EFL Pre-Service Teachers Challenging Media Views of Colombia's Armed Conflict: Exploring the Possibilities That Critical Peace Education and Pedagogy of Memory can Offer to ELT

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Colombia is still trying to emerge from the shadows of a brutal armed and social conflict and is in need of overcoming the obliviousness that prevents its citizens to understand and unlearn the war. Colombian mainstream media have influenced people’s views about the armed conflict, which poses several problems to achieve a stable reconciliation process. Given such context, the role that Colombian teachers play is fundamental to transform people’s mindsets so that they start acting on what is important for them: building peace in their immediate contexts. Specially, future foreign language teachers in Colombia need to be prepared to work in marginalized settings where their learners are craving for educators committed to the amelioration of their life conditions. Although some pedagogical studies have been set up in the Colombian ELT field regarding the promotion of peace, there is still need of working with language student-teachers and their development of critical awareness about the representations of the armed conflict in mainstream media texts. Thus, being guided by the principles of CPE, CML, and pedagogy of memory, the present study was conducted in a foreign language teacher education program at a branch of a public university in Antioquia, attempting to explore how the implementation of a pedagogical project could foster student-teachers’ critical awareness about the views of Colombia’s armed conflict promoted by mainstream media. Data collection included a survey, recordings of critical class discussions about media texts, learners’ artifacts, and interviews. Findings indicated that student-teachers’ views of the armed conflict already appeared to be critical to a certain point, but the pedagogical implementation supported learners to do more complex analyses of this issue, helped them to uncover the purposes of mainstream media, and made them aware of the relevance of some disenfranchised voices. Nonetheless, implementing a single project within a whole program is not enough; thus this study brings attention on the need to integrate critical perspectives of PE and pedagogy of memory in language teacher preparation programs preparing future educators to deal with social issues and to encourage their learners to exert their transformative agency for building peace in our country.