Turkish and US Future-Teachers on War and Peace Education

This comparative qualitative study employs interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to investigate how 38 American and 43 Turkish future-teachers conceptualize war, peace, and peace education (PE). Drawing upon Noddings’s work in PE and Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory, the study examines how these beliefs are constructed, mediated, and enacted within distinct sociocultural and institutional contexts. It explores the ways in which teachers’ meaning-making processes reflect and reproduce dominant cultural logics such as power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism–collectivism, masculinity–femininity, long-term versus short-term orientation, and indulgence–restraint and how these orientations shape pedagogical dispositions toward teaching peace. Findings reveal that participants’ conceptions of peace and conflict are deeply embedded in national, moral, and historical narratives, producing culturally specific enactments of peace pedagogy. The study highlights the tensions between dialogic and nationalistic discourses in teacher education, offering theoretical and practical implications for advancing contextually grounded and critically engaged approaches to PE across diverse education settings.