Program Planning in War-Torn Palestine

Abstract

Planning continuing education programs for professionals was a fairly straight-forward task for me--one that I had done for 20 years. It was not until I was confronted with road closures, military clashes, and guns pointed in my face and those of my [U.S.] consultants that I questioned my role and responsibilities as a program planner and how they changed when situated within a global context. The purpose of this article is to summarize my experiences providing continuing professional education for law professors in West Bank and Gaza as Second Intifada raged. The Second Intifada, an armed conflict between Israel and Palestine, spread throughout West Bank and Gaza, severely limiting our project activities. Security and road closures prohibited travel for professors and students, so solution was to bring U.S. consultants to campuses to teach research skills to professors and their students. My greatest challenges were finding alternate ways to transport consultants to campuses in middle of conflict, adjusting schedules, and keeping consultants safe. This meant I had to reach outside my realm as an experienced Mid-Western program planner to make sure that the show must go and to keep consultants alive. As a result, not only did everyone survive, but show did go on, students learned how to conduct research, and I learned how to be a flexible program planner. The Role and Responsibility of a Program Planner in Palestine Program planning has always come easy for me since I am a details kind of person. My role and responsibilities as a program planner in Chicago were always clear to me: to plan and present a program with adult learner in mind and involved. I made sure that speakers used adult education principles when delivering curricula and evaluating program, and made adjustments based on evaluation. By time I was in Palestine in 2000 and 2001, I had reviewed about 20 program planning models over years and had embraced Caffarella's (1994) program planning ideas, Sork and Caffarella's (1989) program planning model, and studied Cervero's (1985) work on continuing professional education. As a program planner, I agreed to take in context of organization and to understand center of power structure. Andragogy was a word I often used, and I thought Knowles (1980) had a good working program planning model. But planning programs in Chicago was one thing. I thought about my studies and experience in May 2001 while parked at top of a garbage heap that was being used as a road bypass outside Biet El (an Israeli settlement) in West Bank, and looking at my apartment in Ramallah in near distance, about one--quarter of a mile away. I was in trouble. I knew I needed to get my U.S. consultant, Ralph Ruebner, a law professor from John Marshall School of Law, Chicago, back to Ramallah safely. Ralph had just delivered a workshop on legal research to law students in Bit Zeit University. The only problem was that we couldn't use main road, because members of Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) were shooting at student demonstrators on main road and all other roads were dosed. Our only way home was to drive over garbage heap, across a boulder that had been moved into a ditch, through an olive grove, and around an unpaved mountain road. I wondered what a good program planner would do now. My Experience For situation in West Bank in 2001 during Intifada, I had to be flexible in my program plan--really flexible! I was forced to take a shortcut across Judean Desert in our Chew with Ralph, All Abu Ali--my Palestinian assistant--and find yet another alternative way home. As we waited for taxis and trucks to cross in front of us, I wondered, what would Sork and Caffarella (1989) recommend now? Did Knowles (1980) have a good solution? I was considering my awesome responsibility to keep Ralph alive when IDF drove up in their Jeep and tore out our only passage to get back to Ramallah. …