In a world ridden with “direct, structural and cultural violence” (Galtung, 1978), education’s role in alleviating conflict has never been more critical. Peace education offers a systemic-systematic pathway to engage in sustainable ways of transforming individuals into ethical inhabitants of a strained planet. This paper delineates the way Positive Discourse Analysis (PDA) of world literature can enable Critical Peace Education (CPE) as curricular-pedagogical praxis. Literary humanistic inquiry presents a powerful approach to peacebuilding by fostering affective, ideological and ethical engagement with the realities around us through its multidimensional representation of conflict. Strengthening critical reading and interpretive competences enables holistic evidence-based interrogation of structural and cultural conflicts. World literature, characterised by globalisation and cosmopolitanism (Damrosch, 2003), organically disrupts generalised discourses on conflict and peace, emphasising their multicultural, multiethnic and pluralistic episteme through commentaries. Reading world literature therefore builds ethico-political intercultural competence and global citizenship, with PDA as a “counter-hegemonic” pedagogical pathway that creates discerning readers of the world through the word (Freire, 1983). Situating the disciplinary focus of peacebuilding within world literature, I present a reading model with PDA as an interpretive methodology to achieve CPE in adaptive, locally sensitive ways, mapping literary hermeneutics, liberal humanism and critical sociology to Monisha Bajaj’s four coordinates of CPE that build idealistic-ideological-politicisational-intellectual competencies (Haavelsrud, qtd in Bajaj, 2008). I conclude with a competence-based-curriculum framework on PDA for CPE and comment on the normative, aesthetic and ideological pathways as three interconnected aspects that reading world literature can achieve as a pedagogy of peace in classrooms.

Authors:
Nishevita Jayendran, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, India

About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Nishevita Jayendran is Assistant Professor at the Centre of Excellence in Teacher Education, TISS Mumbai, India. She teaches and consults on literature, critical/cultural literacies, material and curriculum design, discourse analysis and creative writing.

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https://www.linkedin.com/in/nishevita-jayendran-71739213/

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