Symposium: The Other Side of the Story:

In this essay, Shoshana Steinberg and Dan Bar-On present the work of a team of Israeli and Palestinian teachers who developed a history textbook that includes both groups’ narratives of the same events side by side. These teachers then tested the effects of its use in both Israeli and Palestinian classrooms; for the first time, students on each side of the conflict were exposed to the other side’s understanding of key historical events. The authors present the challenges that the team faced in developing the textbook and that teachers encountered in the classroom as well as the understanding and collaboration this project fostered. They argue that the process of creating the dual-narratives text, as well as the text itself, allows teachers to play a productive role in violent political conflicts.

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Shoshana Steinberg is a senior lecturer in psychology at Kaye Academic College of Education in Beer-Sheva. Her main topics of interest are the theoretical and practical aspects of intergroup relations, conflict resolution, peace building, and peace education. Her work, which has focused on dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians, has appeared in journals such as Intercultural Education, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, International Journal of Intercultural Relations, and Human Relations. Since 2002 she has been observing and evaluating the joint Palestinian and Israeli curriculum development project “Learning Each Other’s Historical Narrative.”

Dan Bar-On, who passed away on September 4, 2008, was a professor of psychology in the Department of Psychology, Ben-Gurion University, and codirector of PRIME (Peace Research Institute in the Middle East). His work focused on dialogue between parties in conflict situations: learning from the Jewish-German context and the Israeli-Palestinian context. He authored several books, including Legacy of Silence: Encounters with Children of the Third Reich (1991), Fear and Hope: Three Generations of the Holocaust (1998), The Indescribable and the Undiscussable: Reconstructing Human Discourse after Trauma (1998), and Tell Your Life Story: Creating Dialogue Among Jews And Germans, Israelis And Palestinians (2006). Over the years he has been awarded the Bundesverdienstkreutz First Class Award (2001), the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize (2003), the Victor J. Goldberg IIE Prize for Peace in the Middle East (2005), and the EAEA Grundtvig Award (2005).