Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, vol. 49, no. 2,
March–April 2011, pp. 90–96.
© 2011 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved.
ISSN 1061–0405/2011 $9.50 + 0.00.
DOI 10.2753/RPO1061-0405490214
Yifat Ben-David Kolikant
The School of the Dialogue of Cultures’ (SDC) notion of a “person of culture” is appealing, especially because of the increased exposure of today’s students to myriad voices through information and communications technology, some contradicting their (local) culture. However, the SDC’s pedagogical decision to avoid including historical topics close to their students’ world is challenged in this article. An alternative approach is suggested, based on insights gained from the Doing History Together project, where Israeli Arabs and Jews collaboratively investigate events from their shared past of conflict.
Educating the next generations is a challenging task in many respects. Bibler claims—and I heartily agree—that we are undergoing an educational crisis, that “a particular type of education is coming to an end, and we are experiencing the birth throes of a new sense of the school, and, what is more, a new sense of the span of person’s life devoted to school” (Bibler, 2009, p. 34).
Bibler mentions three examples highlighting the need for a change in human thought, and I would like to add a fourth one, which to me is foremost: today’s children live in a world different from the world we and previous generations grew up in, a world of digitalism and globalization. In the past people enjoyed the stability of their local environment and their encounters with the “far” or “global” were sparse. As a result of the accelerating process of globalization, however, people now face the challenge of not only adapting their current local culture but also contending with cultural and historical differences. On the one hand, encounters with “different others” have the potential of broadening their horizons and enriching their experiences; on the other hand, these encounters invite contradictions, threats to local cultures, and conflicts. In my view, schools today should be aware of students’ “daily” encounters with narratives, values, and viewpoints different from those they encounter in school, and, moreover, they should also prepare students to successfully cope with contradictions. What should a school in the new sense of the word be like? The scholars of the School of the Dialogue of Cultures (SDC) believe that schooling should facilitate a student in becoming a “person of culture.” Solomadin and Kurganov describe such a person as someone who is “free and capable of self-definition, a person who is interested in dialogue with unique cultural interlocutors” (2009, p. 7). Bibler described a person of culture as someone who “conjugates in his or her thinking and activity according to different cultures, forms of activity, values, semantic spectra that are not reducible to one another” (Bibler, 2009, p. 35). Bibler articulates the importance of educating students to question “facts,” see their wonder, namely, understand that these are not part of nature (on the contrary, these “facts” and concepts sometimes are unreasonable and inconsistent), and get familiar with the dialogue within which they were generated and sustained.
I share with the scholars of SDC their vision of educating the younger generation for dialogicality. In recent years, I have invested much of my time in developing an educational environment for fertile dialogue. Inspired by Hermans, Watkins, and Marková, our educational goal is to encourage and facilitate students to develop a “dialogical capacity,” namely, the ability and willingness to open-mindedly hold a dialogue with voices contradicting and conflicting their own (Marková, 2003; Watkins, 2003), so that they can perceive, recognize, and deal with differences, conflicts, and opposition, and arrive at workable solutions
(Hermans and Dimaggio, 2007).
As part of this endeavor, a group under my leadership launched the Doing History Together (DHT) project, in which Israeli Jewish and Israeli Arab postprimary students collaboratively investigate historical events of their shared troubled past.
The biethnic groups discuss primary and secondary sources and write accounts of the events within a Wiki-based environment. These activities were developed by a Jewish–Arab team consisting of educational researchers and historians. This project confronted us with many challenges and queries as researchers, designers, educators, citizens loyal to their collective(s), and well-meaning human beings. In this short article, I refer to two tensions, both very relevant to my scholarship, especially to the DHT project. The first tension is the distinction made by Matusov between the SDC’s dialogical pedagogy, which he refers to as epistemological, and another type of dialogical pedagogy, which he refers to as ontological. The second tension is the SDC’s decision to avoid including topics that have immediate relevance to the students, highlighted by Matusov and Berlyand. These tensions are extremely important in the context of DHT.
The assumption underlying DHT is that history is a convenient venue for fostering students’ development of dialogical capacity, due to its interpretive nature, which typically includes multiple perspectives. The history of the foundation of Israel especially lends itself to this, because the Jews, the Arabs, and the British (who conquered the country during World War I) have different perspectives on the historical events.
