Teaching the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Grade 7 Humanities Faculty Present at National Conference for Middle School Educators

Not only did the students respond enthusiastically, the pair of teachers went on to share their approach and experience at the recent Association for Middle Level Education (AMLE) conference in Nashville, TN, the world’s largest gathering of middle-school educators. Tye and Anderson led a workshop titled “Teaching the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Empathy, History, and Perspective-Taking.” They were received with interest, curiosity, and, in some cases, surprise, as their peers from across the nation eagerly took in the lessons gleaned from their experience. 

“Many people commented that they attended our workshop because it was unique among the offerings,” said Tye. “Unique in the sense that they didn’t expect a school to lean into these topics, never mind send teachers there to present about it.”

Said Anderson, “Our audience included a wide range of educators; after the talk, I heard from pre-service teachers still in college, an author writing about culturally responsive teaching, and a Hawaiian social studies teacher teaching about his state’s history.”

Last year’s unit on the Middle Eastern conflict represented a pivot from the planned curriculum. Tye had spent the previous year in Tel Aviv, earning a master’s degree in global migration and policy. With the conflict too important to ignore, he emailed John Bower, head of the Middle School, asking whether he and Anderson might shift the curriculum to include a unit on Israel, Palestine, and the long, complex history behind the war.
 

It wasn’t an “immediate green light,” Bower recalls. But after much discussion with Melissa Dolan ’98, a former Rivers humanities teacher who consults on the Middle School’s curriculum, as well as the Upper School history, English, and interdisciplinary studies department heads, said Bower, “We said, ‘Go for it!’”

How they went for it formed the substance of their AMLE presentation. For background, they spoke to the audience about how Middle School humanities unfolds at Rivers, as an interdisciplinary course that combines English, history, and social studies. It made sense for the unit to form part of the Grade 7 curriculum, which takes global citizenship as its topic. 

They went on to explain that the unit began with setting the norms, which included holding empathy for all civilians affected while understanding the historical and political context, and accepting that the point is not to decide which identity group or nationality is “right” or “wrong.”  Other established norms cautioned students to be careful about messages gleaned from social media and to embrace ambiguity, particularly in a story that is still unfolding. 

From there, they told the crowd in Nashville, the learning was scaffolded by essential questions such as “How can people have different perspectives on political or historical issues that both contain truth?” and “How do narratives, historical claims to land, and religion contribute to individuals’ sense of belonging?” They shared with the group some of the nuts-and-bolts of how the class unfolded, with reading and writing assignments and a final project that had Grade 7 students make presentations about coexistence organizations to Upper School students during advisory. Finally, and compellingly, they talked about student reflections that followed the unit, in which the seventh graders described what they had learned. One typical student response among many read, “I have never encountered or realized that there can be two sides to a story with not one ‘right’ side. This unit made me change my perspective while analyzing issues by not quickly making assumptions that one side is ‘right.’”

That’s exactly the outcome Tye and Anderson were seeking. Said Anderson, “This topic is particularly instructive for seventh graders, because it breaks them out of overly simplistic thinking. If they are used to determining the single solution to a problem, for example, now they encounter a conflict that has no agreed-upon answer. If they are used to picking a side and sticking to it in an unquestioning way, we push them to break out of that kind of thinking. For a 13-year-old to meditate on that ambiguity, to examine many different perspectives on an issue, to face questions that are being debated at the highest levels of international politics, is powerful stuff.” 

Both veteran teachers found much to inspire them at the conference, beyond their own workshop. “We met lots of interesting educators doing amazing work all around the country,” said Anderson.
 

“It really felt like there was a shared mission among all the people at the conference, not just those who attended our session,” said Tye. “A shared mission of teaching students to think empathetically about the world around them.”