Students for peace: the first brazilian english textbook aimed at educating for peace

Abstract

In a world with so much violence and intolerance, which seems to induce even more anger among people, it is essential to improve education, grounding it on peace and tolerance, and we believe that the English classes in regular schools can create opportunities for that. Therefore, this work presents an analysis of the first Brazilian English textbook aimed at educating for peace, named Students for Peace. Supported by a review of literature on peace culture, such as the concepts of negative and positive peace proposed by Galtung, and the nonviolent communication approach developed by Rosenberg, this work explains why it is important to understand what positive peace is, as well as what actions could be taken to achieve it. It also provides an interview given by the author of the book, Eduardo Amos, to the author of this work, which explains how the idea of the book arose and what its purpose is. This work also analyses how the topics of the book are addressed to education for peace, and the way those topics create opportunities for students to reflect about their own reality and those of others, in order to promote critical thinking and tolerance. An analysis of the activities of the book shows that it is possible to use the English classes to develop students’ linguistic resources in this language and at the same time promote their awareness of the world around them.