Moreover, there is a prominent overlap between historical thinking and dialogical capacity. For example, according to Seixas, empathy is “understanding historical figures as agents who faced decisions, conflicts, constraints, and hardships under circumstances and with ways of thinking quite different from their own” (Seixas, 1993, p. 303). In addition, Seixas emphasizes that the interaction with the “different other” individuals, whether the historical agent, as in Seixas’s case, or the present interlocutor entails moral judgment. Hence, historians are in constant dialogue with unique others who lived in the past, as well as with contemporary voices of alternative interpretations. Many studies in history education report that students have difficulty interacting with texts, let alone those that represent views that contradict and are in conflict with their own. The reasons for this are the moral judgments and emotions elicited by their interaction with the unique other historical agent with whom they are in conflict (e.g., Wertsch, 2008). That is, the difficulty stems from the students’ low dialogical capacity.
Inspired by Bakhtin’s (1981) dialogical theory, we hypothesized that a collaboration of agents from conflicting groups involved in the historical investigation of the same texts could foster the development of dialogical capacity because such an interaction may raise students’ awareness of their historical epistemology (Marková, 2003). Specifically, this interaction is most likely to make evident the interpretive nature of history and the bias inherent in human interactions—important aspects of historical thinking.
Much thought, however, was invested in the design of the milieu. Students— because of their sense of belongingness to their ethnic collectives—might regard the instruction to look through the eyes of the other, the “enemy,” as illegitimate and immoral (Kelman, 1999). To this end, our design utilized Intergroup Contact Theory (Allport, 1979; Pettigrew, 1998). This step was necessary in order for students to listen to each other’s voices and continue the interaction. For example, in order to encourage collaboration rather than competition—one of the conditions necessary for a fertile encounter—success in the group assignment did not necessarily depend on a group consensus. Instead we allowed the students to present two different opinions, as long as they analyzed the differences between them. (For a detailed description of the instructional design, see Ben-David Kolikant and Pollack, 2009.)
It is no big surprise, thus, that the SDC notion of viewing history as having a key role in students’ schooling attracted my attention. Interestingly, the history taught in the SDC is—in Matusov’s words—the “Western canon” (2009, p. 10).
This history is used, as far as I understand, to demonstrate the dialogical nature of concepts—that they are dialogically created and interactively sustained through a process of negotiation, before they are agreed upon and become “conventions”— including those used contemporarily, such as numbers and words.
In this aspect, our instructional approach in DHT differs from that of the SDC. We use history different from that used in the SDC. Rather than looking for eras in history far from the students’ world, in the DHT project the students, Israeli Arabs and Jews, are assigned to collaboratively investigate events from their joint conflicting past, the intractable Jewish–Arab conflict. The controversy is not hidden, and the ramifications of the events studied on their world are not tacit. In Israel, the Jews are in the majority and Arabs, who comprise about 20 percent of the Israeli population, make up the biggest minority. The Israeli Arabs are citizens of Israel. They are also descendants of the Palestinians who were the majority in Israel during the British mandate. As such, their sense of belongingness to the Israeli and the Palestinian groups, which are in conflict, is complicated.
This setting enabled us—using SDC terminology—to facilitate students to be surprised by the passionate nature of language and its heteroglossia, as well as by the nature of history, its multiplicity and interpretiveness. A prominent example is the secondary sources that students receive on one of the studied events, “the Balfour
Declaration.” In 1917 Lord Balfour, then the British minister of foreign affairs, issued a document addressed to Lord Rothschild that conveyed the sympathetic view of the British government toward the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. In Jewish sources, the event is referred to as the Balfour declaration, whereas in the Arab sources the event is referred to as the Balfour promise. The word “promise” implies a stronger commitment of Britain to the Jews than the word “declaration” because it attributes more activism and moral responsibility to Britain, which made a similar promise to the Arabs before (in the Hussein–McMahon correspondence) and hence deceived them. The word “declaration,” used in Jewish sources, is consistent with the Zionist tendency to highlight the activism of Zionists in struggling to actualize Zionist aspirations. Students’ surprise (both Arabs and Jews) was empirically evident: we documented their questions upon reading the writings of historians and noted that the biethnic groups devoted much time, when writing the joint essays, to deciding on which word to use:1. JS1: I read the sources and in one of them instead of Israel it is written Palestine, why?
2. AS1: That’s the name. Before you came here.
3. JS1: The place has a name. Israel. You can’t change it just because you don’t like it.
4. AS1: It is not a matter of liking. I suggest that we search and see how it was entitled in the period we are studying and use that name.
