‘Look, Each Side Says Something Different’: the impact of competing history teaching approaches on Jewish and Arab adolescents’ discussions of the Jewish–Arab conflict

The Official, The Empathetic and The Critical: Three Approaches to History Teaching and Reconciliation in Israel

“…As Table 3 shows, discussions carried out among participants who studied in the empathetic dual-narrative condition featured a significantly lower Jewish dominance of discussion time than a control and the conventionalauthoritative conditions. The critical disciplinary condition featured a significantly lower Jewish dominating behavior in discussion than the control and the conventional-authoritative conditions (Goldberg and Ron 2014). In both cases, it appears the exposure to both sides' perspectives promoted a more egalitarian discussion atmosphere.…”

“…The study described below sought to fill this lacuna. I will present findings and conclusions from the various publications which emanated from it (Goldberg 2014a, b;Goldberg and Gerwin 2013;Goldberg and Ron 2014).…”

“…During the first decade of the new millennium (2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010), history curriculum in Israel has shown contrasting features of innovation and regression, leading to the production of varied and competing curricular materials about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (Goldberg and Gerwin 2013;Goldberg and Ron 2014). On the one hand, this is the period in which Sami Adwan and Dan Bar-On, along with a group of Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian teachers, formulated a dual-narrative textbook (Adwan and Bar-On 2004).…”

“…Discussions were conducted in Hebrew (a language both groups speak and understand but Jews speak considerably more fluently) facilitated and recorded by participants, transcribed and analyzed. For a detailed description of procedure, materials and measures, see Goldberg and Ron (2014) and Goldberg (2014a).…”

“…Learners also filled questionnaires about intergroup attitudes such as interest in the other's perspective of the conflict (Bar-Tal and Halperin 2011) 4 and defense of in-group narratives (Klar and Baram 2016). 5 For detailed description of procedure, materials and measures, see Goldberg and Ron (2014) and Goldberg (2014a, b).…”