Understanding Critical Peace Education: A Case Study of a Moroccan School

Abstract

Despite seemingly remarkable progress on civic-political concepts in different cultural and national contexts, the co-existence of students and civilizations in the classroom remains underrepresented in critical peace education as a pedagogical approach. As a result, this qualitative case study seeks to understand the curriculum-as-planned, -implemented, and -lived of four Grade 5 classrooms at a school in Morocco. In this study, I suggest that their curriculum represents some of the key concepts taken up in critical peace education. Critical peace education works toward creating spaces of empowerment for students where they can critically analyze their relations to power. I use Foucault’s conceptions of discursive regimes, power/knowledge, care of the self, genealogy, and archaeology as the foundation for a postmodernist worldview. As part of my research methodology I collected data from curriculum documents, photos of activities/events/interactions at the school and/or within the classroom, responses from Grade 5 students to questions about their lived experiences about “making peace,” and journaling about my role as a participant-observer in the Arabic-speaking classrooms. This research seeks to mobilize knowledge that focuses on current practices for designing curriculum and pedagogical strategies that are needed to develop what we might call a “critical peace curriculum.”