Peace Education through Literary Works in English Language Classes

This paper reports a longitudinal case study of peace education in two English language courses namely Topical Conversation and Reading Comprehension. The participants, chosen through convenience sampling, were 15 (7 males and 8 females) Iranian English language learners with the age range of 18 to 24. Eight literary works imbued with peace, non-violence, and diversity values were used for the purpose of peace education in the two courses. Various qualitative tools of data collection, such as interviews, journals, classroom presentations, ethnographic field notes, and memos were used. These data sources were gathered from the two courses in two consecutive semesters at Sharif University of Technology in the city of Tehran, as part of a minor program in English language and literature. Then, the students’ progress was traced through their journal entries, classroom presentations, and the researchers’ own participatory observation and field notes. Hybrid thematic analysis was used to analyse the data. The findings showed that the two courses had a positive impact on the students’ overall awareness of peace values. Besides, the noteworthy themes extracted from the qualitative data included self-knowledge, knowledge of the local world, knowledge of others, peace with nature, and acknowledgment of and respect for diversities and unheard voices. Generally, the proposed literary works helped the participants reevaluate their stereotypical opinions about marginalized groups.