What do students learn when a curriculum is based on politics?

By Joel Magalnick, Editor, The Jewish Sound

Whether it’s seen as a way to teach students about an under-examined side of a conflict or as an irresponsible attempt at indoctrination, the next battleground in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict appears to be coming to high school social studies classrooms.

Three years in the making and first appearing about a year and a half ago, the Palestine Teaching Trunk is the brainchild of Linda Bevis, a former high school social studies teacher and an activist with Seattle’s Palestine Solidarity Committee. Bevis, who has lived in the Palestinian territories, wanted to create a curriculum that focuses on the Palestinians because “they’re the group less heard from, less publicized in the United States media and curriculums,” she told JTNews.

But Rob Jacobs, the director of Israel advocacy organization StandWithUs Northwest, questions why the same people who put ads highly critical of Israel on the sides of Metro buses and local billboards should be offering its teaching materials in our schools.

“No advocacy group should be producing a curriculum…for public school because they’re representing a perspective,” he said.

Sarah Culpepper Stroup, a professor of classics on the faculties of comparative religion and Jewish studies at the University of Washington, agrees. In her opinion, the curriculum “puts words and political intentions in the teachers’ mouths.”

While Washington State social studies requirements specify what skills students in 9th and 10th grade — for which this curriculum has been created — should be attaining, the content itself is left to the individual teachers for the areas of history, geography, civics, economics and basic social studies skills. One example in its suggested guidelines for teaching history includes “Examines Palestinians’ and Israelis’ perspectives on the causes of conflict in the Middle East to develop a position on the primary cause of the conflict.”

“I haven’t seen any directives from the State of Washington that you can’t use such and such material to teach this course,” said Jacobs, who has been monitoring the trunk’s creation.

And therein lies the opportunity. Bevis began to collect materials from social studies teachers she knew who were teaching about the conflict, and from there compiled the trunk that contains videos, activities, and 700 pages of information, which “[provides] multiple perspectives,” she said. “There are at least two sides to the story, so we framed it as competing narratives, which is one accepted social studies way of teaching the issue.”

Whether the trunk accurately portrays the competing narratives is another story.

Stroup said this curriculum is both manipulative and “a general misrepresentation of the history of the area. There were factual problems in the longer history of the area and the origins of the conflict.”

Those inaccuracies ranged from “a general misrepresentative of the history of the area,” according to Stroup to a video featuring Bevis and collaborator Ed Mast “that talks about how Zionist leaders went to England and France and asked them to please expel their Jews so that they could be forced to go to Israel,” according to Jacobs.

Because the curriculum focuses so heavily on emotions — from a card in “The Occupation Game” saying you’ve been “shot by Occupation soldiers and die instantly” to exercises that ask students to draw out areas in their own neighborhoods that would be cut off by the “building of a concrete wall 25 feet high and 9 feet wide,” as the “Dig Deep Classroom Based Assessment (CBA): Palestine-Israel: The Effects of Occupation” lesson presents — “the topic is bound to give lies to emotions,” Stroup said.

Bevis said the game is “only one small part of the trunk,” but it “accurately reflects what it’s like to live under occupation.”

Bevis is straightforward about the curriculum focusing on the Palestinian perspective, but “with a focus on human rights and equal rights,” she said. “The part that isn’t the causes of the conflict focuses on Palestinians and Israelis whose perspective is that everyone should have equal rights.”

The online videos and DVDs include titles such as “Occupation 101,” video study guides on non-violent ways Palestinians have attempted to end the Gaza blockade, and a trailer called “Roadmap to Israeli Apartheid,” which “compares South African Apartheid to Israeli Apartheid.” To provide what Bevis called balance, that lesson includes a counterpoint video, produced by Maoz Israel, a Tel Aviv-based Messianic Jewish organization.

“I tried to present just the basic study of the story of Israel, and the basic story of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians,” Bevis said.

StandWithUs supports an Israeli-Palestinian curriculum from the Institute for Curriculum Services, a joint project of the Jewish Community Relations Council of San Francisco and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs.

“It provides both narratives and a lot of perspectives on both,” with “materials from Israelis and Palestinians and American Jews,” Jacobs said.

Stroup also praised the ICS curriculum for its evenhandedness. While that curriculum is much shorter, if taught in full the Palestine Teaching Trunk would take nine weeks of class time, Stroup questioned why any teacher would spend that much time on one topic while at the same time wondering if students could understand the complexities of the issue in a shorter unit.

