Foundations for peacebuilding and discursive peacekeeping: Infusion and exclusion of conflict in Canadian public school curricula

Formal curriculum guidelines reflect prevailing understandings and political will, and help to shape the resources available for implemented curriculum. The understandings embodied in such public curriculum reinforce patterns of social violence and injustice, yet at the same time may provide diverse students with opportunities to develop commitment and critical citizenship capacity to handle social conflict. This paper examines the discourse about conflict, social diversity, and (in)justice in the mandated English Language Arts, Health, and Social Sciences curricula of three Canadian provinces. On one hand, all these curricula acknowledge the existence of bias and multiple viewpoints, and encode expectations for conflict management and critical inquiry skills, recognition of ethno‐cultural diversity, and awareness of international interdependence and justice concerns. Thus a significant proportion of the knowledge, skill, and pedagogy called for by international peace and conflict educators is already included in these curricula. At the same time, these themes are primarily represented in abstract terms emphasizing ‘Canadian’ ideals, instead of examining many actual instances of social conflict. Is this anti‐conflictual representation of social conflict a solid foundation for democratic peacebuilding, (and) or a gentle manner of peacekeeping through denial and indoctrination