Beth Harris, Political Justice
Ithaca College, New York

During the fall semester 2008, the academic communities in my two Political Justice classes were transformed by a new educational strategy, the use of a videoconference to meet with Palestinian college students living in the West Bank.  Afterwards many students shared that this class with these students half way around the world was an “unforgettable” and life-changing experience.  The 100-level Political Justice course provides an introduction to the relationships between law, justice and political power in a comparative context.  The students explore strategies for witnessing injustices, especially those experienced by people who are excluded by legal protections.  They also gain experience researching contemporary legal and political issues and skills to develop more informed understandings of governmental policies and their implications.

This semester I worked with the Research Journalism Initiative to set up a videoconference with Palestinian students at An-Najah University in the West Bank.  In preparation for the conferences, students explored a variety of sources produced by Palestinians, Israelis and Americans to learn about the political, legal and social conditions in Israel’s occupied territories.  Then they worked in groups to develop questions for their Palestinian peers.  Samantha Lowe and Robert Freeman, students who were proficient with media, volunteered to coordinate the technological aspects of the project.  

Samantha reflects, “The videoconference was one of the most influential experiences that I have ever had—I had never had the chance to speak to a person from Palestine and to hear their point of view was groundbreaking.  I have been conditioned by our media to believe only one side of the story—Israel is good and Palestine is bad.  Yet actually being able to speak to a person from Palestine was amazing.  From their stories I was able to grasp how it felt for them to live in constant fear.” Many students now look at U.S. media more critically and realize that they needed to seek multiple sources to develop an accurate understanding of situations.  

Students acknowledge that “speaking with kids like us can teach us more than we had ever imagined.”  One student observes, “I thought the classroom they were sitting in looked just like ours, which added to the overall experience.  The videoconference was significant because it helped me place all the readings and briefings and work up to that point in a real context. The people we were talking about were not just facts and figures, but real college students like me whose lives were being turned upside down on a daily basis.”

The video conference inspired some students to search for ways to seek justice. One student explains, “It was very striking to see people our own age ask us for help, because so much of their life is affected.”  Another student concludes, “The experience was so authentic and eye-opening that I actually felt as thought I needed to do something to help.” - December, 2008

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Jennifer D. Klein, RJI Director of Educational Development
St. Mary’s Academy, Colorado

"Educational exchange can turn nations into people, contributing as no other form of communication can to the humanizing of international relations.  …I do not think educational exchange is certain to produce affection between peoples, nor indeed do I think that is one of its necessary purposes; it is quite enough if it contributes to the feeling of a common humanity, to an emotional awareness that other countries are populated not by doctrines that we fear but by people with the same capacity for pleasure and pain, for cruelty and kindness, as the people we were brought up with in our own countries."

Senator J. W. Fulbright

I have been a university and high school teacher for 18 years, and my students consistently say that the most valuable experiences they have in my classroom are those which teach them to think beyond the limitations of their own experiences and perspectives.  Life is by its very nature subjective, biased by the individual who experiences it, and education is no exception to this human rule; just pick up any textbook and you’ll see the truth only as one particular company or group of individuals wants to present it.  The goal in education can’t be for any one teacher or lesson plan to achieve perfect balance and lack of bias because it’s impossible—the goal instead is to provide students with broadly varied perspectives and experiences through myriad people, to ultimately allow them to make their own choices and define their own opinions as they grow to understand the bigger picture.  No one teacher or even institution can provide perfect balance if the teachers in that building are teaching from within themselves authentically, and most good teachers do.  In fact, most good teachers agree that they teach who they are even more than what they know, and research suggests that teachers’ authenticity and willingness to reveal themselves and their personal views are huge factors in education’s success.           

If I could, I would take every student overseas so she could have her own experiences and not have to experience so much through the limited lens of my travels.  Since I can’t, I try to expose my students to as many global perspectives as I can, as honestly as I can.  Literature is, for whatever reason, somehow immune to complaints of bias—subjectivity is assumed and accepted, and global literature allows students a certain amount of entry into perspectives other than their own.  But the Research Journalism Initiative allows students entry into another world entirely because it explores another reality, not one imagined through the format of fiction, but one viewed directly through real, raw exposure to everyday life in Palestine and other parts of the world.  The more students understand what reality means to a young person growing up surrounded by violence and chaos, the more their ability to think compassionately and globally will increase as well—and this can’t help but improve the possibility we might build a more constructive, compassionate and just global community. 

Educator and philosopher Paolo Freire taught teachers the world over that education must be a dialogue with students, not something inserted or “banked” into students’ minds, and that the teacher is as much a participant as her students.  The wider the dialogue, the more fully students develop their own “conscientização” or internal conciousness, what Freire called “…learning to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality.”  The building of individual conscience is RJI’s goal as well, and the high school classroom is the perfect forum for this work.  Students this age are still open minded and curious, still willing to try on other people’s opinions to see how well they fit.  And this is true on both sides of the RJI exchange; we know direct communication will be just as valuable for the Palestinian young people involved, as they will have the chance to explore the real, everyday lives and perspectives of our students in the U.S. through a method which circumvents biases on their side of the globe as well.  In the spirit of open dialogue, we encourage parents to get involved in this discussion as well, both through the blogsite and by watching and discussing RJI’s film clips with their children at home. It may not always be a comfortable journey to undertake, to look straight into the heart of human conflict, but as educators we feel these explorations have immeasurable value for our students and ourselves.

This educational dialogue is not about indoctrinating students into one set of ideas about the Middle East or the human condition; the goal is rather to use the classroom as a forum to empower students to make their own choices with more relativism, with wider, more authentic information and a hands-on context that traditional media can’t provide.  We hope our students will question everything they’ve assumed to be true and will learn to recognize their own biases as much as those of the media, textbooks, and nearly any source of information conveyed by humans.  In this process, we hope they can weave those disparate views in with their own experiences and come to their own authentic answers about what’s right, wrong or true about the world.  As RJI founder Mark Turner writes in his Letter to Parents &  Teachers, “As educators, we retain a remarkable possibility, an exercise in honesty, to teach not facts to be remembered, but perspectives to be questioned. If we are to bestow anything, let it be the facility of our students to doubt us, to disagree with what we know and to discover their own truths.” - Fall, 2008