Zvi Bekerman

Hebrew University of Jerusalem | HUJI · School of Education

This study presents a systematic transcript-based analysis of the dialogue occurring in a track two workshop attended by Jewish–Israelis and Palestinians. We hypothesized that participants from conflicting groups would form a shared superordinate identity in the course of the workshop. Our findings confirmed this hypothesis. Consistent with self-ca...

In recent years, a new integrative bilingual multicultural educational initiative has been developed in Israel. Its main purpose is to offer dignity and equality to the two Israeli groups who have for the last 100 years denied each other's humanity: Palestinians and Jews. The research examines this attempt at encouraging each group to take pride in...

The present paper deals with Jewish and Palestinian teachers who work in an integrated school in Israel, and shows the challenges and possibilities from examining these teachers' powerful historical narratives in the context of in-service training sessions. It is shown how these teachers essentially remain firmly rooted in the hegemonic historical...

Focusing on the Palestinian–Israeli case, this article critically reviews some central issues which burden the field of intergroup encounters. More specifically it considers some of their foundational historical and educational roots. I point to the reified concepts of self and identity, the history of schooling and its practices, and the coming in...

This paper addresses the complexities encountered by teachers and students when dealing with conflictual historical narratives in the context of integrated bilingual schools in Israel. The narratives presented are based on rich ethnographic data gathered from a long-standing research effort in the schools. They offer insights into how those involve...

This chapter contributes to a better understanding of how minority teachers in majority schools experience their work and how their participation in such educational contexts helps shape their sense of ethno-cultural belonging and their sense of self-efficacy. Through comparative work, we gain insights into the context-specific conditions which mig...

This open access book offers in depth knowledge on the challenges and opportunities offered by the inclusion of minority teachers in mainstream educational settings from an international perspective. It aims to be a unique and important contribution for scholars, policy-makers, and practitioners considering the complexities brought about by global...

The introductory chapter begins by clarifying the rationale that led the editors to delve into this project despite the many challenges in this field of study. First, we outline the rationale that preceded our journey, while explaining the gap in the academic literature in this field. Thereafter, we address each of the four parts of this book. The...

The paper offers a wide definition of peace education showing, in short, its historical development. Then, it reviews the major theoretical premises, which substantiate present peace educational work. Following, the paper examines the main peace educational initiatives implemented in Israel in the context of the Palestinian Israeli conflict and fin...

Participant role theory describes the designation of social roles and the use of contextually appropriate social scripts and provides a context for the interpretation of a range of social and interpersonal issues, including bullying in the school setting. This study uses participant role theory to analyze interpersonal engagements in a 10th grade c...

This article focuses on Chilean students from vulnerable school contexts facing a standard national curriculum. It offers insights into students’ voices, while uncovering what they want to learn and the drivers behind this decision. Semi-structured interviews revealed the power of the school socialisation process; for the majority of students, core...

The body of research on civic education points to the importance of teachers creating open democratic environments, leading to what has been termed the political classroom. This yearlong study of an Israeli multicultural and bilingual high school civics course, in which students from different citizenship status participated, presents a case in whi...

Arab teachers from the Palestinian minority in Israel chose to teach in the schools of the Jewish majority.

This article presents a short reflection on the confluence between politics and pandemics as they are reflected in Israel in March and April 2020.

In spite of policy impetus, research shows that teachers struggle to address the increasing diversity in classrooms, among others, due to the lack of competences to deal with it. The acquisition of Intercultural Competence (IC), which could be defined as “the ability to mobilise and deploy relevant attitudes, skills, knowledge and values in order t...

Although the yeshiva is the housekeeper of the Jewish tradition of learning, it has undergone dramatic changes along history. We describe these changes in historical, sociogenetic, and microgenetic analyses, and particularly focus on the chavruta—dyadic learning around Talmudic texts during successive meetings, and the chabure—a gathering of chavru...

El objetivo de esta presentación es rastrear el triste y destructivo poder de la metáfora educativa occidental del aprendiz como una dualidad men¬te / cuerpo basada en un lenguaje psicologizado e intentar sugerir algunos caminos alternativos. La mayor parte de lo que vamos a decir se ha dicho anteriormente (ver, por ejemplo, Hager & Hodkinson, 2009...

