Despite seemingly remarkable progress on civic-political concepts in different cultural and national contexts, the co-existence of students and civilizations in the classroom remains underrepresented in critical peace education as a pedagogical approach. As a result, this qualitative case study seeks to understand the curriculum-as-planned, -implemented, and -lived of four Grade 5 classrooms at a school in Morocco. In this study, I suggest that their curriculum represents some of the key concepts taken up in critical peace education. Critical peace education works toward creating spaces of empowerment for students where they can critically analyze their relations to power. I use Foucault’s conceptions of discursive regimes, power/knowledge, care of the self, genealogy, and archaeology as the foundation for a postmodernist worldview. As part of my research methodology I collected data from curriculum documents, photos of activities/events/interactions at the school and/or within the classroom, responses from Grade 5 students to questions about their lived experiences about “making peace,” and journaling about my role as a participant-observer in the Arabic-speaking classrooms. This research seeks to mobilize knowledge that focuses on current practices for designing curriculum and pedagogical strategies that are needed to develop what we might call a “critical peace curriculum.”

There is no one clear concept of peace in peace education. A large part of peace education recognizes and discusses different forms of violence and how they affect peace. Peace education is a broad field and finds connections to critical peace education, feminism, sustainability, the United Nations, and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Using transnational feminist theory and a transnational feminist critical discourse analysis, this thesis problematizes the peace discourse that is created in peace educational material from World’s Largest Lesson. In order to problematize the overall peace discourse, this thesis critically explores the knowledge that is produced through discussions of different forms of violence. The peace education materials were selected based on their relevance to peace education occurring in relation to education for the Sustainable Development Goals.  The materials were also selected based on their aim to produce knowledge specifically related to concepts of peace and violence. The thesis finds that overall, the knowledge produced in the materials deemphasizes the interconnectedness of different forms of violence and, therefore, creates a peace discourse that is decontextualized, dehistoricized, depoliticized, privileges individuals, and maintains the status quo. The thesis also discusses pedagogical implications in relation to Mohanty’s (2003) discussion of different pedagogical strategies. It is argued that the peace discourse in World’s Largest Lesson contributes to a peace as tourist pedagogical model. The thesis also offers insights into a peace as solidarity pedagogical model before calling for change