Navigating Israeli citizenship: how do Arab-Palestinian teachers civicize their pupils?

Three-faced: The conflicting roles of citizenship education in conflict-affected societies – A comparison of Northern Ireland and Israel

“…Notably, teachers from all four schools perceived the curriculum as not sufficiently relevant to the students' lived reality, prompting them to reinterpret citizenship in more meaningful ways. While teachers from all schools seemed to envision CE as active citizenship building on human rights, equality, and critical thinking in relation to the conflict, minority and majority groups vary in their readiness to adopt these concepts -an issue that has been noted in previous research (Agbaria and Pinson, 2019;Cahill-Ripley, 2019;Gordon, 2012;Goren and Yemini, 2018). It emerged that it is more difficult for teachers from majority communities (Protestant and Jewish-Israeli) to connect these concepts to their communities' recent history and thus make them relatable for the students, whereas active forms of CE were more readily embraced by the minority communities.…”

“…They found that Jewish religious students favoured ethno-republican citizenship orientations, while Jewish secular and especially Arab-Palestinian students tended to endorse liberal citizenship orientations. Qualitative research about teachers also found that Arab-Palestinian citizenship teachers discuss conflictual issues drawing on discourses about rights and equality (Agbaria and Pinson, 2019), while Jewish-Israeli teachers were shown to vary in their support or rebellion against the official presentation of conflictual issues in CE, depending on their political identities (Muff and Bekerman, 2019). 1 In Northern Ireland, most Protestant and Catholic children attend separate schools (controlled for Protestants and maintained for Catholics).…”

“…(Mr Musa) Similar to participants in the Catholic school, he drew connections between the concepts of rights, equality, and discrimination, connecting them to the local conflict. Such approaches to CE by Arab-Palestinian citizenship teachers were described in previous research(Agbaria and Pinson, 2019). Yet, arguably stemming from their conflictual reality, students from the Arab-Palestinian school could draw on experiences of rights violations, whilst their Catholic peers framed state violence mainly as a collective historical experience.…”

“Glocalisation” doctrine in the Israeli Public Education System: A contextual analysis of a policy-making process

“…Additional information concerning question number 5998 provides the following description: "The identity of young people today is undergoing accelerated globalization and they develop a global consciousness/identity based on the insight that our quality of life, if not life itself, is dependent on worldwide cooperation" (MoE, 2016, p. 152). We argue that the MoE's decision to introduce this topic as a preliminary question is not trivial, and rather significant in light of the otherwise Zionist-oriented curricula (Agbaria & Pinson, 2018). In the absence of state policy in this matter (Dvir et al, 2017;, it seems that this was a bold decision aimed at generating a discourse concerned with non-national citizenship, which in turn legitimizes its entry into public discourse via the 'participatory' policy-making process.…”

The communitarian attitudes of religious Zionist female adolescents to democracy in Israel

“…Agbaria (2018) argues that the state civic education for Palestinians in the Arab sector depoliticizes the curriculum and excludes ideology and politics, and this has been reinforced recently by the current, right-wing government. Yet, again the teaching approach in the Arabic-speaking classroom is influenced by the attitude of the teachers so that teachers ‘attempt to reclaim the authenticity of the indigenous identity and knowledge, amplify its voice, and empower its agency for social change’ (Agbaria and Pinson, 2019: 16).…”