During an immersion programme abroad in the Middle East (Lassner, Carenen, Fernheimer, Shichtman, Passmore, Divine, … & Deshazo, 2019), a group of university students attended a presentation at Independence Hall in Tel Aviv, Israel. An Israeli national museum, the exhibition honoured the signing of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, the founding of the city of Tel Aviv, accomplishments of the Zionist movement, and a Zionist retelling of the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948, also known as The Nakba (translating to ‘catastrophe’ in Arabic), which violently displaced and dispossessed over 80% of the indigenous Palestinian Arab population, leading to the creation of the State of Israel (Abu-Lughod, 1971). At the end of the visit, the students were prompted by the museum guide to stand for the Israeli national anthem. With the cohort of students spanning those of Jewish American, Arab American, and Palestinian descent, many found this to be an uncomfortable request – struggling to reconcile this with their visit to a Palestinian refugee camp the previous day. None of the Palestinian or Arab students stood. Some non-Arab students remained seated out of solidarity with their Palestinian classmates – others rose. All Jewish students rose.
This same group of students travelled the northern West Bank later that week. While waiting in line at an Israeli military checkpoint, separating the Palestinian city Ramallah from Jerusalem, they witnessed an elderly man held at gun point pleading for entry. He was scheduled for an eye surgery in a Jerusalem hospital and possessed a permit to enter the city; mercilessly, he was denied. The students were then promptly waived through the checkpoint with their United States passports.
The above is adapted from an experience recanted by Oren Kroll-Zeldin, Director of Beyond Bridges: Israel-Palestine (BBIP). BBIP is a three-week summer immersion programme in Palestine and Israel that submerges university students in experiential learning, in order to empower them to critically reflect, tangibly act in communion with others, and transform society for more just ends. Launched in 2010 by the Centre for Transformative Education in partnership with the University of San Francisco (USF), this programme shapes students’ political awareness and commitments to conflict transformation, and provides an avenue from which the complexities of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict can be understood on a deeply personal level (Lassner et al., 2019).
As foreshadowed, I will be evaluating the extent to which education can transform society for more just ends, through assessing the BBIP programme as a site of hope that holds the potential for positive change,transformation, and resistance against oppressive systems. BBIP’s interwoven critical pedagogies will be explored through the lens of Paulo Freire and bell hooks’ scholarship on pedagogies of hope and education as a practice of freedom (hooks, 1994; Freire, 2000, 2004).
Specifically, I will take you through:
- the rationale of social justice education as a means for conflict transformation, and the significance of social identity theory;
- a programme description of BBIP;
- and an overall evaluation of BBIP.
I end with the sentiment that the BBIP programme is a radical space of possibility (hooks, 1994), one we can replicate within the wider field of conflict transformation.
A BRIEF NOTE FOLLOWING 7TH OCTOBER 2023
Students do not, and have never, travelled to Gaza due to its inaccessibility. This programme took place in the summers of 2010, 2011, 2012, relaunched in 2023, and consequently also predates Israel’s ongoing and most recent war on Gaza (post-7th October 2023). Unsurprisingly, there is currently zero clarity as to the future feasibility of this programme.
However, I maintain by evaluating BBIP’s underpinning pedagogies, the ways in which social justice education surfaces during the immersive experience, and the dialogic encounters during the programme’s daily group process, we can apply the teachings from this site of hope to various other conflicts.
There is a popular notion that Israel-Palestine defies comparative approaches with other historical conflicts (Veracini, 2006). I contend this, concluding that the BBIP programme successfully de-exceptionalises conflicts (Tapper, 2013), equipping students with the knowledge of how to identify patterns of social inequality, and affirming their agency and collective responsibility towards creating positive change within their own communities (Tapper & Kroll-Zeldin, 2015).
Conflict resolution scholars and practitioners are increasingly weaving elements of social justice education into their programmes, shifting focus to ‘understanding disparities in terms of societal opportunities, resources, and long-term outcomes, particularly among marginalized groups’ (Shakman, Cochran-Smith, Jong, Terrell, Barnatt, & McQuillan, 2007). BBIP is a prime example of this integration. Fisher (2000) asserts that conflict transformation requires both systemic and personal transformation. BBIP takes this key principle and explores the possibilities of personal transformation as a prerequisite for transforming conflict. This can otherwise be defined by Freire’s (2000) conscientization, or critical consciousness, whereby students learn to ‘take action against the oppressive elements of reality.’ Critical reflection is pertinent to this process in the way it encourages students to connect their own multifaceted social and political identities to, in this case, a given conflict. As Giroux (2001) would reason, it creates opportunities for them ‘to deepen awareness of the interconnected moments in the process of individual and collective emancipation.’
Education is never value-neutral, often playing a central role in perpetuating societal inequities, especially in terms of power – Freire presented education as having the potential to either domesticate or liberate students and teachers (Rozas, 2007). BBIP strives to perform the latter. While the former classroom dynamic implicitly assumes that every student, and even the teacher, occupies the same positionality (in terms of social status and identity), liberatory education – and what BBIP scaffolds itself around – requires students’ identities to be taken into account in every educational setting (Freire, 2000). In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire (2000) goes even further in visualising the ideal educational experience as existing between the teacher and students, rather than stemming from a teacher to their students. This is an explicit rejection of the banking system of teaching, where educators deposit detached bodies of knowledge into students, with complete disregard for their own realities and positionality. hooks (1994) equally despised the banking system, citing the teaching vocation as sacred, and that ‘to teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin’ (Specia & Osman, 2015). BBIP educators instead look to integrate student voices and experiences into the programme – an experience which they create with the students (not for the students) their identities tied together in an interlocked relationship (Rozas, 2007).
The backbone of BBIP is its intentionality with communication and authentic thinking. According to Freire (2000), transformational education must incorporate habitual critical reflection that takes into account personal social identities. Social groups are shaped infinitely by socioeconomic class, race, ethnicity, gender, nationality, sexuality, and religion etc. and hooks (1994) even essentialises ‘lived experiences’ and makes it the condition of authentic knowledge. A huge asset to BBIP’s methodology, is its willingness to continuously confront the power dynamics that exist in relation to such social identities of students and staff – exactly the habit the programme seeks to instil in its students far beyond the end of their BBIP experience, and what Freire’s (2000) scholarship would define as education for liberation.
By analysing their own social identities in relation to the people the Palestinian-Israeli conflict primarily implicate – Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Arabs – as well as in relation to wider dynamics influenced by the backdrop of historical chronology and context of the conflict, students are prompted to pick up on more sophisticated and nuanced observations, and critically reflect on the ways in which power is produced, enacted, and maintained (Goar, 2007; hooks, 2003). As upheld by Foucault (1972; Gordon & Foucault, 1980), power always exists in terms of social relations. BBIP understands that in order to transform the status quo, there must first be recognition of the status quo.
Having said that, BBIP’s aim is not simply for its students to adopt a particular prescribed ideology (Tapper & Kroll-Zeldin, 2015). It is for the educators to gently steer students through critical thought and the process of teaching one another about social identities and intergroup dynamics, and to co-construct knowledge based off their collective personal and educational experiences garnered over the three-weeks and prior. hooks’ (2003) scholarship describes this as a place of liberating mutuality where teachers and students work in partnership. This dialogic encounter between the students themselves and with the teachers is where the critical reflection is markedly evident. This critical thought is what often generates tangible action amongst the students.
To be continued in part two…
