Existence and Coexistence in Acre: The Power of Educational Activism

Abstract

This article presents a five-year action-research project of systemic change toward coexistence in Acre, a mixed Arab-Jewish city in Israel. Educational activism was the basis for this project. Because education in Acre was closely interwoven with discriminative politics, this project used a citywide systemic approach consisting of three layers: (a) work in schools that used cooperative learning to increase achievement, (b) work with parents in school-family literacy partnerships, and (c) work with the city's educational and political leadership for citywide change. Data presented for each layer show the potential of this long-term holistic approach to bring coexistence to the community even though regional and political factors worked against community coexistence.A community model of systemic change is presented in this article. This model was used in Acre, a mixed Arab-Jewish city in Israel. First, the background of the city will be described, followed by a description of action and research in three settings: the schools, the families, and the leadership in the city. Because Acre can be considered a metaphor for mixed Arab-Jewish life in Israel, the Acre experience can contribute to social scientific understanding in the field.In order to give the reader a sense of the feelings of participants in the Acre project, at the time, quotes from parents, educators, and the participants are

The art of living together: Reducing stereotyping and prejudicial attitudes through the Arab-Jewish Class Exchange Program (CEP).

“…A multisystemic approach to reducing prejudice was suggested by several scholars (Coleman & Deutsch, 2000; Pruitt & Olczak, 1995) who advocated addressing simultaneously issues related to multiple modalities including motivation, affect, cognition, behavior, and social environment. Examples of such programs were provided by Desivilya (2004) and Hertz-Lazarowitz (2004). The CEP strives to integrate the aforementioned approaches, including McKown’s (2005) ecological theory that suggested advancing the practice of school-based prejudice reduction intervention by utilizing a combination of interventions that originate from varied theoretical traditions.…”

Counseling Groups for Arab Adolescents in an Intergroup Conflict in Israel: Report of an Outcome Study.

“…Lustig (2003) found that the study of a remote interethnic conflict (in this case, the Irish) helped Israeli youngsters become more willing to acknowledge the two-sided nature of the narratives involved in the local conflict. Hertz-Lazarowitz (2004) presented successful results emanating from a 5-year action-research project of systemic change toward coexistence in the mixed Arab-Jewish city of Acre. The project was successful until the second Intifada erupted.…”

into the future

“…There are some 'private' educational programmes available for schools that deal with Palestinian-Israeli relationships. These programmes are not part of the general curriculum, but schools can, on the principals' initiative, participate in them (Abu-Nimer, 2004;Hertz-Lazarowitz, 2004). Obviously there are advantages to such programmes and meetings, but they are affected by three main problems: (1) in most of them, the dominant (virtually the only) language of communication is Hebrew; (2) although some programmes deal with the conflict and others try to find shared interests, most of them are based on culture (folklore); and (3) most of the programmes are either one-time events, or have long intervals between them.…”