My name is Carter Latendresse, and I am the sixth grade English teacher and the Garden Coordinator at Catlin Gabel School http://www.catlin.edu/ in Portland, Oregon.
The Schools for Peace blog project is collaboration between my school and schools in Michigan and Romania for the NAIS Challenge 20/20 program http://www.nais.org/Articles/Pages/Challenge-20-20.aspx between January and April, 2014. Our focus is on Peacekeeping, Conflict prevention, and Combating Terrorism in the Middle East.
Teacher Tom Hinken at NBC Middle School in Montague, Michigan, led the Michigan team, where they read the book I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban, by Malala Yousafzai. Tom’s students blogged about Pakistan, peace, the Taliban, religious extremism, feminism, and social justice.
Tom’s School: http://www.mapsk12.org/nbcmiddleschool/
Their Blog: http://thinken.weebly.com/i-am-malala.html
TeacherDoina-Elena Tomoila at Scoala Gimnaziala Nr. 17, in Galati, Romania, lead the Romania team, where they studied the Syrian conflict. There are a considerable number of Syrian refugees in her country of Romania. Her class first read the book How to Cure a Fanatic, by Amos Oz, and then continued with some of Yehuda Amichai's poems, following the motto "From the place where you are right, flowers will never grow.” They also translated into English a number of poems of Khalouf Iman, a 17 year-old Romanian citizen with Syrian roots, discussing the needs of the Syrian refugees in their country. Finally, they put all this on a blog called “WILDPEACE.” The page entitled “OUR VOICES,” is open for comments, opinions, and solutions.
Doina-Elena’s School: http://www.scoalanr17gl.blogspot.com/
Their Blog: http://challengesc17.wordpress.com/our-voices/
My students at Catlin Gabel School in Portland, Oregon, began our unit by reading the novel Habibi, by Naomi Shihab Nye. Another quarter of my students (an "Expert Group") read the nonfiction book Understanding the Holy Land, by Mitch Frank. All students then also read excerpts from the nonfiction book of interviews entitled Three Wishes: Palestinian and Israeli Children Speak, by Deborah Ellis. Students wrote about and role played their personas in class.
Last, all students watched the film Promises, by B.Z. Goldberg, for which they were assigned characters to take notes on so that they could then knowledgeably blog from that person’s point of view in the Schools for Peace blog. During the months of January and February, while we were reading Habibi, Understanding the Holy Land, and Three Wishes, we had six visiting speakers into our class, who talked about various topics such as Islam, Judaism, life in Palestine / Israel today, and interfaith dialogue.
The students also researched 29 major historical events in Palestine / Israel since the late 1800s to today. We hung a 20-foot-long timeline on a wall that held the facts of the events (who, what, where, when), as well as both Israeli and Palestinian perspectives on each of the events. My students therefore learned that history is about events as well as divergent perspectives on those events. They researched contentious partition plans (Balfour Declaration, Sykes-Pico Agreement, UN Partition Plan), moments of extreme tension (the Holocaust, the Six Day War, the Intifada), as well as peace keeping attempts (Camp David, Oslo, Road Map to Peace)—to name a few.
Eventually our historical study brought us to today, and I wanted my students to hear from people in Portland around issues of interfaith dialogue and peace in the Middle East. The aforementioned Expert Group of twelve students hosted an evening event at our school on February 13, 2014, entitled "Judaism, Islam, and Peace in the Middle East." Two speakers—Lee Gordon, from Hand in Hand Schools http://www.handinhandk12.org/, and Harris Zafar, of Muslims for Peace http://www.muslimsforpeace.org/ —came and discussed their organizations and how we can all help to establish peace in Palestine / Israel.
The Expert Group not only presented timeline posters in the foyer prior to the speakers’ presentations, they also gave a brief Google Presentation in the auditorium as an introduction for the speakers, and they finally finished by moderating the Q & A session at the close of the evening.
Harris Zafar and Muslims for Peace videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSbXoJ0H9CM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3N_HKikErY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooAbVPsJOGc
Lee Gordon and Hand in Hand School videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EA18apIi0g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seblkkKosXk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3DD7lhf_Rs
Finally, we arrived at this Schools for Peace Blog Project http://schoolsforpeace.blogspot.com/, for which I borrowed the work of Bill Bigelow http://www.palestineinformation.org/Promises_Role_Play where my students assumed the personas of the kids presented in B.Z. Goldberg’s movie Promises. My students wrote about their grievances, hopes, and thoughts on various Middle East topics (Jerusalem, Palestinian refugees, the Occupied Territories, and U.S. aid to Palestine and Israel)—all from the point of view of their characters (Shlomo, Moishe, Faraj, Sanabel, Mahmoud, and twins Daniel and Yarko), four Israeli Jews, one Israeli Arab, and two Palestinian Arabs. We also convened Peace Summits where I took notes as students negotiated and made proposals with compromise, peace, and justice in mind—all the while maintaining their Promises role-play personas.
At the close of the blog project, students dropped their role-play personas and reflected on the two months of study of history, literature, politics, and religion, and they wrote about different types of peace between Palestine and Israel. They wrote from their own perspectives, not their Promises characters’ perspective, explaining their opinions using specific examples from what they saw in Promises, what they remembered from Habibi, from Understanding the Holy Land, from their Arab-Israeli Background research, from Three Wishes, from the evening talk by Harris Zafar and Lee Gordon, from our other guest speakers, and from their own experiences. The Schools for Peace blog is the culminating activity of these two months worth of work.
Please visit the blog and give my students comments and feedback: http://schoolsforpeace.blogspot.com/.
Thank you.