Conflict and democracy education in Palestine

Abstract

This paper describes the conflict situations that teachers and students faced when a new problem- and case-based approach to democracy education was used in Palestine. The data for the study were six documentary cases written by teachers who participated in the three-year project, supplemented by the observations and interpretations of the author as a participant observer. The study describes how dedicated and tactful teachers generally succeeded to teach democracy in a largely undemocratic context, and shows that teaching democracy in the manner described perturbed the system, and students and teachers were faced with internal and external conflict situations. These conflict situations sometimes facilitated radical change in the knowledge, beliefs, and behavior of teachers and students. The study underscores the importance of internal cognitive and emotional conflict, in addition to external conflict, in learning, as well as draws attention to the dialectical relation between teachers’ efforts to introduce educational change and their own change and professional development.