Based on ethnographic data gathered at the bilingual integrated Palestinian Jewish schools in Israel I reveal the complicated as well as dynamic negotiation of individual and group identities and cultures for communities engaged in multicultural and peace education. By looking closely at the experiences of children, teachers and parents at one inte...

Though not unique, educational environments serve as important places for socialization into collective identities (e.g. religious, ethnic), civic identities and democratic attitudes and behaviors. Educational environments affect the formation and negotiation of character, values, attitudes and behaviors of future citizens participating in them. Th...

This paper assesses the dangers of the use of the concept ‘culture’ in present political and educational rhetoric. The first section offers a critique of the use of the term ‘culture’ in the so-called intercultural educational efforts. It asserts that ‘culture’ in its present use is a proxy for ‘race’ and supports views, which ignore diversity and...

The global world is based on the concept of multiculturalism as a lever for the creation of authentic knowledge and innovation in inter-disciplinary fields. In various sectors of the industry there is a trend of deepening professional qualifications by absorbing experts from foreign countries and even aspiring to leverage creativity through exposur...

The present study offers a systematic analysis of the evolution of talk practices of ultraorthodox Jews learning in dyads called Chavruta. We investigate whether and how these practices contribute to the maintenance of traditional legal discourses and or move in a transformative direction. We answer this question by observing two learners in a Chav...

The goal of this study is to gain a better understanding of the experiences of Palestinian-Israeli minority¹ teachers when teaching at majority state Hebrew secular schools in Israel. Specifically, the objective is to describe and analyze the role of the teachers’ work-related experiences in shaping their sense of self-efficacy, job satisfaction, a...

Highlights • Palestinian teachers feel satisfied and have strong sense of self-efficacy. • They have good relationships with colleagues, principals, students, and parents. • They were able to alter prejudiced opinions & to promote mutual understanding. • Acculturation relates to integration, adopting new culture & retaining heritage. • Their et...

The paper explores how might teacher educators engage with teachers’ difficult knowledge and negotiate competing moral truths, when this effort obviously fails to provide adequate ‘answers’ or ‘solutions’. Although the paper is theoretical, this question’s point of departure is an incident from a series of teacher workshops in Cyprus. The question...

The paper critically approaches the western epistemological tradition and its psychologized perspectives that pose identitarian and cultural categories as standing at the basis of societal conflicts. It suggests that staying attached to a conceptualization of identity as a, more or less, fixed cognizant entity and of culture as a, rather, fixed bod...

Cet article examine différentes initiatives éducatives, actuelles et passées, en faveur de l’intégration et de la réconciliation en Israël. La première partie décrit le contexte sociopolitique et éducatif de l’État d’Israël, notamment les politiques publiques générales en faveur de l’intégration. L’article examine ensuite les principales perspectiv...

The helping professions in general and social work in particular pose particular challenges and opportunities for national minority group members. This article adds to the present knowledge in the literature concerning the interaction between career choice in the welfare professions and minority status, by looking at the voices of Palestinian Israe...

In the present article, I discuss current and past peace and reconciliation educational efforts conducted between Palestinians and Israelis. I concentrate on the educational initiatives conducted for Jewish-and Palestinian-Israeli citizens and not on those less common taking place between Israelis and Palestinians in the Palestinian Authority. In t...

This chapter continues the discussion on meaning from the previous chapter and emphasizes that signification is not shaped in neutral space beyond the social sphere. Words and their meaning are always sites of struggle, which reflect the social conflicts we produce, which, in turn, produce us. The attempt to fix meaning is then aligned with power s...

This chapter traces historically the development of dualisms and shows how they have gradually become naturalized with serious consequences in education and schooling. A number of examples are discussed to show these consequences and their negative effects for education and its organization in schooling. The authors argue that psychologized languag...

This chapter emphasizes two important concepts that try to overcome the positivistic inclinations of the social sciences. These two concepts are context and practice and the authors in this chapter clarify them first. Then, the authors discuss the materialist critique and its implications as well as the ontological turn in the social sciences and h...

We seem to hold to an idea that humans have a body and a mind that are somewhat separate. The mind we situate in the head. The body, though important in our eyes, is less so than the mind, which we seem to believe is central in the learning process. In this chapter, the authors argue that we have inherited the hegemonic psychologized language that...

