Plurilingualism and STEAM: Unfolding the Paper Crane of Peace at an Elementary School in Japan

Introduction

On the school trip to Hiroshima, after hearing the Hibakusha’s¹ story, well that night, a teacher in the boys’ room came to me saying, “you’ve got to come, you’ve got to come.” So I went, expecting trouble, but when I arrived, the boys had gathered and had been talking for over an hour, of their own accord, about their impressions of the Hibakusha’s story, about what they could do for peace, about how they would live their lives. And they were saying, “the Hibakusha’s use of ‘life,’ couldn’t that be different to how we understand it?” … I thought this had to be connected to what they were learning in their Gengo Bunka [Languages and Cultures] class(Kana-sensei, reflective journaling, translated from Japanese).

We open this article with the elementary school children’s voices after they met with atomic bomb survivors. These children’s experience and their narratives will bookend the paper and help to frame our discussion. In the same way, the Paper Crane origami, chosen by the children themselves, will frame, as a metaphor of learning, this paper.

Japan is a highly homogenous and monolingual nation with relatively recent and very poignant memories of violence, located in a currently uncertain geopolitical region with the potential for renewed conflict. Within this context, we will present a grassroots pedagogical project that meshes learning about peace, STEAM (an interdisciplinary pedagogical approach that incorporates Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics, often simultaneously), and plurilingualism at an elementary school.

Peace education has received a lot of attention in the literature since the latter half of the 20^th century. Profoundly influenced by Johan Galtung’s (1969) concepts of negative peace (in short, the absence of direct, physical violence such as armed conflict) and positive peace (absence of structural violence, entrenched systems that perpetuate inequality, poverty, etc.), many peace education initiatives focus on fostering awareness of, and encouraging action toward, the latter, including critical peace education (Bajaj, 2015). Most studies have focused on higher education (Kester & Cremin, 2017), and less attention has been given to this field for K-12 children.

In K-12 education, much attention is given to multidisciplinary approaches, such as STEAM, and to plurilingual education. Traditionally, all these have been seen as separate fields of study. In this paper, we attempt to clarify their relationship in practice. We will trace the creation of the Gengo Bunka (言語・文化, literally, ‘Languages and Cultures’) subject which incorporated foreign languages into the core curriculum at an elementary school, despite considerable initial resistance to their introduction. We will then examine thepractice, with particular focus on STEAM instruction and the school’s peace learning initiative.

In this vein, the paper focusses on the interlinking of languages, intercultural awareness, and peace learning in the spirit of David Crystal’s definition of peace linguistics: