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Peace through Understanding: Peace Activities as Innovations in Language Teacher Education

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Innovative Practices in Language Teacher Education

Part of the book series: Educational Linguistics ((EDUL,volume 30))

Abstract

This chapter contends that peace is necessary and possible. It presents six crucial dimensions of peace: inner, interpersonal, intergroup, international, intercultural, and ecological. The future of the whole planet rides on decisions about these aspects of peace. Foreign and second language (L2) teacher educators and their students, future L2 teachers, have a significant role to play in fostering peace. Peace is created through communication, and communication is the métier of L2 teacher educators and L2 teachers. This chapter explains the importance of weaving peace activities into L2 teacher education and of encouraging prospective teachers to integrate such activities into their own teaching. It describes a current project for weaving peace activities into EFL teacher education in Argentina. Finally, it presents an array of peace activities useful for L2 teacher education and urges readers to use them in teacher education courses.

Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.

Albert Einstein

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Notes

  1. 1.

    These two modes, which are less conscious and fully conscious, also correspond to two different ways of approaching L2 learning strategy instruction. In strategy instruction the second mode, compared with the first mode, has proven to be much more effective (Oxford, 1990, 2011, 2017).

  2. 2.

    Some of the pope’s visits to different parts of the world at other times have received tremendous publicity in the name of peace and love. I hope that the media’s almost constant current focus on turbulence and violence will eventually recede, allowing some of the good news, such as peaceful efforts by the pope and many others, to arise in the public consciousness.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Carrie Drake for the SMILES technique and to Tammy Gregersen for her constant encouragement in the area of peace activities for teacher education. I am also grateful to Jing Lin and Ian Harris for their unfailing support for my writings on peace.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Education, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Rebecca Oxford

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  1. Rebecca Oxford
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Correspondence to Rebecca Oxford .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Languages and Literatures, University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, Iowa, USA

    Tammy S. Gregersen

  2. Department of Psychology, Cape Breton University, Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada

    Peter D. MacIntyre

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Oxford, R. (2017). Peace through Understanding: Peace Activities as Innovations in Language Teacher Education. In: Gregersen, T., MacIntyre, P. (eds) Innovative Practices in Language Teacher Education. Educational Linguistics, vol 30. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51789-6_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51789-6_7

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