iCENTER TAKES ON ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN ISSUE WITH NEW PROGRAM ‘CONFLICTS OF INTEREST’

Framework is meant to serve as a basic structure for how to teach students about the conflict, not what to teach, its authors say

By Judah Ari Gross

Inevitably, the conversation around Israel always turns to conflict: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Arab-Israeli conflict, Israel’s myriad domestic conflicts.

And yet Israel educators report feeling “fear, angst and anxiety” when teaching about those conflicts and therefore try to avoid discussing them, according to Alex Harris of Chicago’s iCenter.

“Educators feared they didn’t have sufficient content knowledge. They worried that they didn’t have the right emotional dispositions to deal with some of these key topics. They worried, ‘How do I, as an educator, come to the students and bring in my own perspectives, but also maintain [a] sort of political neutrality, but also work with identity formation,” Harris told eJewishPhilanthropy.

To address this, last year the iCenter launched a new initiative to develop a framework to prepare educators to teach their students about these conflicts and conflict in general. This week, the organization is rolling out this new program, which it is calling “Conflicts of Interest.”

Harris, the director of the project, is particularly proud of the name and its dual layers of meaning. For one, he said, the program focuses on multiple conflicts that are of interest: “The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, also the multiple conflicts that exist within the Israel education world, the Jewish education world, and the education world in general.

“It’s all about how do we engage in conversations about controversial issues, how do we facilitate those dialogues, how do we train educators to be the best educators possible to deal with these complex and controversial issues,” Harris told eJP this week.

“And the other aspect of the name conflict of interest is that oftentimes educators feel that they have a conflict of interest between what they might want to do as an educator almost in an isolated world — critical thinking and looking through that lens — but also in terms of identity formation, the different pressures and different responsibilities that they have as a Jewish educator or an educator in a particular institution, or as an individual who has their own perspectives, their own biases, and their own way of coming to the topic,” he said.

To begin developing the Conflicts of Interest program, iCenter first spoke to some 200 educators – day school teachers, Hebrew school teachers, Israel trip organizers, youth group directors – in order to get a lay of the land and understand the educators’ needs. Harris and the other iCenter employees who worked on the project also read through the available resources, including “20 lesson plans, 23 textbooks and resource guides, 18 white papers, 66 books and articles, and 19 curriculum frameworks,” Harris wrote in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy last year.

View full article on eJewish Philanthropy.