Peace Education Quotes and Memes: A Peace Education Bibliography

Critical pedagogy keeps at its center the questioning of how power relations operate in the construction of knowledge and how teachers and students can become transformative democratic agents who learn to address injustice, prejudice, and unequal social structures.

In this article, Michalinos Zembylas & Zvi Bekerman sort through various fundamental premises about peace education to figure out how those premises operate to normalize particular meanings for peace, conflict, education, and other related concepts. They argue that peace education may often become part of the problem it tries to solve, if theoretical work is not used to interrogate the taken for granted assumptions about peace and peace education. For this purpose, they make explicit their own proposition of critical peace education through explicating the openings that are created by putting forward some alternative premises about peace, educational reform, and schooling. In particular, they put forward a proposition consisting of four elements aiming to reclaim criticality in peace education: reinstating the materiality of things and practices; reontologizing research and practice in peace education; becoming critical experts of design; and engaging in critical cultural analysis.