Teaching Palestine: Praxes of Transgression and Possibility

• In Event: Education and Palestine: Defying Imposed Boundaries, Resisting Erasure, & Charting Educational Praxis Across Spaces

Proposal

This paper explores the possibilities of teaching about Palestine in US higher education and K-12 spaces. Drawing on over two decades of teaching and learning in diverse US contexts, we consider the broader sociopolitical climate at different junctures and how it has shaped pedagogies and praxes of possibility. We ask: (1) How do larger cultural, political, educational, and economic forces and institutions contribute to and/or challenge the dominant narratives surrounding critical engagement on Palestine, and shape the way educators and scholars teach and write about Palestine? (2) How do these grand narratives complicate the ways in which they are contextually embodied, experienced, resisted and/or practiced by individuals or groups who are engaging Palestine in their work? (3) Given this landscape, what role might educators play in critically engaging students in contextualizing and learning about the histories and continuing impacts of occupation, genocide, and political contestations surrounding Palestine?

Israel’s latest US-backed assault on Gaza since October 2023 has been met with mass protests and solidarity actions globally, as well as by staunch repression of dissent particularly in educational spaces. Educators are often left stumped and even fearful on how to engage in critical discussions on armed conflicts and humanitarian crises that unfold in real time. The brutality and visibility of this particular war has made both dissent and backlash stronger. Whilst other wars, conflicts, sites of displacement, ethnic cleansing, and dispossession do not harken the same caution in the classroom, the suppression of speech surrounding Palestine have led to stifled, muted, or even clandestine conversations.

The Palestine exception in education is not new. Historically there has always been a curbing of free speech around teaching Palestine in US education. Research has shown that faculty self-censor when it comes to teaching about Palestine. Prominent faculty have been sanctioned, junior faculty have received warnings, and tenure cases have been revoked. This has a chilling effect on teaching, learning, scholarship, and open conversation.

However, we find ourselves at a pivotal crossroads in teaching about and contextualizing what has not only been happening in Gaza since 2023, but also more broadly in all of historic Palestine since and preceding 1948. As long-time educators and scholars who have engaged in teaching about conflict, human rights, peace, decoloniality and liberation, we seek to grapple with these old and new challenges in teaching about Palestine. We lean on de/post-colonial and abolitionist theories to write about the possibilities of teaching Palestine during these fraught times, building on growing scholarship that contends with these dilemmas. We write from our different social and institutional locations--both public and private, undergraduate and graduate, and within different subfields of education. In particular, we consider how we have engaged Palestine in the past, as scholars who came of age under the scepter of silencing where teaching Palestine has constituted transgressive acts in the academy. We also consider the contemporary landscape, where teaching Palestine has taken place in unsanctioned spaces, to contemplate the possibilities of this moment, grounded in praxes of transgression and liberation.

Authors

• Zeena Zakharia, University of Maryland College Park

• Brooke Harris Garad, Butler University

• Hakim Mohandas Amani Williams, Gettysburg College

• Maria Hantzopoulos, Vassar College

• Monisha Bajaj, University of San Francisco

• Roozbeh Shirazi, University of Minnesota