Application of Paulo Freire’s Critical Pedagogy Principles to the Jewish–Arab Interface in Israel: Dialog, Awareness, and Identity

Abstract

Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy has been implemented in many, diverse fields; in this article, I will present the implementation of Freirean thought in a new field that has not been mentioned in the literature to date—the encounter between groups in conflict. I will do this through the educational encounter between Jews and Arabs in Israel. In this article I will argue that the principles of the Freirean approach, mainly the dialog proposed by Freire, are most suitable for running educational dialog between groups in conflict. The use of Freirean dialog principles in meetings between Arabs and Jews is preferable to dialogs based on psychological principles. Freirean dialog does not ignore reality; on the contrary, it originates in reality and combines it with theory. Thus, it allows the participants to reach an awareness of the conflict and their role in it, and enables them to reconstruct their identity and take action if they so desire in order to change reality.