How does one arouse basic human care for an enemy? A story of a transformative moment in a diverse classroom

Abstract

This article demonstrates how stories serve as effective methodology when scrutinizing the meaning of social and political conflicts in diverse classrooms. I base my argument on a story about a distressing conflict among students from different ethnic, and national backgrounds occurring in an academic course at an Israeli college. A detailed description of the clash, which eventually evolved into a moment of mutual support and solidarity, provides a sense of immediacy and verisimilitude, and thus is the best way to introduce the dynamic, messy reality of the classroom. Moreover, I argue that story-like documentation may well expose social and political processes and subtleties better than any thin report and theoretical analysis and can form an archive of hope amid seemingly social and political estrangement and despair.

Keywords:

• Teaching stories
• diverse classroom
• Arab-Jewish conflict
• archive of hope
• reflexivity of discomfort

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This is mainly true for Palestinian citizens of Israel who are politically, socially, and geographically excluded by the Jewish hegemony (Hager & Jabareen, 2016). Military service in Israel is compulsory for most Jewish women and men as well as for Druze men, which allows meetings across class and ethnic groups (Sasson-Levy, 2002).

2 Cohen and Leon (2008) show that following diversification of Israel's higher education, members of the new Mizrahi middle class have enrolled in colleges, challenging traditional educational and socioeconomic dichotomies. In xxx College, however, Ashkenazi culture still prevails.

3 The Second Lebanon War in 2006 was a 34-day military conflict in Lebanon, northern Israel and the Golan Heights. It is believed to have killed more than 1,000 Lebanese, and 165 Israelis, Jews and Arabs. It severely damaged the Lebanese civil infrastructure and displaced approximately one million Lebanese and 300,000–500,000 Israelis.

4 The participants in this class were second- and third-year female students. Women have outnumbered men in the Education Departments in Tel Hai College and elsewhere and thus some courses like this one contain women only.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tamar Hager

Tamar Hager is an Associate Professor in the Department of Education and Gender Studies at Tel Hai College, Israel. Motherhood, critical feminist pedagogy and methodology, art sociology, and fictional and academic writing are core issues of her academic research, writing, teaching and social activism. She is the co-editor of Bad Mothers: Regulations, Representations and Resistance published in 2017 and the co-writer of Compliance and Resistance Within the Neoliberal Academia: Biographical Stories, Collective Voices to be soon published by Palgrave-Macmillan.