Race Ethnicity and Education Navigating Israeli citizenship: how do Arab- Palestinian teachers civicize their pupils (original) (raw)
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Navigating Israeli citizenship: how do Arab-Palestinian teachers civicize their pupils?
Race Ethnicity and Education, 2018
This study examines citizenship education in Israel from the point of view of Arab teachers, as they rework and negotiate the content and boundaries of their Israeli citizenship. Specifically, the paper studies how teachers of citizenship education in Arab high schools in Israel perceive their sociopolitical reality, how they respond to it in their classrooms, and how they conceptualize Israeli citizenship for their pupils. In doing so, the paper ponders the pedagogical strategies and emphases of these teachers, as they mediate the citizenship education curriculum, with its heavy emphasis on the ethno-national character of Israel, to their Arab pupils.
Citizenship Education in Israel – A Jewish-Democratic State
Israel Affairs, 2005
Our point of departure is that the education of future citizens is afi eld that is greatly sensitive to the macro-political cultures of nations and the micropolitical culture of schools within these nations. To comprehend the enormity of the task of preparing youngsters to become citizens in Israel we discuss the major features of both Israeli society and the schools. Israeli society is characterized by great heterogeneity and wide rifts among segments of the population that hold contesting views concerning the very foundations of the state of Israel. This context makes the emergence of ashared civic identity amission that'shard to accomplish. We trace the major milestones of citizenship education from the pre-state period (Yishuv) until today and conclude that citizenship education progressed from a highly emotional nationalistic focus, centering on civic obligations, to am ore cognitive, discipline-oriented civic education with greater awareness of civil liberties and human rights. We also conclude that citizenship education is still inadequately implemented in the schools.
Citizenship, Education and Social Conflict: Israeli Political Education in Global Perspective
Citizenship, Teaching & Learning 10(3), 2015
Thus, despite their different theoretical perspectives and ways of analysing and understanding citizenship education, these contributions share a common concern in regard to the superficiality of the teaching of citizenship. This multivocality is not a drawback but rather one of the strengths of this book, which ultimately is not made of one cloth. In particular, it demonstrates the book’s main argument, namely that to teach about citizenship and to create knowledgeable and political aware citizens, requires bringing politics into the classroom, and that this mission is important not only in the eyes of so-called ‘radical’ multiculturalists, Marxists or feminists.
On Citizenship and Citizenship Education; A Levantine Approach and Reimagining Israel/Palestine
This article argues in favor of a Levantine approach to citizenship and citizenship education. A Levantine approach calls for some sort of Mediterranean regionalism, which accommodates and promotes overlapping and shared sovereignties and jurisdiction, multiple loyalties, and regional integration. It transcends the paradigmatic statist model of citizenship by recasting the relationship between territoriality, national identity, sovereignty, and citizenship in complex, multilayered and disaggregated constellations. As the case of Israel/Palestine demonstrates, this new approach goes beyond multicultural accommodation and territorial partition. It proposes, among other things, extending the political and territorial boundaries of citizenship to take all the territory between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River as one unit of analysis belonging to a larger region.
Within and Beyond Citizenship: Alternative Educational Initiatives in the Arab Society in Israel
Citizenship Studies, 2012
In recent years, Arab-Palestinian citizens in Israel are in search of ‘a new vocabulary of citizenship’, amongst other ways, by resorting to ‘alternative educational initiatives’. We investigate and compare three alternative schools, each challenges the contested conception of Israeli citizenship. Our findings reveal different educational strategies to become ‘claimants of rights’, yet all initiatives demonstrate the constraints Arab citizens face while trying to become ‘activist citizens’ (Isin 2009).
Civic and Citizenship Education in Israel
Cambridge Journal of Education, 2003
As distinguished from the formal, political science-oriented citizenship curriculum studied exclusively in secondary schools, civic education-learning develops throughout the young-mature citizen's life in Israel. The analysis of the role and learning of two primary civic myths-'Israel is a Jewish and a democratic state' and 'Israelis are Jews'-demonstrates how this learning takes place through 'formations' of hegemony such as the family, the media, civic militarism as well as through schools' statist and social curricula. Successes of civic education enable the civic myths to be vibrant, gestalt worlds of meaning for Jewish Israelis, and sites of resistance for ultra-orthodox Jewish as well as Palestinian citizens of Israel. On the other hand, as an ethnocracy, democracy in civic Israel is not a meaningful world of value but rather a means to manage political processes. Therefore, the Israel case study is insightful for understanding the limitations of civic and citizenship education that seeks to advance democratic-oriented values such as human rights, liberty, justice, tolerance, civility, coexistence, pluralism and an alternative concept of Israel as a civil society.
Education, Citizenship and Social Justice, 2019
The Israeli education system is divided and segregated along the lines of nationality and religiosity. While Israeli society and its education system, in particular, have generally been subjected to the influence of globalisation, including universal discourses of citizenship, in many ways it remains highly particularistic and nationalistic. To a large extent, what we see today in terms of school curricula in Israel stands in contradiction to the main trends in civic education in the developed world. It expresses a move towards neo-nationalistic religious (neo-Zionist) discourse which overtly gives preference to the Jewishness of the state over and above its commitment to democratic universal principles. This article will focus on these recent discursive changes. It will examine the space, or rather the lack of it, that is given to the Palestinian identity and narratives in the official civics textbook for high schools. The article explores several discursive practices adopted by th...
This article focuses on the role of the civics teacher against the backdrop of the recent political developments in Israel, where the political elite increasingly seeks to underpin citizenship education with a national-religious ideology. As in previous work on this topic by other academics, we draw on Gramsci's work on cultural hegemony to locate the hegemonic discourse of citizenship education in Israel and focus on the teacher's role along the spectrum of being an agent of the nation-state to acting as a transformative intellectual. We have interviewed Jewish-Israeli civics teachers to gain a better understanding of how they mediate their role between the different demands that the politics of civic education in Israel imposes on them. Our findings outline how teachers sometimes tend to reproduce the hegemonic discourse and how they also find ways to rebel against it, drawing on counter-hegemonic strategies in their classroom practice.