Opening new spaces for dialogue: A study into a special curriculum developed by a bi-lingual school in Israel

• In Event: Youths, identity and contested values in conflict settings

Proposal

This paper presents findings from an evaluation study into a unique curriculum for primary schools designed by Hagar – Association for Jewish-Arab Education for Equality, in collaboration with Ben-Gurion University and funded by the EU partnership for Peace. The curriculum was implemented in the past three years in the bi-lingual school in Beer-Sheva. The process of putting together the curriculum, its implementation in the bi-lingual school ere carefully evaluated.
There are six bilingual, Hebrew-Arabic, schools in Israeli today. These institutions run against a widespread predisposition of Israeli education system to separate Jewish state schools from the Arab schools. To a great extent the Israeli state education system can be described as segregated along the lines of nationality, religion and language. In contrast to the separationist institutional culture of the Israeli education system and against the backdrop of protracted conflict between Jews and Arabs in Israel, the bi-lingual schools' main agenda is to create a shared, equal, empathic and secured space for both Jewish and Arab children.
The challenges these schools face are numerous. They have to deal with hostile responses seeking to tamper with their attempt to overcome the culture of separation. But perhaps the greatest challenge is how to create a shared space without compromising or eradicating the students' different national and religious identities, languages and cultures; how to create a meaningful space without falling into the trap of reducing the inter-culture encounter to tasting each other food, and dancing traditional dances. Teaching about religious holidays and especially national holidays of each group, however, possess an even greater challenge since these holidays often stress once again particular narratives and the differences between 'us' and 'them' within the walls of the very school. Recognizing this obstacle, Hagar decided to put together a special curriculum which focuses on teaching the different holidays in ways that connect and stress commonalities rather than conflicted differences, that raise empathy rather than alienation, familiarity rather than distance.


The project and the research
The main aim of the curriculum was to counter the image of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as protracted conflict. Thus, in order to undermine contemporary common sense regarding the bipolar perception of Jewish and Muslim identities, the curriculum has used the following strategies: 1) The curriculum includes ten original stories, written by Hebrew and Arabic speaking authors. Each story is centered around a different religious or national holiday. The stories do not necessarily tell the 'official story' of the holiday in question but tell a story which conveys the holidays' spirit and values. The stories bring to the fore individuals, situations, scenes and histories that encompass both “Jewish” as well as “Muslim” or “Arab” characters. It was hoped that this will encourage empathy towards the ‘other’ and learning about their culture in a non-academic way. 2) The stories in the program are made to create a cultural ambience of shared Jewish-Muslim lives based on the history of Jewish lives in Muslim North Africa and West Asia. Instead of imagining what it would be like to live together in a shared space in a utopian situation, the authors built their stories on actual histories of shared Muslim-Jewish lives. 3) The stories dedicated to the national holidays moved away from the dominant narratives that positions Jews and Arabs as enemies and moved away from practices often adopted by bi-lingual schools of creating a symmetry between the two opposing sides.

The evaluation study included the following: documenting the developing stage; observation of the teachers' training sessions and the lessons in which the stories were taught; in depth interviews with all the teachers who taught the curriculum as well as focus groups with selected groups of students. The data collection focused on how the curriculum was received by both teachers and students, what are its strength and weaknesses. But mostly we were interested at whether the curriculum managed to open new spaces for dialogue and to develop a positive notion of the ‘others’ and their culture. Following the presentation of the curriculum and its innovations, we will focus on the evaluation study’s findings especially on the extent it managed to achieve its goals. We will use the study to draw some boarder conclusions to the possibilities and limitations of using school curricula to open up spaces for dialogue and collaboration in the context of protracted conflict.

Authors

• Halleli Pinson, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

• Hanita Hadad Cohen, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev