Crisis in Palestine: Our Role as Teachers

As teachers, should we tell our students in front of the classroom, are we supporting Palestine or Israel? 

As an individual, no one can or should force us to believe in something or support whatever we decide to support. We are all free men and women to determine our options.

But we must professionally uphold the integrity of being educators and teachers by understanding our priorities. Being teachers, what matters the most is the learning, the process. Hence, we need to deploy specific pedagogies to serve this objective. As teachers or educators, learning sciences should already become our second nature to refer to. It is always the basis of our work. 

I don't think we should or need to begin the conversation by saying, "I think it's Hamas who did it or not", or "Israel who did it or not", for at least two reasons. First, it doesn't matter what our opinion is, especially to the actual victims there in Palestine. They don't get any benefits, and they are not affected by our support or our decision to go against any of them, and it has no learning value.

But if we really want to engage our students in discussing the current issues in Palestine, especially if we are teachers or educators responsible for teaching social studies and especially history, then we might begin the conversation by asking the students, "Are you aware of what happened in Gaza, so and so, recently?"

Invite the students to think. 

Some might say, "Oh, I think Hamas are the criminals." And then some others might say, "Oh, I think it is Israel who is doing so and so." So, our responsibility as teachers is to guide our students, mediate the differences of opinion by helping them to investigate, make some comparisons between resources, and help them to think. 

Especially in history, historical thinking and investigating resources are the foundation of everything. And students deserve to be guided. Also, from the perspective of media literacy, students need our help to understand what is behind media, how to identify bias and specific interest, be it explicit or implicit, try to make some comparisons between different narratives and help to reach a conclusion.

We might be happy or unhappy with the conclusion that the students arrive at, but be it negative or positive, as teachers, we must understand how they actually arrive at the conclusion. They deserve to realise they did the right thing if it's right. And if the judgment has something wrong with it, we need to highlight to the students what went wrong and how that can be improved.

And, of course, in the end, we also need to guide our students on how to coexist in peace when opinions are divided and become very binary. That can be achieved by inviting students to investigate and learn about the virtues, values, and characters behind these events. Humanise the situation. Try to understand from that point of view.

Because justice and injustice, bullying, oppression, and wrongdoings are not only in foreign lands far, far, far away from our reality. It is universal. It happens in our schools, homes, and in our society. 

Without the learning process, there is no education. It is an indoctrination. An indoctrination doesn't need teachers or educators. Anyone can do it. 

An indoctrination makes teachers and educators irrelevant.

RIZAL.IE