Writing for Peace
Situating their concerns in contexts of war, educational injustice, and white supremacy, English studies scholars have been asking variations of a similar question for decades: Is it possible to teach English/writing/ literature/language so that people stop killing each other? (Hassan quoted in O’Reilly, 1984 and 1989; Wagar, 2015; Winn, 2018; Inoue, 2019).
In a series of community-engaged studies, collaborators and I shift the question slightly to ask: Under what conditions might writing promote peace?
These studies are characterized by two key principles:
• Peace is not only the absence of violence, but instead is defined as the conditions of justice, equality, and trust that are created in communities through everyday practices; and
• It is not writing or the teaching of writing in itself that builds peace. Instead it is people who, in complex and situated practices, within particular historical legacies and communities, make creative use of writing’s affordances for social change.
But how do people use writing to accomplish these ends? This question—one that implicates texts, people, practices, and socio-historic contexts—demands community-engaged ethnographic answers.
Paz: Escribiendo un Corazón Común / Peace: Writing a Common Heart
Edited by Jhoana Patiño and Kate Vieira
Peace: Writing a Common Heart is a community-authored book and board game, co-edited by Jhoana Patiño and Kate Vieira, committed to the construction of peace via writing. It was funded by a Baldwin Seed Grant, the Susan J. Cellmer Distinguished Chair in Literacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Fulbright/ICETEX.
Our team includes high school students, teachers, activists, artists, editors, psychologists, adults, young people, and writers. For us, “peace” does not have only one meaning.
We believe that peace is multiple, that it is a process, and that it is constructed in everyday life, and in everyday relationships. This kit is for young people, community members, teachers, or anyone who would like to experience the power of writing to construct peace with others. Here is co-editor Jhoana Patiño speaking about the process at the Conference on Community Writing in 2019:
The materials are open access and free. Please download and share!
The kit was distributed to schools, community centers, and community leaders in a pedagogical tour in Caldas in November 2019.
Please publish your own poetry for peace, based on our prompts or your own, here.
Writing for Peace in Colombia: A Literacy Ethnography
In the wake of the historic 2016 agreement to end 52 years of deadly conflict, Colombian communities are working to sustain peace—in part through peace-oriented writing, including storytelling, rap, theater, testimonios, singing, experimental literature, and poetry. According to Colombian poet JuanaMaría Echeverri, in a context in which war has colonized everyday language, such literary efforts serve to “write a new page of Colombia’s history.” Perhaps for this reason, writing has become a national symbol of political activism. In nationwide student marches in 2018, protesters demanded more books and fewer guns, wielding giant pencils in defiant fists. This “march of the pencils,” as it came to be known, represents a tight association between writing and peace building in Colombia’s post-accord era.
Based on scores of interviews with Colombian literary writers, participatory action research in writing-for-peace workshops with young people, and ongoing engagements with other writing-for-peace groups, this collaborative book manuscript (in process) seeks to provide a grounded model of how communities infuse writing with the power to build peace. In doing so, it makes a contextualized argument for expressive writing as a crucial, yet ethnographically underexamined, technology of social transformation.
Data collection funded by Fulbright/ICETEX (2018-2019) and writing and data analysis funded by an Institute for Research in the Humanities Faculty Fellowship, University of Wisconsin, Madison (2021).
Articles on writing and peace building
“Writing, Mobility, and Power.” Research in the Teaching of English, “In Dialogue” section, 54.3 (forthcoming 2020).
“What Happens When Texts Fly.” College English, Special Issue on Texts, 82.1 (2019): 77-95.
Writing for Peace Week, Madison, Wisconsin, May 2019 and the Correo de Colibrís
Thanks to the Susan J. Cellmer Distinguished Chair and the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program, Madison, Wisconsin had the privilege of welcoming the magical poetry-for-peace educators of Encantapalabras, Juana Maria Echeverri and Rodrigo Rojas Ospina, for a week of workshops, talks, and poetry. Events included: workshops with the young people of La Escalera, multilingual students at East High School, and bilingual educators; a Latinx bilingual poetry night (thank you Araceli Esparza!); a women-in-translation group meeting; a talk for the Latin American and Caribbean Studies program; and a collaborative data analysis workshop with graduate students analyzing young people’s poetry for peace.
This week resulted in the creation of the Correo de Colibrís, Juana’s brainchild. The goal of the hummingbird mail system is to share young people’s multilingual poetry for peace across borders. Colombian young people’s poetry was shared with youth in Wisconsin, and Wisconsin young people’s poetry was shared with youth in Chinchiná, Colombia. We are currently working on an anthology of multilingual poetryby youth Colombia and the U.S. called “Las Lenguas que Tenemos Dentro / The Languages we have Inside.”
Learn more about Encantapalabras here.
See encantapalabras discuss their work teaching poetry for peace in Colombia here.
Thank you to Gabrielle Kelenyi for crucial research assistance on countless aspects of this project.
Gabrielle (Gabbi) Kelenyi is a PhD student in the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Composition & Rhetoric Program interested in writing development across the lifespan, writing program administration, and researching best practices for teaching writing effectively across grade levels. Before returning to school, Gabbi served as a 9th Grade Composition Teacher and a Class of 2018 Advisor at a charter school in her hometown of Chicago, where she concurrently earned her MA in Teaching from Relay Graduate School of Education. She enjoys reading and writing with others, running long(ish) distances, and exploring new places!
Writing’s Potential to Heal
In an age that is seeing the rise of writing, more and more people are turning to writing to seek emotional and physical healing, resulting in shelves of popular self-help literature on writing to heal. It appears they are on to something. Psychologists have shown that writing can help release emotional stress, and medical researchers have documented the beneficial effects of writing on a range of physical conditions. But we understand relatively little about the conditions under which writing can achieve these effects.
How might we teach writing to heal? With funding the National Council of Teachers of English/College Composition and Communication Chair’s Research Initiative, and with commmunity partners, I pursue some answers to this question and some cautions about moving forward.
Read the article here: