University as a Place for Personal Renaissance: Future-teachers’ University Experiences as Agents for Learning and Teaching Peace

This phenomenological study aims to understand how future-teachers’ university setting has become a personal awakening place to reflect on their past schooling experiences and build plans as peace agents. In other words, this study argues that university experience, if meaningfully constructed to promote peace, equips future-teachers with the necessary skills to teach peace, and it could help future teachers about critically reflecting their past learnings upon the negative peace and violence. It transforms these learnings into positive peace in the end. Drawing from Freire’s (1970) critical consciousness and Giroux’s (1981,1988, 2010) conceptualization of teachers as transformative intellectuals, the findings suggest that universities by building inclusive, peaceful, democratic, and diverse communities, can help their students to gain the awareness of systematic oppression and structural violence (re)produced by patriarchal, political and social discourses, and it develops motivation to incorporate peace (education) in their professional practices.