مطالب

There is an urgent need for methods by which people and communities of faith peacebuilding and human rights development. This paper argues for a holistic understanding of peacebuilding that includes security of life, a guarantee of subsistence, and the pursuit of other fundamental human rights. This need is especially acute in countries of rising instability or post-conflict rebuilding. More and more countries face a downward spiral of instability even though many leaders and bodies seek to reverse this trend. Sadly, even among those countries that emerge from conflict, one-half revert to conflict within five years. Hence the question this paper addresses is, “How shall people and communities of religious conviction be effectively engaged in a peacebuilding and human rights process?” <br />This people factor is too little understood, even though the role of citizens in transitional states has long been acknowledged as essential for just and sustainable change. For peace accords and international conventions, in and of themselves, do not make peace or deliver human rights. Neither does the arrival of international peacekeepers nor the speeches of clerics and political leaders. While these developments are helpful stimuli, real human peace and security derives from community-based initiatives that create a “positive deviance” for peaceable, rights-oriented living vis-à-vis governments and other forces.  <br />Thus this paper will hypothesize a methodology whereby citizens engage religious institutions, governments (local and national), and international change agents to transform conflict into promising peace and rights. It will identify common peacebuilding principles operating across sectors of human development, security, and rights-oriented work. These sectors may include at least the following: health, conservation, education, security, labor, spirituality, and corporate social responsibility. <br />This paper also seeks to hone a typology of human rights and peacebuilding challenges facing countries of instability and post-conflict rebuilding. Categories may include at least the following: stages and types of conflict, fragile and failed states, overlooked populations, ethnic and racial discrimination, transnational politics and justice, natural resource and wealth distribution, and social capital.

This paper aims to study Vygotsky’s (1987) sociocultural theory of learning with respect to how it relates to technology-based second language learning and teaching. The researchers selected their participants from advanced students from Payame Noor University. We divided the participants into two groups- an experimental group and a control group. After teaching the course an experimental group was asked to continue practicing language in an online learning environment, whereas those in the control group were not told anything about practice procedure. We found that students’ engagement in an interactive group activity in the online learning can be a useful approach to facilitating and motivating internalization, learning, and better performance.

The present study was an attempt to investigate to what extent Iranian EFL teachers practice critical discourse analysis in the English language classroom during their teaching. To reach this aim, a 27-item questionnaire was designed and administered among 120 male and female Iranian English teachers in different language schools in Tehran. Following descriptive statistics through which the mean, standard deviation, and reliability of the questionnaire were calculated,a factor analysis was conducted to assess the construct validity of the designed questionnaire.The results of the statistical analysis clearly demonstrated the validity of the designed questionnaire.Once validated, certain within group comparisons (with respect to the demographic factors of gender, age, and educational degree) were conducted to see how the different demographic subsets of the sample responded to the questionnaire. The study also discusses the implications of such measurement for ELT and points out a number of suggestions for further study.