“Keep the symmetrical power between minority and majority, even if it means sacrificing equality in numbers,” Professor Ilham Nasser, Ph.D., told her audience at the panel discussion, “Social Justice and Peace Education.”
Nasser studied a school in village called Neve Shalom/Wahat Al Salam (NSWAS) in Israel, a place where Jews and Palestinians decided live together in relative peace since the 1970s.
In this village, peace was sought through education. According to Nasser, peace education claims to understand the other side. The school in NSWAS is bilingual; however, according to Nasser, problems of equality persist.
Palestinian schools teach Hebrew beginning in second grade, but Arabic is not mandated in Jewish schools. Jewish teachers in NSWAS, Nasser reported, did not believe they had to learn Arabic because all administrative dealings are done in Hebrew. For the school to thrive, Nasser noted, “it is important to give legitimacy to the minority language” in order to achieve bilingual power.
The second speaker, Kathryn Fisher, writer and performance artist, spoke about her month at a remote farming cooperative in San Ramon, Nicaragua. There she studied women’s perceptions of their roles by formally and informally interviewing the women. Most women in this farming co-op felt they needed financial help, contraceptives and literacy within their communities.
Fischer noted that many women did not feel disempowered; that word was not part of their vocabulary. The co-op sponsored a gender empowerment program, and men and women alike seemed responsive to the workshops that taught the difference between gender and sex. Women were especially responsive to the thought of men helping them with housework and cooking.
A typical day for these women, Fisher told the audience, was getting up at 3:00 a.m., cooking breakfast and lunch, running errands, cooking dinner, and going to bed at 8:00 p.m. The typical day for men included getting up at 3:00 a.m., working from 6:00 a.m. until 4:00 p.m., playing soccer for an hour in the evening before dinner at 6:00, and going to bed at 8:00 p.m.
In San Ramon, most children did not go to school, and only one adult female told Fisher that she was interested in learning English.
Fisher told the audience that she often felt out of place in her month in San Ramon. “What is my relationship to these women? How can I take place in this environment?” she often asked herself during her stay.