Dancing for the future: How community-based education in a Palestinian refugee camp supports current needs and future thinking

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Between repression and resistance. Learning from the Palestinian education experience.

Proposal

“No one is from a refugee camp,” Ibrahim starts to say. He takes a long drag of his cigarette and appears to be reflecting deeply, or maybe reminiscing. He continues, “when I was younger one time I took a class outside of the camp. When I was asked to introduce myself I was supposed to say where I was from. I didn’t know what to say.” He pauses before continuing, “Al Merkez [المركز - the center] helped me to understand that I am from somewhere, even if I have never been allowed to go there. At Al Merkez, I learned to have no shame about living in a refugee camp today.”

Ibrahim has recently become the director of Al Merkez, a grassroots center in Aida Refugee Camp in Bethlehem. While Ibrahim is new to this position, he has lived in Aida for his entire life and has attended programming at Al Merkez since he was a child. Aida is unique among other refugee camps in the West Bank as in 2018 human rights researchers found that this community is the most tear-gassed place in the world (Haar & Ghannam, 2018). On top of this cruel distinction, Aida is surrounded on three sides by the apartheid wall and is one of the West Bank camps subject to the presence of an AI-controlled robotic machine gun (McNeil, 2022). In Aida, this dystopian panopticon is situated just by the entrance to the camp–within range of the front door to Al Merkez.

Drawing on the language of the motto of the center, this paper explores how staff and community members understand their efforts “to dream together… to work together… to build a future together… to decide together”. Through ethnography and portraiture, this study sheds light on how Al Merkez’s educational programming serves the specific identity and context-based needs of Palestinian refugees with attention to both the short and long term. This type of education does not occur in the public education system, a gap that leaves some refugees feeling a lack of representation (Pherali & Turner, 2017). At Al Merkez, community-based education focused on human rights, the environment, and the arts, including the traditional Palestinian dance, dabke, supports a gestalt experience to meet those needs. Al Merkez does not accept funding from any donor that normalizes with the occupying government. Thus their programming is also an example of one approach to balancing the neoliberal influences of donor agencies with the community’s goals as related to class, ethnicity, power, and citizenship- that of total resistance to (Baldrige, 2017).

When asked about what the phrase in the motto “to build a future together” means to Ibrahim, he says, “Always, there is a connection to keep dancing. That’s what it means to build a future. Keeping that tradition alive. Also, I know that if I go back, any time, to my original home I’m sure that I would still do this dance.”

Author

• Catherine Pitcher, Harvard Graduate School of Education