Abstract:
It is apparent in the world of today that for any meaningful development to take place in a social context, peace is indubitably a prerequisite condition. Formal Education, in its efforts to adopt to the social and political climate of the swiftly changing world, must strive to produce students who are not only imbued with theoretical content but also those with requisite practical social skills capable of nurturing and sustaining the moral and material well being of their respective communities. In Kenya, a major impediment to achieving peaceful co-existence among its communities is negative ethnicity. Since Language is the scaffolding on which we build our thoughts, perceptions, attitudes, values and behaviours, this paper will explore ways in which a Foreign Language class that uses critical pedagogy concepts can expose the learners to privileged learning spaces that promote the acquisition of vital social knowledge, skills and values that fall within the domain of Peace Education. In his reflections on the dialectic epistemology that characterizes critical pedagogy, Peter McLaren (2003.) contends that "the critical educator endorses theories that are, first and foremost, dialectical; that is, theories which recognize the problems of society as more than simply isolated events of individuals or deficiencies in the social structure". Using the French Classroom (FLE) in a University setting, the paper will discuss the merits of strategies of deterritorialization and reterritorialization (Deleuze and Guattari, (1983). In this context “deterritorialization is defined as the movement or process by which something departs from a given territory, ( a territory can be a system of any kind; conceptual, linguistic, social, or affective), while reterritorialization refers to the ways in which deterritorialized elements recombine and enter into new relation (Braidotti, 2012). Deterritorialization therefore is a transformative process where a learner allows his or her sense of reality to be altered through contextual, conceptual and linguistic encounter with the “other” in the language learning process.
