Voices of the Displaced and Marginalized: Cultivating Educational Spaces for Often-Silenced Narratives

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Sesion 4
  In Roundtable Session: Cultivating Racial Justice in Higher Education (Table 8)

Abstract

This paper describes a teacher-education course that was developed to cater to the needs of Palestinian-Israeli students within the Israeli-Jewish hegemony. As these indigenous students are in many cases descendants of displaced people, the course was designed to honor their minoritized experiences and narratives and guarantee them safe spaces to disclose and discuss lived experiences of marginalization and family displacement. Inspired by critical pedagogies, the course used multicultural Children's literature as catalysts for students' profound reflections on reality and family history. Visual, video and audio methods generated data that divulged experiences and emotions pertaining to students’ life challenges and histories. Content analysis helped scrutinize the effect of students' engagement in the course on them personally and pedagogically as future teachers.

Author

• Rawia Hayik, Israel Institute