Conference Program

Educational democracy is central to understanding how justice and participation are practiced within classrooms, particularly in restricted urban environments. The old schools (H2) in Hebron represent a complex model that imposes structural constraints and daily challenges on classroom interactions, making the school more than just a space for the transfer of knowledge, but rather an arena for reproducing democratic meaning in school life.

The study starts from the idea that education and democracy are organically linked. John Dewey (1916/2008) argues that school is a microcosm of democratic life, where experience is built through social interaction and participation. It is also based on Gert Biesta's (2010) distinction between learning as the acquisition of knowledge and education as the process of empowering oneself as a democratic actor capable of emerging and being held accountable. This view is consistent with contemporary literature, which emphasizes that democratic education is achieved through daily practice in the classroom, not just through theoretical discourse (Brunker, 2025).

In light of this, the study seeks to answer the fundamental question: What is the essence of the lived experience of educational democracy among teachers and students in the old schools of Hebron, and how do they reconstruct the meaning of justice and participation within a school space surrounded by urban constraints?

The study is based on a qualitative approach and will target a purposive sample of teachers and students in upper elementary and secondary school who experience daily classroom interactions. The research will combine several data collection tools, including in-depth individual interviews and focus groups that highlight the collective voice of students and teachers, as well as the collection and analysis of reflective writings in which participants reflect on the details of their daily experiences. This data will be analyzed to extract core themes that reveal how meaning is constructed, democracy is produced, and social and spatial constraints are interacted with.

The results are expected to reveal a dialectical tension between external constraints and efforts to build more equitable classroom spaces, where teachers develop pedagogical strategies that promote recognition and participation, and students redefine their school attendance as a daily exercise in democratic agency.

The importance of this study lies in reframing the understanding of education in constrained urban environments, as it shifts teachers and students from the position of recipients to that of democratic actors and active participants in the construction of the educational experience. The study offers recommendations to curriculum developers and educational decision-makers on the need to integrate the lived experiences of teachers and students into curriculum design. It also contributes to the international debate on the relationship between learning and democracy in constrained environments, focusing on lived experience as a site for the production of educational meaning and democratic change.

Resistance through Education: Experiences of Palestinian Schools in Jerusalem

Nihad Abu Irmeleh

This research examines the role of education as a tool for cultural and social resistance in Palestinian schools in Jerusalem under the reality of occupation and its accompanying policies that exert pressure on the educational system. These policies include interference with curricula, restrictions on movement, and attempts to reshape cultural and national identity. The research is based on the fundamental premise that education is not merely a process of knowledge transfer, but rather a vital space for strengthening national awareness and preserving Palestinian identity, especially within contexts of domination and colonialism.

The research focuses on the experiences of teachers in Jerusalem schools, considering them key actors in the process of building students' awareness. It draws on a theoretical framework that evokes concepts of cultural resistance, particularly those proposed by Paulo Freire on "education for the oppressed," as well as studies of education in colonial contexts, to understand how education is repurposed as a tool for resilience and peaceful resistance. The research questions revolve around the nature of the challenges faced by teachers, the strategies they employ to strengthen Palestinian identity, and the extent of the impact of these efforts on students and the local community.

The importance of this research lies in its documentation of field experiences specifically in Jerusalem, a case that has not received sufficient attention in educational literature, despite its unique political, religious, and cultural context. It also contributes to providing knowledge that can benefit educational policymakers and institutions supporting education by highlighting the role of education in promoting peaceful resistance and supporting the resilience of the local community.

The research aims to explore the role of education in strengthening cultural and social resistance, identify the most significant challenges hindering teachers' work, analyze the educational strategies they use to instill national awareness, and assess the impact of these strategies on the cultural identity of emerging generations. Ultimately, it offers practical recommendations to support Palestinian schools in Jerusalem.

Methodologically, the research employs a mixed design combining quantitative and qualitative approaches. The sample comprises fifty teachers from Palestinian schools in Jerusalem, selected using stratified random sampling to ensure representation of different educational levels and genders. A questionnaire is used to collect statistical data on challenges and strategies, while semi-systematic interviews are conducted with a subsample to deepen the qualitative understanding of personal experiences. Quantitative data are analyzed using descriptive statistical methods and correlation analysis, while interviews are subjected to objective content analysis to extract key patterns. The results are then integrated to provide a comprehensive picture of education as a daily resistance practice that fosters identity and belonging in a complex political reality.

People in Gaza have long faced systemic colonial violence through blockade, occupation, and the deliberate restriction of movement and resources. Since October 2023, this violence has escalated into an active genocide (Albanese, 2024), which has also targeted the educational infrastructure that has long sustained learners, through a deliberate campaign of scholasticide (Dader et al., 2024; Alarabeed, 2025; Desai et al., 2025). This study examines resistance to this scholasticide by centering Gazan women as knowledge-makers and knowledge-seekers who continue to sustain education amid the deliberate destruction of schools and universities. By documenting their testimonies and analyzing their embodied experiences, this study presents Gazan women as active intellectual and practical laborers, refusing the "women-and-children" rhetoric that reduces them to passive victims or martyrs and recognizing them as forces that sustain education when everything around them is deliberately destroyed.

Besides facing systemic colonial violence, Gazan women must also contend with patriarchal norms that constrain their ambitions and freedom of movement. These norms dismiss their educational role, reducing them to "stay-at-home mothers" and erasing their crucial contributions to building communities of care. The study reveals how the genocide has further intensified these patriarchal harms: forced marriage, for instance, has been increasingly normalized as economic necessity. Drawing on decolonial and feminist critical frameworks (Smith, 2021), this study examines the construction of informal learning spaces as a form of knowledge production with implications for how indigenous and marginalized women globally resist systemic erasure.

