Plurilingual memoir writing: A framework for storytelling and peacebuilding

Amid ongoing perturbing global events, students in any given society have hardly been able to navigate their way back to normalcy. This often triggers strong emotions, which indicate deeper personal needs, like the need to feel safe, respected, or heard. Students bring with them all sorts of trauma in the classroom, such as experiences of war, displacement, loss, discrimination, violence, or personal struggles. While teachers may not always fully understand the complexities of each student's experiences, it is essential to acknowledge and validate the presence of these traumas. Of the various pedagogical practices that can be adopted in English language leaching (ELT)1 classes to address students' needs, sharing stories and reflecting on personal narratives and life events, otherwise known as storytelling, emerges as a form of emotional healing that allows students to transform inner conflicts—henceforth peacebuilding (Pentón Herrera & McNair, 2021). Storytelling can humanize language learning and render it more relatable to students. While storytelling can take various forms (i.e., written, oral, artistic), its written form optimizes its benefits, as writing is often considered a form of resistance through which students defy orthodox views of language and implied worldviews (Kalan, 2021). In current periods of instability, the pedagogical practice of writing about one's experiences, henceforth referred to as written storytelling, can bring students and their teachers spiritually and mentally closer together. For written storytelling to attain its full potential, it is important for ELT practitioners to give students the choice to use their diverse linguistic repertoire, theoretically known as plurilingualism (Council of Europe, 2001, 2020), to increase their use of comforting linguistic resources—that is, allow students to reflect inward by using the language(s) they are most comfortable with. In fact, the languages students are most comfortable using are often acquired from daily interactions with family and friends (i.e., first language, home language; Blair, 2022). Hence, languages become infused with all sorts of emotions that students navigate in their everyday life. To address the topic of plurilingual storytelling, I report my classroom explorations of Plurilingual Memoir Writing, a project that I designed and implemented in ELT courses at a language center for adults in Montreal, Canada. Students with an intermediate proficiency level enroll in this 8-week paid course for personal enrichment, with the aim of improving their communication skills. The project aims to provide students a platform to write their stories (using diverse linguistic repertoire at their disposal) as a form of peacebuilding that places students' experiences at the center of learning and validates them. As theorized in the Common European Framework of References (CEFR; Council of Europe, 2001), plurilingualism posits that, throughout the language learning process, students have the agency to flexibly draw from their linguistic repertoire. It also emphasizes students' savoir-être, which encompasses affective variables involved in language learning, such as self-confidence, anxiety, motivations, and values aligned with the peacebuilding capacity of storytelling. By using the different languages at their disposal, plurilingual students can navigate emotional turbulence, hence creating a venue for peacebuilding within and beyond the classroom. While the plurilingual framework can be implemented differently, incorporating it through storytelling can optimize its peacebuilding capacity. In fact, storytelling, as both a pedagogical and a theoretical framework, is regarded as a nurturer of peace and a community builder (Pentón Herrera & Trinh, 2021). Story-based projects are often developed to promote the mutual exchange of personal experiences, cultivate self-awareness and awareness of others, and validate people's thoughts and feelings. In the context of ELT, storytelling has academic and nonacademic advantages. Not only can it enhance students' English language proficiency and boost cognitive functions (Barkhuizen, 2016), but it can also heal students emotionally to help them overcome their inner conflicts. Since sharing personal experiences requires a degree of familiarity among the students, I usually implement this project toward the end of the semester. Its main aim is to motivate students to write their own memoirs, hence, to treat them as protagonists of their own stories rather than mere spectators of strangers' stories, which could ultimately result in creating a bond of trust among students and finding peace within themselves and with others. This project is also intended to decrease students' anxiety toward learning English. Although it was initially implemented in ELT classes with adults, it can easily be tailored to different age groups and learning contexts. After concluding a 2-week unit about memoirs in which students go through excerpts of memoirs from around the world (see examples in Figure 1), we brainstorm the elements of good memoirs and create an anchor chart that students can use as a reference document. Most importantly, we discuss examples of peacebuilding strategies (i.e., conflict prevention and resolution) that the authors from the memoirs have adopted in their lives and how such choices affected their course of life. Such a discussion enlightens students on different peacebuilding strategies they can use in their own life. The choice of memoirs is based mainly on the diversity of authors' backgrounds, so that every student can relate to the content. I then invite students to proceed with their own memoirs following the seven steps shown in Figure 2. The criteria for student memoirs, including length, format, and structure, are initially agreed upon by the teacher, me in this case, and the students, hence can vary depending on the classroom context. For example, I ask my students to write a one-page memoir with a free-form criteria. I usually emphasize to students that the main purpose of the project is not to evaluate their ability to write in the target language, but to help them organize their thoughts and verbalize their feelings. For that, students are encouraged to use the different languages in their repertoire, including symbols and drawings. The students' final memoirs consist of free-form written texts and drawings that allow them to convey their experiences in their distinct style and leverage their entire plurilingual repertoire. These memoirs often contain detailed descriptions and emotional nuances, as students are free to think in any language they desire, leading to more accurate articulation of their thoughts. Students have shared that this project creates a safe space for them to share intimate and sensitive experiences that disturb their inner peace and helped them develop peacebuilding strategies such as active listening, respectful communication, and cultural awareness, fostering inclusivity and harmony in the classroom. This project also gives students a voice that had been suppressed in other ELT tasks and helped create a welcoming classroom environment where everyone felt accepted and belonged. In addition to the academic benefits of the project, which include increased motivation to use English, the project helps students process and verbalize internal conflicts that only they know about and share them with others. By using all the languages in their repertoire, students can provide vivid and detailed descriptions of their stories due to the broader variety of vocabulary and expressions. In addition to helping students transform and heal their inner conflicts, written storytelling can help students feel less alone and troubled as it allows them to learn about the hardships of others and realize that their own struggles are common to many. It is through this process of sharing, reflecting on, and learning about one another's personal experiences—hence aiming for peacebuilding—that ELT classes become instrumental in building a peaceful, encouraging, and accepting learning environment. Thus, in and beyond current periods of calamity, ELT practitioners are urged to ground their teaching in various forms and practices of storytelling to make students' voices and stories heard and accompany them in their healing, hence the peacebuilding journey. Lana F. Zeaiter is a PhD candidate in Educational Studies at McGill University. Her transnational teaching experience in Lebanon, UAE, and Canada have provided her with a comprehensive understanding of diverse educational contexts. She has extensive expertise in language teaching, teacher education, and curriculum design. Currently, she serves as a sessional lecturer in the Bachelor of Education degree program at McGill University and Université du Québec à Montréal. I would like to thank the students who contributed to the success of this project and the editors who provided thorough and constructive feedback for this manuscript.

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