This chapter reviews ideas discussed in all previous chapters, namely, how metaphysical paradigmatic assumptions set the parameters within which we attempt to uncover and understand a complex world. For the most part, these assumptions go unnoticed and inhabit and guide our worlds—our educational world, our research world and our daily world—withou...

This chapter summarizes the two major issues that are discussed in the book and the proposal put forward by the authors. First, the authors expose the psychologized language of schooling, as reflected through the reified conceptualizations of identity, culture and other accompanying concepts; and second, they point at the historical trajectory of m...

In this chapter, the authors recapitulate and connect their main arguments in this book and offer three possible overlapping metaphors that could help view learning in a different way. The three overlapping metaphors they offer are: learning as art; learning as performance; and learning as social activity/work/doing. These metaphors are not new; th...

‘Culture’ allows us not to blame it all on psychology; psychology cannot take responsibility for the use of this word in modernity, at least not at first. Culture seems to do in the outside what identity achieves in the inside. Culture is as fleeting as identity is; yet in the service of education, as the authors discuss in this chapter, culture se...

This chapter affirms that Western paradigmatic perspectives have shaped the epistemology, rhetoric and practice of education so as to hide the fact that the ‘failure’ of education is not due to the quality of people (teachers and/or students) but of the systems. The authors suggest that if we examine critically our paradigmatic sources, the real qu...

This chapter builds on ideas discussed in previous chapters and emphasizes meaning as an outcome of our living in dialogue. Meaning is not in people’s heads ever evolving into people’s actions, but the other way around. Whatever is to be found as meaning or understanding in people’s heads originates in their actions in the world. The argument goes...

The present chapter takes on the underlying assumptions of ‘the self’ grounded once again in a duality—the individual outside the bodily, the material, and the one inside, the immaterial but more ‘real’. A number of examples are shared through which the consequences are discussed for education and schooling. The authors explain that these consequen...

As the authors have done with the other concepts discussed in the book—for example, mind, individual, identity, self—and almost completing the list of the main ideas they approach critically, this chapter focuses on ‘emotion’, which has also till recently been mostly associated with our ‘inner’ side. This metaphor of emotions being ‘inner’ the body...

The authors point at the educational language impregnated by psychological perspectives as one central aspect standing in the way to achieve the needed change. First, it creates metaphors in students and teachers that are an obstacle to learning/knowing, what we are told schools want to teach. Second, it produces learning/teaching practices that br...

In education, we talk a lot about individuals. Learning processes, we say, should be adapted to individuals and their ‘capacities’. Talking about the individual and attaching to him or her unique singular qualities has the benefit of allowing us to identify those who can be pointed at as carrying the responsibility for the success or failure of the...

This chapter challenges assumptions about identity as a mental substance somewhere inside us, independent of the body. The belief that there is a mental substance called ‘identity’ raises multiple problems. The authors discuss these problems, beginning from the idea that identity as applied to people is a rather new invention. After providing a bri...

This chapter historicizes the development of schooling in the Western world and identifies how we have come to frame ‘problems’ and ‘solutions’ through psychologized language. It shows how formal educational efforts are strongly related to the historical developments that brought about the reifying ‘tyranny’ of psychologized language itself strongl...

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...

Our point of departure in this paper is the observation that in many secular societies—which may be so in variable degrees, especially in the West—as well as in societies emerging out of religious conflict, there may be the perception that educational systems ought to promote civic values while sidestepping religious or cultural values. This entang...

Abstract Advocates of integration and cross cultural contact believe schools have a seminal role to play in perpetuating or breaking the cycle of violence and division in conflicted societies. Historically, segregated schools are the norm in such societies. An alternative educational model is provided through integrated schools—schools where child...

This article discusses minority-majority practice relations on the basis of a case study analysis of the dynamics and strategies reported by 32 Palestinian social workers living in Israel regarding their practice with Jewish clients. The described encounters reflect the charged political reality and are loaded with many tensions, fears, anger, and...

Bekerman and Zembylas provide an ethnographic description of classroom events which bring to the surface the pedagogical challenges of finding ways that talk about social remembering and rival histories without putting aside “individual” memory or presenting it as less important than collective memory. The data come from their extensive ethnographi...