Obviously, the different terminology used by the Arab historian bothered JS1, a Jewish student, since she initiated a discussion on it, and suggested the name 94 JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY “Israel.” The correspondence between her and Arab student AS1 in lines 1–3 demonstrates presentism, or students’ bringing the present controversy to the discussion, for example, JS1’s assumption that AS1 does not like the name Israel (line 3). In line 4, AS1, perhaps in an attempt to reduce the tension, suggested investigating the name used back then, that is, he utilized historiography as a way out of controversy.
Similarly, when AS2, an Arab student from another group, was asked during an interview to describe the dynamics of the discussion in his group, he referred thus to his group’s discussion of the terms “declaration” and “promise”: “They [Jewish peers] said ‘declaration.’ We said ‘promis
So we [Arab peers] [said], ‘Listen. It’s a declaration but it has the same importance as a promise.’”
Our use of history is related to the argument between Matusov and Berlyand.
In his introduction to the special issues on SDC Matusov made the following statement: The SDC seems to prefer to study the Trojan War in the ancient world, the object of numerous inspirations and commentaries by high cultures, rather than the Chechen war in modern-day Russia, a messy and, potentially, unsafe contemporary subject. (2009, p. 11)
In response, Berlyand suggested two options educators who teach in a “macro” context of conflict can choose between when deciding on the topics taught. In fact, she gave an example of children living in a violent reality and asked whether teaching them to use a weapon, knowledge that has immediate relevance, is really a better choice than what the SDC offers. She further explained: “the institution is aimed at extracting a child from his or her life—the child is liberated from life commitments and demands . . . the child can do something that society considers necessary for the child in a different way” (Matusov, 2009, p. 18).
In my view, the DHT offers a third possibility, one that addresses both the issue of relevance and the issue of extracting students from their life. Simply put, we attempt to teach them a way out, to bring them to learn to live with otherness peacefully and resolve conflicts in a different way. Perhaps we perceive extraction differently from Berlyand. We do not teach the students what “society” deems important, thereby sheltering them from the messy and sometimes even cruel world.
The mere notion that there is an entity “society” that knows what is good for a child and dictates it sounds nondialogical to me. Instead, in DHT we aim to help our students to live in this world and to deal with the contradictions and conflicts they encounter in their own reality.
Are we pursuing the same goal as the SDC, and differing only in the means we use? Do we aim for a “person of culture?” We certainly hope that students would recognize how historical “facts” were conventionalized to certain narratives, how language is utilized, how emotions play a crucial role in ostensibly cognitive tasks. We want them to question every past and contemporary fact used, to employ self-critique, and to have the tendency and the ability to recognize the logic of the other voice, even if they disagree with it. Perhaps both we and the SDC consider the same tradeoff, that between engagement and presentism. The topics we use facilitate students’ engagement, and yet we need to help students see beyond “their” side. In the SDC, the use of the far, of the West, makes it easier for students to see beyond the cultural-historical constraints, and yet I wonder to what extent, and by what process they get engaged in the topics discussed.
Does our instructional pedagogy align with ontological dialogue or with epistemological dialogue? We certainly aspire to influence students’ epistemology. Barton and McCully (2005) reported that in Northern Ireland, after taking a history class that presented both narratives in a balanced manner, students tended to search for the voice of the “other” side when encountering a historical presentation. Their epistemology changed, but their ontology also changed, as they became aware of the dialogic nature of their world.
According to my understanding of Matusov’s argument, a major distinctive line between ontological and epistemological dialogical pedagogies is whether the pedagogy relies on the assumption that logic is rather stable and explicit, or the assumption that logic (like language) is only semi-explicit, and, moreover, changes as we live and engage in dialogue with others. Many historians, in my view, belong to the epistemological camp, as they strive to reveal the meta-narrative, the template to which narratives of specific events apply (Wertsch, 2008). Yet, their ontology is that of a dialogue, as they are aware of the different opinions of other historians and struggle against their (meta-)narratives with their analytical tools. Can we aspire, as pedagogues, to both? That is, can we hope that students would become aware of the cultural logic, and at the same time, would learn to see beyond it, thereby changing it? Is that not the very concept behind the idea of the “person of culture?”
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Yifat Ben-David Kolikant is an assistant professor in the School of Education, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research interests include the interrelations among technology, schooling, and learning, particularly the impact of students’ informal experience with computer technology and the Internet on learning, and the characterization of effective teaching environments in an age of globalization and rapid changes.
This study was supported by the Israeli Science Foundation, grant no. 1236/09.
E-mail: yifatbdk@mscc.huji.ac.il.
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