Israel/Palestine

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Reflective Practice

Reflective Practice is exploring a pattern of action, making adjustments during the action, or thinking about past actions. In an elemental sense, most of us perform some form of reflective practice virtually daily. To the extent that reflective practice incorporates theory and experience, even the most mundane activities engage aspects of experiential learning and developing theory.

Conflict resolution is frequently a process that involves emotional intensity and relational complexity. This can be a factor in dyadic disputes but is significantly present in deep-rooted multiparty conflicts. Because of this, practitioners must be skilled at integrating theory and experiential learning into practice at three stages of intervention: (i) in analyzing or assessing the conflict in preparation for intervention, (ii) during the intervention itself, (iii) and post-intervention reflection. In this way, reflective practice is a form of “meaning-making,” attempting to make sense of phenomena occurring around you through an interdependence of theory, experience, and practice. Utilizing a uniquely challenging fieldwork experience, you will have the opportunity to engage in aspects of reflective practice, as noted above. The objective is to build an understanding of integrative practice that can be utilized in various conflict settings.

Th Israel/Palestine Seminar is an intense experience in an environment that becomes practice and reflection the moment one enters the region. The study and engagement are all in the shadow of a paradoxical combination of incredible hospitality, fascinating people, and a complicated and intense environment. There is a need to measure one’s every word and action to honor and reflect in conflict and effectively practice citizen diplomacy and peacebuilding. Before, during, and after this trip, the student experiences reflective practice at every moment, and the assignments are geared precisely in this way.

The model combines intensive classroom study, speakers from the local region, touring famous holy sites, and extensive field experience engaging communities across the spectrum of Israel and Palestine–day and night. Participants will be exposed to diverse and conflictual narratives on the ground, with a preparatory meeting, follow-up meeting, and individual and peer help with papers.

This experience will be an integration of new approaches to peacebuilding in a uniquely intractable conflict where CRDC has innovated a direct intervention of social justice practice, study, and engagement, including Conflict Healing, Compassionate Reasoning, Future Visioning, Bridge Walking and Peer Support, and Social Network Practice. The course has been carefully engineered to support directly agents of change, namely peacemakers in Israel and Palestine, especially women who are conspicuously absent from power structures globally in places of conflict. In addition, the seminar and its experiences are fundamentally a multiple-narrative approach to understanding the reality on the ground. The seminar will involve study and fieldwork with all stakeholders, including of course, Palestinians, Palestinian citizens of Israel, and Israeli Jews, with an interest in the inclusion of women especially. The intervention method is utterly new in its combination of nonprofit, for-profit, social justice, and conflict resolution and calls for the evolution of theory and research from the students.

The Carter School professor for the course is Dr. Marc Gopin, with extensive lectures and guidance on the ground by Dr. Fakhira Halloun.

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