Creating a harmonious and amenable atmosphere in the language classroom is an essential step for peaceful learning. Educating language learners about target culture or international cultures might help to bring out wider perspectives and empathy. Therefore, raising plurilingual and pluricultural individuals should be among the concerns of the language education system. Plurilingual and pluricultural language education were put forward in CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) which was developed by the Council of Europe and officially launched in 2001. CEFR “describes in a comprehensive way what language learners have to learn to do in order to use a language for communication and what knowledge and skills they have to develop so as to be able to act effectively” (Council of Europe, 2001, p.1). It functions as a guide and source to consult while designing coursebooks and syllabi across Europe. Ministry of National Education (MoNE) in Turkey has adopted CEFR as a guideline and arranges language levels in all grades and designs textbooks according to this framework.
Ian Harris (2004) defines the main problem of peace education mostly as emphasizing just ending the war and considering peace as an opposite construct from war. On the other hand, Harris asserts that peace education includes achieving peace while teaching non- violent skills and promoting peaceful attitudes. Thus, it contains five types of education: international education, human rights education, development education, environmental education and conflict resolution skills.
The Fundamental Law of MoNE, especially with their emphasis on first and second law, adopt to teach students peace education components and raise citizens who are sensitive about human rights, culture and the welfare of others. Since the articles are defined in the fundamental law, all courses teaching at schools supervising by MoNE should embrace these basic and fundamental aspects of education. On the other hand, at the English teaching books of 7th graders, there are culturally insensitive examples and photos promoting gender roles such as working male characters, shopping female characters, examples of sultan’s of Ottoman Empire instead of giving examples from other cultures, photos of boys are doing science and girls are playing dolls.
The purpose is this case study is to examine the peace education in English teaching classroom for 7th graders at an elementary school in Bursa. At this stage in the case study, the primary focus is on peace education and will be generally defined in this case study as teaching skills to develop non- violent environmental considering peace as a process to transform conflicts (Harris & Morrison, 2003). The research question of this case study is defined as “What are the most common identified gaps by students and the English language teacher as a key informant in terms of multicultural education in English teaching classrooms?”.