This article examines the constitutive role of English as a foreign language (EFL) as a cultural discourse of action and empowerment through which teachers in marginalized, specifically conflict-ridden, educational contexts act as agents of social and educational change. Although current approaches to teaching English accentuate its transformative…

This article focuses on Aliza Levenberg, an educator who taught at a Kiryat Shmona high school at the beginning of the 1960s. For three years Levenberg, a middle class Western European, travelled every week from her home in Tel Aviv to the poor town in the northern periphery of Israel, the inhabitants of which were mainly immigrants from Islamic…

I present here the normative argument that the role of the democratic-liberal state is to ensure solidarity between the public educational system and the parents of students, during routine times and during emergency times. I shed light on the weakness of the values of solidarity and equality, which have characterized the relations of the Israeli…

The "Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions" (BDS) movement against Israel is one of the faces of anti-Semitism in the United States. It threatens not only Jewish students and scholars but also the political neutrality of the university. The BDS movement is particularly concentrated in higher education and creates an environment of academic…

The paper reports on trends in language testing taking place over the years and aim at critical perspectives of testing and promoting inclusion, equity and justice. It begins with critical theories by Messick, Foucault and Bourdieu, leading to critical language testing (CLT) which focused on consequences and uses of tests. Given the power of tests…

Focusing on education policy and politics in Israel, this essay examines how ethnic segregation is established and sheds light on the latest curricular developments that place a heavy emphasis on Jewish identity. The first part of the paper underscores the rising influence of the radical right in Israel and it's political theology. The second part…

Encounters with dignity are learning moments that foster humanization and communal values, even in settings of radical difference. This article probes the potential of such learning, reviewing pedagogies of encounter and analyzing the values of dignity implicit in that work. Diving more deeply into the phenomenon of dignity, the authors analyze…

This article presents and analyzes two examples of peace education practices in the Israeli-Palestinian context. "Zochrot" is an organization dedicated to raising public awareness of the Palestinian Nakba, especially among Jews in Israel. "The School for Peace" is a Jewish-Arab organization that conducts encounter activities…

Experiences as a Work Package leader on a European Union project on internationalization of higher education in Israel motivated the author to use her research on internationalization and university teaching experiences in various countries to facilitate the Israeli partners to interrogate their pedagogical practices. Supported to engage in a…

Dominant national myths create versions of reality that we need to deconstruct if we are to take students beyond stereotype. Using the USA as an example, histories that do not align with critical national narratives become silenced or muted. Preoccupation with Black and White dichotomies is just such a narrative that has hidden the significance of…

In this article I argue that Palestinians, in particular Palestinian youth engage in forms of cultural resistance such as filming, video production and dissemination in their everyday lives as a way to re-configure place, space, law, knowledge and violence, through a critical race, feminist, anti-colonial theoretical analysis. Recently, interest…

The theoretical grounds underlying this paper are the variety of governance perspectives, which represent different political and economic ideologies (Green, 2005; Manzer, 2003). The coexistence of these often clashing attitudes is one of the reasons for policy ambiguity and policy implementation gaps (Malen, 2006). It can also expose disputing…

This paper examines the ways in which neoliberal economic policies are affecting academic work in Israeli universities, prioritizing programs that can generate their own funding, External philanthropic support from North America has enabled creation of an interdisciplinary Women and Gender Studies Program at Tel Aviv University that draws…

This article draws attention to the growing evidence of a mismatch between sociological categorization and actors' worlds of meaning as expressed in the classroom. The mismatch is especially blatant in cases where students from disadvantaged groups are introduced to what educators and theorists presume to be the liberating discourse of…

This article proposes a typology that conceptualizes a chronological approach to Holocaust Education and suggests that we focus on identifying the stages and shifts in the development of the curriculum and the scholarship. I attempt to organize existing knowledge on the subject by conducting a meta-analysis of the foundations and basic premises of…