Conference Agenda

The persistence of displacement crises, enduring conflicts, and unstable sociopolitical contexts underscores an urgent demand for education that fosters positive peace. This concept extends beyond negating direct violence to encompass the active cultivation of societal frameworks that encourage empathy, dialogue, and enduring nonviolent relationships (Bajaj, 2008; Galtung, 1969). In borderland and marginalized contexts, both displaced and host communities experience overlapping forms of trauma caused by violence, loss, and chronic insecurity, which shape learners’ sense of safety, identity, and belonging in the classrooms (Betancourt et al., 2013; Brabeck et al., 2014; Fazel et al., 2012). Despite growing awareness that trauma profoundly affects participation and relationship-building (Perry, 2006), trauma-informed pedagogy remains limited in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) settings, where emotional vulnerability often intersects with linguistic risks. A critical perspective demands that these experiences be understood within historical and institutional power structures that shape whose voices are legitimized in educational spaces (Apple, 2013; Giroux, 2011; Fairclough, 2003).

Conventional peace education often presumes emotionally regulated learners and politically neutral classrooms (Salomon, 2002; Davies, 2017), assumptions that collapse in contexts of instability. As critical pedagogy reminds us, classrooms are ideological spaces where dominant norms are either reproduced or resisted (Freire, 1994; Giroux, 2011). Trauma, viewed as a relational and embodied disruption of safety (Perry, 2006; van der Kolk, 2014), undermines attention, memory, and social regulation which are key foundations of learning. Hence, educators must challenge deficit-based discourses that belittle marginalized students (Fairclough, 2003; Zembylas, 2018).

EFL classrooms can serve as transformative spaces for peacebuilding, where language becomes both an emotional and communicative bridge. Through scaffolding, empathy, and dialogic engagement, students can find inner peace and develop relational safety (Amerstorfer, 2021). Yet, even communicative and humanistic methods may reproduce hegemonic linguistic norms that marginalize minority voices (Pennycook, 2001; Norton, 2013). To counter this, narrative, reflective, and strength-based approaches grounded in critical awareness support self-expression, cultural recognition, and emotional regulation (Mason, 2021; Midgette & González, 2023).

Positioning hope as a collective, discursive practice rather than a personal trait (Freire, 1994; Zembylas, 2018), this study situates teachers as mediators of recognition and inclusion, particularly in multilingual, marginalized contexts. By fostering storytelling, reflective dialogue, and empathy, trauma-informed peace pedagogy not only enhances language acquisition but also nurtures belonging, safety, and social connection (Pappamihiel et al., 2022; Birch & Nasser, 2017). The study contributes to the emerging field of peace and trauma-integrated English language teaching by demonstrating how EFL classrooms can be reimagined as sites of nonviolence, critical hope, and relational healing.

By applying a design-based research (DBR) approach (Barab & Squire, 2009), this study integrates trauma-informed and critical peace education within an EFL context, grounded in Schön’s (2017) reflective practitioner model. Introducing an 11-week trauma-informed peace curriculum for seventh-grade students, it addresses the lack of empirically grounded and context-responsive models in peace-oriented EFL teaching. The study follows a critical peace framework that confronts how classroom discourse normalizes exclusion, silencing, and emotional misrecognition (Bajaj, 2008; Zembylas & Bekerman, 2013) throıugh trauma-informed principles (SAMHSA, 2014).

Inclusive education is widely promoted as a guiding principle for educating children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), positioning early years practitioners as key actors in recognising and responding to children’s learning and developmental differences (Florian, 2019; Nutbrown & Clough, 2021). In early childhood education and care (ECEC), however, inclusion is frequently organised through an emphasis on care and needs, sometimes at the expense of educational purpose and pedagogical intention. This tension becomes particularly visible in debates surrounding the early identification of SEND, which occupies a contested position between inclusive education and special education discourses.

There are, though, policy frameworks that commonly promote early identification as part of a graduated approach to support, emphasising ongoing observation and procedural caution in order to avoid labelling or exclusion (OECD, 2021). Scholarship has questioned the evidential basis of early intervention effects and the risks associated with medicalisation and categorisation, particularly when identification becomes a gateway to resources rather than a pedagogical process (Mintz, 2022; Slee, 2021). Within these debates, delaying identification is often framed as protective, allowing children “time to develop” before additional needs are formally recognised.

In practice, early years practitioners are required to make judgements about children’s development while navigating institutional expectations, accountability demands, and access to specialist support (Florian, 2019; Mintz, 2022). However, comparatively little attention has been paid to how early identification is understood and enacted by practitioners themselves within inclusive classroom contexts. Rather than approaching early identification as a technical assessment procedure or a policy requirement, this paper treats it as a contested educational practice through which practitioners negotiate care, education, and professional responsibility. The analysis is guided by a key question: how do early years practitioners understand and enact early identification as part of their professional role obligations within inclusive ECEC settings?

This paper draws on a doctoral comparative study conducted in ECEC settings in China, England, and Scotland. Within the broader study, early identification emerged as a shared concern articulated by participating practitioners across all three contexts. Although early identification was embedded within distinct institutional arrangements, such as diagnostic gateways to specialist provision in China, extended procedural timelines and sensitivities around SEND categorisation in England, and needs-led approaches that reject diagnostic labels in principle in Scotland, it was repeatedly foregrounded by practitioners as a point of tension. Across contexts, practitioners described early identification as a moment where professional responsibility, access to educational support, and pedagogical purpose intersected, positioning it as a key comparative issue within the doctoral research.

The paper is informed by ethics of care, used here as an analytic framework for examining responsibility and professional judgement in institutional contexts (Tronto, 1993, 2013). Care is understood as professionalised educational care: acting to secure meaningful learning opportunities, anticipating barriers to participation, and taking responsibility for children’s longer-term educational trajectories. This perspective is complemented by Miller’s argument that moral agents always act within roles, and that obligations are mediated by institutional responsibilities and access to professional support (Miller, 2007, 2010). Within this framework, recognising a child’s needs does not automatically translate into clear or actionable obligations; rather, practitioners’ capacity to act is shaped by the institutional conditions under which early identification is organised.