergraduate students and conflict transformation trainings for emerging young civil society leaders in conflict zones.

Valerie Jakar

It is hard to imagine a more important task than the struggle for what Jewish tradition calls Tikkun Olam—the repair and healing of our world.
—Shapiro, “Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Peace”

More than 50 years ago, as a high school senior in London, England, I was introduced to the Council for Education in World Citizenship (CEWC), which was a United Nations–sponsored organization seeking to bring young people together in a learning situation. That early nurturing process, instilling into us an understanding that we, the privileged Westerners, should seek to reduce inequity in the world, has remained with me. Since that time, I have always been associated with UN entities and other social-responsibility oriented groups: as a student, as a teacher of ESOL, and as a member of a UNICEF educational development committee in Israel, where I have lived and worked for the last 35 years. Throughout my years in the teaching profession, inspired by colleagues such as teacher-educators Natalie Hess and Esther Lucas and folklorist Simon Lichman, I have sought to promote mutual understanding and appreciation among my peers, my students (and by association, their students), and my fellow teachers. The people who live in my region are known to be in an intractable conflict situation, with little movement toward political conciliation between Israel and the Palestinian Authority over the last 20 years.

It was Amos Oz, a revered Israeli author, who asked, “What do you do when both sides are right?” (2002). In my role as teacher-educator and EFL specialist, I have striven to acknowledge that both “sides” may well be “right” and that it is my role to help them understand each others’ “rights” and reasons. Within Israel there are conflicts of opinion on religious issues and practices among Jews, among the Christian sects, and among Islamic groups. In some sectors of our society, family conflicts have created horrible situations where lives are lost or bodies are mutilated. Within families and within schools, conflicts arise that cannot be resolved without help. In many of these situations it is the children who are harmed, either physically or emotionally (or both). I continue to try to create opportunities for encounters between individuals or groups of educators (mostly teachers of English) from different ethnic, national, or religious heritages, despite comments such as “That’s ludicrous! Why bother when you are in an intractable situation?”

Over the years, despite the despondency and frustration felt by those who endeavored to create peacebuilding situations but failed, social justice–minded people, including many educators, continue to develop programs that aim to generate positive feelings, empathy, and an appreciation of “the other.” As in our famous irrigation systems, the effect of small but regular input (the drip method) in a stable environment, with some boosts of positive influences (the fertilizer) such as learning about empathy, may be more effective than other, more erratic approaches. Thus, through a series of workshops or ongoing encounter programs, we have succeeded in establishing a sense of community among teachers of English who are driven, with passion, toward creating a community of understanding.

OUR CHARGE, OUR EXAMPLES

Our experiences provide you with a sense of the lenses through which we see the world. They also give you a sense of what informs our peacebuilding perspectives. Most important, by sharing pieces of our stories, we raise the notion that stories and personal experiences matter. We, as educators, must reflect on who we are and what stories we want to share with our colleagues and students. Sharing stories builds trust and contributes to understanding, allowing our students to see the humanity within us and inviting them, as well as ourselves, to see the humanity within others.

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