The study unfolds in two phases. The first gathers oral testimonies from Gazan women educators and students through narrative interviews, exploring their relationship to education before and during the genocide. The second, developed collaboratively with participants, uses photo-based inquiry to build a multimedia archive of stories told through images they themselves captured. Across both phases, participants are invited to reimagine the rebuilding of educational spaces through the lens of "critical hope" (Freire, 1992). The study relies on snowball sampling via existing community networks, prioritizing trust, safety, and voluntary participation in a highly sensitive context.

Through the experiences of a small group of women in Gaza, preliminary findings illuminate how education persists as an act of resistance under genocide. Example narratives include how women came to together to create alternative classrooms using improvised materials such as whiteboards made from tarps and nylon. Students continued their studies despite targeted airstrikes on internet hubs they frequented and the manual survival labor that they had to go through.

Across these testimonies, participants insisted that their efforts in maintaining education are a temporary rescue, not a substitute for real schooling, refusing to let their resilience obscure the ongoing catastrophe affecting vulnerable learners in Gaza. This study bears witness to Gazan women's crucial role in sustaining education, documenting their unrecognized struggles, and most importantly, what they are fighting to keep alive across communities.

Aida Camp is one of more than sixty Palestinian refugee camps established in the aftermath of the Nakba and today offers a particularly significant site for examining contemporary forms of educational resistance under conditions of colonial occupation and systemic oppression. Founded in 1949 and formally recognised in 1950, the camp covers less than one square kilometre. Extreme population density, overcrowded housing, severe restrictions on mobility, and constant exposure to military violence shape everyday life. The apartheid wall further defines both the camp’s geography and its symbolic condition: it physically encloses the area and structures daily existence through separation, surveillance, and territorial fragmentation (Ghannam & Haar, 2018).

In this context, education is not simply a matter of access to schooling; it becomes a social practice through which collective survival, memory transmission, and political subject formation are sustained. Critical pedagogy helps frame education as a terrain of conflict and emancipatory possibility, where critical consciousness and transformative agency can develop even under structural oppression (Freire, 2022). At the same time, educational practices create spaces for recognition, voice, and resistant subjectivity within systems of exclusion (hooks, 2020). In the Palestinian context, youth and community centres therefore emerge not only as places of extracurricular support, but as pedagogical infrastructures that sustain collective agency, political imagination, and forms of democratic learning under occupation.

This paper draws on qualitative field interviews with three organisations engaged in social and educational work inside the camp: Amal al Mustakbal, Aida Youth Centre, and Lajee Centre. Through a context-specific pedagogical analysis, it explores how these organisations create informal educational spaces where children, adolescents, and young adults can process traumatic experiences, build a sense of belonging, and experiment with forms of civic participation rooted in everyday collective life.

Particular attention is paid to the meanings attached to these centres locally. One interview describes them as “spaces of light in this gloomy place”, a phrase that captures their role not only as protective environments but also as spaces where social imagination remains possible despite the permanence of violence. This educational persistence becomes especially significant in a camp that has existed for more than seventy years and can no longer be understood through the temporary logic of humanitarian emergency. Aida shows how the refugee camp has become a permanent political and social framework in which suspended citizenship, daily resistance, and practices of community care are constantly renegotiated.

The analysis shows that informal education plays a decisive role in producing concrete forms of inclusion and in reinterpreting the right to education under occupation. These practices respond to structural deficiencies produced by military control, while also creating possibilities for collective existence that go beyond humanitarian management. Through memory work, artistic production, sport, storytelling, and civic engagement, these organisations generate forms of empowerment that connect democratic participation to everyday resistance. Analysing these experiences helps illuminate how education, under conditions of occupation and colonial domination, continues to function as a language of resistance, a practice of future-making, and a concrete exercise of democracy in daily life.

Palestinian society faces a unique condition of "enforced fragmentation," where geographical and political barriers prevent the formation of a unified civic discourse. This structural isolation affects youth across the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, the "Arab 48" community, and the global Diaspora, creating a landscape of disconnected "lifeworlds." This paper presents the Virtu-Peace initiative (Virtual Interactive Reconciliation for Transforming Unity in Palestine) as a pedagogical intervention that utilizes Virtual Exchange (VE) to bridge these divides. Rather than focusing on external normalization, the project prioritizes "Civic Peace"—an internal, community-led process of social reconciliation and democratic capacity-building.

Theoretically, the study utilizes Jürgen Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action (1981) to analyze how digital "third spaces" can host a functional Palestinian Public Sphere. By facilitating synchronous, online dialogues, Virtu-Peace creates a digital environment modeled after the "Ideal Speech Situation," where the "unforced force of the better argument" allows youth from disparate regions to negotiate a shared civic identity. This process moves beyond mere interaction; it fosters Deliberative Democracy by encouraging participants to transition from strategic survival-oriented communication to communicative action oriented toward mutual understanding.

A key strength of the Virtu-Peace model is its inclusive reach. By connecting youth in Gaza and the West Bank with their peers in East Jerusalem, the Arab 48, and the Diaspora, the project bypasses physical checkpoints to foster a "pedagogy of resilience." The curriculum addresses the specific identity tensions and democratic aspirations of each group, treating them not as isolated fragments, but as integral components of a collective civic body. The findings suggest that VE provides a robust framework for sustaining democratic values in conflict-affected environments, demonstrating that technology-mediated education can serve as a vital tool for internal social reconstruction and the cultivation of active, democratic agency.