ABSTRACT
The chapter is based on a case study of Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Jewish teacher-trainees who participated in an experimental art education program. The trainees belonged to two different cultural, linguistic and religious communities, and co-taught arts lessons at Arab and Jewish schools. While gaining their first experiences as arts teachers, the trainees learned to work cooperatively against the background of the ongoing, violent Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Planning lessons and teaching together led the teacher-trainees to rely on one another’s knowledge, overcoming existential fears, and resisting the common culture of conflict characterized by negative collective images of each other. The case study demonstrates how empathy and new interpretations of one another were established without ignoring the complexity of the conflict, and the uneven power relations between them in Israeli society. This development was achieved through sustained interaction of heterogeneous learning groups comprised of intentional inter-group encounters, equal status, and over-arching goals that demanded cooperation and interdependency. The chapter also describes the challenges that threatened the program, such as the Israel-Gaza conflict of 2014.
