Who Fired First? Students' Construction of Meaning From One Textbook Account of the Israeli–Arab Conflict

Abstract

In this article, I present three students' and one parent's reading of an excerpt from a textbook on the Israeli–Arab conflict. The excerpt is an account of a skirmish between Jews and Arabs in 1920, symbolizing for Jews the first bloody encounter between the two sides. While all students read the same excerpt, they use different mechanisms in their reading process to decipher the text, and come to different historical conclusions about the meaning of the text. The three mechanisms of reading identified in the article are “horizon of expectations,”“the gap in the text,” and “narrative integration.” While “horizon of expectations” focuses on the beliefs that readers bring with them to the textual account, “the gap in the text” centers on how meaning is made in the process of reading. Finally, “narrative integration” highlights the way in which text readers integrate the account they read with other information they acquired earlier. In the conclusion of the article I compare the three processes readers use in their engagement with the text.