Protracted conflict presents students with an unfamiliar and often puzzling context. Why do negotiations sometimes succeed, while at other points, actors are unable to reach agreement on key issues, even in the face of deadly costs? In this article, I introduce an extended role-playing simulation designed to enhance student understanding of…

Michael Young's notion of powerful knowledge is attractive to many: to teachers wishing the best for disadvantaged students, to neoliberal governments that continually stress the need for teachers and students to improve their performance. This essay takes issue with this understanding of education. Firstly, it shows how classrooms are mediated by…

How do students draw on texts read in class to explore and make sense of the world? How does role-play open up the possibilities of utilising these resources, remaking them for their own purposes? How does play, as Vygotsky suggests, enable students to achieve more? And how does being in role change the character of social relations in the…

The Arab-Israeli conflict can be a difficult topic to teach, for a variety of reasons. As such, this article represents a conversation by four scholar-teachers of the Middle East and the conflict about our approaches to teaching it. We discuss our motivations for the manner in which we teach the conflict and some of the specific tools we use to do…