No abstract

The effects of the pandemic, natural disasters, wars, and economic distress at the turn of the second decade of the 20th century are a call to strengthen peace education around the world. In this chapter, the authors argue that intentional social practices of critical literacies offer opportunities for peacebuilding, understood as a dynamic process which includes the development of harmony in different life dimensions. After providing an overview of peace research and peace education in the Colombian context, the authors provide a conceptualization of critical literacy and its relation to peacebuilding. Finally, the chapter offers a set of practical strategies to promote peacebuilding through critical literacies based on research experiences across the Americas. The strategies include the use of children's literature to understand social reality and to develop empathy, critical literacies to develop critical intercultural awareness, and connecting with families and communities through literacy practices to make peace.

No abstract

This paper aims to provide a framework-in-action, informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics, to inspire reconstructive discourse analysis in language and literacy teacher education, with illustrative examples and provocative questions. We exemplify the use of the framework through the analysis of a community mapping project. We analyze the curriculum documents, as well as a sample of a racially aware educator's community mapping project, through the ideational, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions, drawing relevant semiotic interpretations on the field, tenor, and mode. Findings highlight tensions in practice and possibilities for reconstructing curricular knowledge more deeply rooted in praxis that is intentionally transformative, context-specific, historically construed, and geopolitically sensitive. We pose a series of questions that educators can bring to bear on the discourse practices of teacher education. Whether one is studying texts, curricular documents, instructional dialogues, or policies, this framework-in-action provides tools and questions that may be useful for deconstructing whiteness and reconstructing anti-racism. It also situates teacher educators as agents of policy making and implementation who are able to reconstruct discursive practices to respond to pressing social needs in the context of literacy teacher education. The idea of a framework-in-action emphasizes the partiality of epistemological and ontological foundations and the need to connect our analyses in the social world in ways that make a difference.

No abstract