The Role of Education Providers in developing Ideas and Practices of Citizenship Education among young Palestinians

• In Event: Citizenship and democratic education in conflict and post-conflict contexts

Proposal

Introduction & Research Questions
This study explores the role of education providers in formal and informal settings in the West Bank in developing ideas and practices of citizenship and global citizenship among young Palestinians. While there has been extensive research on citizenship and global citizenship education in global North settings, less attention has been paid to it outside these contexts. This has reinforced the conflation of global citizenship with affluence and mobility, and ignored diverse struggles for citizenship and education, which do not conform to established models and understandings. The case of Palestine provides a unique lens on citizenship education, given its struggle for statehood and the challenges occupation presents to everyday survival. It is important that approaches and struggles for global citizenship in such a context are not written out of explorations of education for citizenship and global citizenship. Rather, paying attention to them reveals assumptions in the ways citizenship and global citizenship are conceptualised.
The overarching questions that direct this study are:
1- What are the core citizenship values that the Palestinian Ministry of Education is looking to develop in young Palestinians?
2- How are these core citizenship values translated into practice in schools and informal settings?
To gain more understandings and meanings of citizenship and global citizenship education and its practices among young Palestinians, a qualitative approach is implemented using the following data tools:
- Content analysis of policy documents and teachers’ lesson plans
- Teachers, and policy officials’ interviews are to help in identifying core citizenship and global citizenship values.
- School visits and classroom observations to help view the process through which those citizenship and global citizenship values are translated into practice.
Research Background:
Following the Oslo Accords, the Palestinians have been given partial autonomy and were permitted to set up a political authority whose power is nonetheless circumscribed entirely by an Israeli military occupation (Moughrabi, 2008). Oslo agreement according to Moughrabi (2008), granted West Bank and Gaza on the symbolic level "full regalia of a passport, a flag, a national anthem, an executive, a legislature and a court system. On a more basic level, none of this amounts to much: the passport still has to be approved by the Israeli military; the executive and the legislature have few real powers, and the court system barely functions" p. 239. Ironically, each year Palestinians remember two dates symbolizing the rupture of Palestinian society and the exile of hundreds of thousands to the four corners of the world: May 15th Nakba Day, and June 6th , Naksa Day (BADIL, 2004) and at the same time they celebrate on November 22 of each year Palestinian Independence Day (Moughrabi, 2008). In another word, the Palestinians celebrate what they aspire to rather than what they already have as they live in a legal grey zone under a political authority that is continuously waiting to become a state (Moughrabi, 2008).
Despite all the extreme difficulties, Palestinian Ministry of Education emphasized from the first step of creating the Palestinian curriculum on citizenship and enriching its value among Palestinian citizens. This is through adopting the psychological and social basis and through including the concepts and values of citizenship, democracy, and human rights directly and indirectly in the curriculum of Social studies in their various branches of history, geography, national education and civic education (Ministry of Education, 1998). Civic education plays a vital role in the development of citizenship values, including information about political systems, state institutions, national rights and duties, and a range of values such as belonging and loyalty to the nation, consultation, coexistence. (Murtaja & Rantisi, 2011) beliefs.
Little research has been done to explore the how Palestinian teacher actually mediate texts to their students, exploring also what materials they use, how much they rely on official texts. How do teachers try to deal with the contradictions in their society, like talking about democracy and human rights in a context where those are been violated daily. Those inquiries are very important which this study tackles.


Reference:

BADIL. (2004, June). From the 1948 Nakba to the 1967 Naksa. Retrieved from badil.org: http://www.badil.org/phocadownloadpap/Badil_docs/bulletins-and-briefs/Bulletin-18.pdf
Ministry of Education. General Administration of Curricula. (1998). First Palestinian curriculum plan. Ramallah: Ministry of Education, General Administration of Curricula. Retrieved from http://www.ibe.unesco.org/curricula/palestine/ps_alfw_1998_eng.pdf
Moughrabi, F. (2008). Chapter 18: From Subjects to citizens: Citizenship Education in Palestine. In J. Arthur, I. Davies, & C. Hahn, The Sage Handbook of Education for Citizenship and Democracy (pp. 239-252). London: SAGE Publications Ltd.
Murtaja, Z. R., & Rantisi, M. M. (2011). Evaluation of the content of the curricula of civic education for the seventh, eighth and ninth grades in light of the values of citizenship. Journal of the Islamic University (Series of Humanities Studies), 19(2) pp. 161-195.

Author

• Kefah Barham, Northumria University- Center for International Development