“It’s really important to teach, but there’s other history that is also very, very important to teach,” she said. “As a teacher it does not make sense to me to privilege it so greatly.”

Even Bevis doesn’t believe that teachers will use the full nine weeks of her curriculum, and has offered suggested two-, three- and four-week units.

Stroup suggested that the only reason so much time and effort would be expended on this particular conflict, especially in a region so fraught with so many conflicts, is political.

“There’s not an educational argument to privilege this conflict…over so many conflicts in history,” she said.

Jacobs, Stroup and Bevis all agree that students must have the opportunity to explore on their own and make informed decisions after learning as much as they can.

“I think that 9th and 10th graders have a great capacity for critical thinking,” Bevis said. “If you provide only one side to a 9th grader or 10th grader, they will rebel. They will ask, ‘Where’s the other side?’”

But Stroup, who teaches the history of the Middle East and this conflict at the college level, believes that younger high school students “are not yet intellectually mature. Ninth and 10th graders are working on a lot of things, including their ethical beings, and trying to find their place in the world,” she said. “There’s only one right answer that is suggested for each of these exercises…. We don’t do social studies or history like that.”

This curriculum is “full of bullying language,” she added. “Our first job is to protect our students. It’s not to push our politics on our students, and I feel this slams straight into politics without any recognition of safe space or mutual respect or diversity in the classroom.

“It would be very difficult to teach this history and its ongoing complexities well to 9th or 10th graders.”

Bevis, who has taught social studies at this level, believes students are ready for hard topics, and can go to their teachers for support if they need to.

“Teachers should do what they always do to support students who are upset — talk to them in class or in private, be very open to hearing how the student is thinking/feeling, offer student alternatives if the subject matter is too emotionally difficult,” Bevis wrote in an email. “Teachers should always create a class climate where it is possible to respect multiple views and feelings.”

Bevis also works on the assumption that teachers have a working knowledge of the Middle East.

“I trust the teachers to either know about the conflict already or to be spending their spring break learning about it, which is what one of the teachers did,” she said.

To Jacobs’s surprise, however, after attending the conference for the Washington State Council of the Social Studies (WSCSS) in October to watch Bevis present the trunk, he realized that wasn’t the case.

“Many social studies teachers really know surprisingly little about the material they’re supposed to be teaching students,” he said. “We had some social studies teachers telling us that we were being ridiculous saying Israel was not a European colony, that we should of course know that the Jews took over the country of Palestine.”

Before 1948, when Israel achieved statehood, Palestine was the name of the British-mandated territory where Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza now appear on the map.

Stroup sees the breadth of the trunk as an issue as well. “Speaking as a teacher…it is one of the least organized attempts at a curriculum that I’ve seen,” she said. In addition, “a lot of their curriculum is outdated, and it doesn’t actually tell the teacher how to…stay up to date and develop [the materials].”

But Bevis doesn’t see that as a problem.

“I wish the situation would change. I don’t think it’s changed very much in a long time,” she said. “There’s a lesson in there on the attack on Gaza in 2008-2009. Truthfully, I didn’t feel I needed to add a lesson on the latest Gaza attack because I didn’t feel it was all that different from the last two.”

She does, however, continue to add materials to the online version of the trunk.

Which raises the question of who is using the trunk. Bevis said three teachers have checked out the trunk, and about 200 people have visited the website. The trunk has also been presented at social studies conferences in Oregon and Washington.

WSCSS president John Hines appears to have received multiple complaints about Bevis’s appearance at the October conference, and said in a statement prior to the event that “if the Palestine Teaching Trunk is as inflammatory and loose with facts as suggested, Ms. Bevis will face a tough audience at the conference. The alternative, cancelling her presentation, smacks of censorship and is less palatable for teachers who thrive on deliberating controversial issues and on considering diverse perspectives.”

That so few people have used the trunk creates a conundrum: How much effort does StandWithUs want to put into mounting an opposition? In recent years, Jacobs said his organization has reached out to social studies chairs at local high schools to find out if “they had had somebody come speak about the Middle East from a Palestinian perspective in the past year,” he said.

Nearly all of them had, he said, and StandWithUs created a highly successful program to have speakers talk about Israel in high schools.

“I haven’t done that with the Palestinian teaching trunk because we didn’t want to draw more attention to it in case somebody hadn’t looked at it yet,” Jacobs said.

Editor’s note: This article has been corrected to reflect inaccuracies about the Institute for Curriculum Services.