This book explores how psychologized language has come to dominate education and schooling. Taking a critical lens to some major constructs in education—e.g. the mind, the self, identity, emotion, emotional intelligence, motivation, culture, language and meaning—and their grounding in psychologized discourses, the authors suggest possible ways to o...

The purpose of this chapter is to explore the potential and necessary interconnections among peace education, social justice education and citizenship education, adopting a critical approach. The authors argue that critical peace education and its conceptual underpinnings have important common ground with social justice and critical citizenship edu...

Based on the result of over a decade of studies I conducted at the Palestinian Jewish integrated bilingual schools in Israel I consider some foundational issues related to present practice and research in the field of multicultural and peace education. I argue that any contributions psychological perspectives might offer to the development of pedag...

ABSTRACT The present paper deals with epistemological and methodological issues as these touch upon the products of educational practices related to the teaching of historical narratives in settings purposely created to facilitate dialogue, inclusion and recognition among children thought to be belonging in clearly differentiated and antagonistic g...

The Promise of Integrated and Multicultural Bilingual Education presents the results of a long-term ethnographic study of the integrated bilingual Palestinian-Jewish schools in Israel that offer a new educational option to two groups of Israelis--Palestinians and Jews--who have been in conflict for the last one hundred years. Their goal is to creat...

The present paper deals with epistemological and methodological issues as these touch upon the products of educational practices related to the teaching of historical narratives in settings purposely created to facilitate dialogue, inclusion and recognition among children thought to be belonging in clearly differentiated and antagonistic groups in...

Bringing together the voices of scholars and practitioners on challenges and possibilities of implementing peace education in diverse global sites, this book addresses key questions for students seeking to deepen their understanding of the field. The book not only highlights ground-breaking and rich qualitative studies from around the globe, but al...

INTRODUCTION Historically, segregated schools are the norm. An alternative educational model is provided through integrated schools-schools where children who are more normally educated apart are deliberately educated together. Integrated schools have originated in Northern Ireland but similar efforts are now met in several countries (e.g. Bosnia-H...

This collection focuses on the developing field of integrated education in conflicted societies, where children who would normally be educated apart are deliberately educated together. A variety of accounts from different geographical and socio-political sites - Catholic and Protestant in Northern Ireland, Palestinian and Jewish in Israel, and Gree...

This article takes on the issue of ‘integrated education’ in conflicted societies and engages in a deeper analysis of its dominant theoretical concepts, approaches, and implications. This analysis suggests that the theoretical language that drives current approaches of integrated education may unintentionally be complicit to the project of hegemony...

In this article, we sort through various fundamental premises about peace education to figure out how those premises operate to normalize particular meanings for peace, conflict, education, and other related concepts. We argue that peace education may often become part of the problem it tries to solve, if theoretical work is not used to interrogate...

Resumen: El presente artículo cuestiona las premisas que históricamente han sostenido la investigación científica y reflexiona, en este sentido, sobre las reformas educativas promovidas por los estados nacionales, las cuales dan cuenta, asimismo, de un sistema económico y político global específico. Es la retórica nacional, a la que todos estamos a...

In March 2012, a team of academics, practitioners, and nongovernmental organizations gathered in Belfast to discuss the current status of integrated education in various conflicted societies—Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Cyprus, Israel, Macedonia, and Northern Ireland. A driving concern for this group was the need to review the different framewo...

Academics and practitioners examine the developing field of integrated education in conflicted societies, where children who would normally be educated apart are deliberately educated together. They draw on a range of theoretical and practical frameworks, providing numerous case studies from Northern Ireland, Israel, Macedonia, and Cyprus.

The present study examines parental attitudes toward bilingual and peace-promoting education at a school in Israel, and how these affect the behaviors and perceptions of their children studying there. The questions of interest were: (a) what are the parents’ perceptions of and attitudes toward the bilingual and peace-promoting education? (b) Are th...

Minority parents’ attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors vis-à-vis their children’s education reflect the intricacies of the relations between minority and majority groups. Parental expectations of schools and of schooling are a pivotal factor within the complex relations between families and their children’s schools. This chapter intends to add to...

This article is about teachers working at the bilingual integrated schools in Israel. The study allows us to problematise and critically approach cross-cultural encounters on the basis of contact theory, which posits understandings regarding social interaction across cultural-political boundaries. It exposes potential differences between the outcom...