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

Group Submission Type: Highlighted Paper Session

Proposal

This panel explores the two faces of education in Palestinians’ anti-colonial struggle. Education has long played a central role in Palestinians' quest for national recognition, self determination and human rights. This is evidenced through a strong collective commitment to education under the most difficult conditions, including during the current genocide in Gaza. At the same time, education has also been co-opted to contain and usurp Palestinians’ political claims and rights. The result is a fragmented and contested educational landscape.

The tension between education as a force for emancipation or as a tool of colonial repression manifests at local, national and international levels. In Gaza the Israeli military has damaged or destroyed 85 percent of school buildings and all centers of higher learning. Yet communities are restarting learning in tents and the open air even as bombardments continue. In Jerusalem, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, Palestinian teachers are finding ever more innovative ways to promote and preserve national consciousness in the face of increasing censorship and the overwhelming suppression of their historical narratives. And around the world, students in solidarity with Palestinians have protested the war in Gaza - in spite of the efforts of university administrators to suppress their voices. As these examples show, repression and resistance are integral to understanding the purpose and practices of education for, by and in solidarity with Palestinians.

Papers in this panel explore different aspects of this central tension. Our first paper explores the continuities of scholasticide over time and across space through the experiences of Palestinian teachers in Lebanon during that country’s civil war (1975-1990). It argues that scholasticide has always been an integral part of the Nakba. In this way the paper challenges researchers to expand conceptual framings of the relationship between education and conflict to account for the colonial continuities that inform contemporary crises. The second paper uses ethnography and portraiture to examine how a non-formal education program in a Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank addresses refugees’ short and long term needs. In doing so the paper also speaks to the ways in which such education initiatives balance neoliberal pressures with community resistance to oppression. The third and final paper shifts focus to the western colonial discourses that echo through discussions of educational reconstruction in Gaza. It underscores the need to center the experience and vision of Gazan educators to rebuild higher education and considers how North American higher education institutions could support Palestinian colleagues in their ongoing efforts to educate for liberation.

Together these papers shed light on the coercive and discursive forms of power that shape education for Palestinians within and beyond their historic homeland. A better understanding of these struggles is crucial to carving out more equitable and just education responses during the current moment. Moreover, while the repression experienced in the Palestinian case is extreme, the issues covered by this panel touch on broader concerns within the field of comparative and international education including: the relationship between education and conflict; the ways in which neo-colonialism and imperialism manifest through international education policies and programs; and the need to critically reflect on how the politics of knowledge production shapes research agendas and, increasingly, educational practices. By foregrounding the high stakes of the Palestinian struggle within these debates we seek to productively challenge the current and future orientation of the field.

Sub Unit

• Middle East and North Africa SIG

Organizer

• Jo A Kelcey, Lebanese American University

Chair

• Catherine Pitcher, Harvard Graduate School of Education

Individual Presentations

• The two faces of education in colonial conflict - Jo A Kelcey, Lebanese American University; Thea Abu El-Haj, Barnard College, Columbia University

• Dancing for the future: How community-based education in a Palestinian refugee camp supports current needs and future thinking - Catherine Pitcher, Harvard Graduate School of Education

• Islamophobia Reexamined: Unpacking Traditional and Structural Anti-Muslim Racism - Ameena Ghaffar-Kucher, University of Pennsylvania

Discussant

• Salim Vally, University of Johannesburg