Undergraduate students this semester will have the opportunity to sign up for a one-credit course, MENA 298, entitled “Palestine and Israel: Contexts, Convictions & Commitments.” The course will consist of eight sessions total, comprised of moderated dialogues, teach-ins and and discussions.
An overview of the course describes its intent to focus on expanding each student’s understanding of the diverse ways in which our community experiences and responds to the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas.
“Welcoming the diverse biographies, convictions and commitments that participants bring to this topic, the course is premised on the values of generous listening, sincere curiosity, and a desire to build trust,” reads a flyer distributed around campus. “Our collective work will be guided by an ethics of justice, reconciliation, and peace.”
Oren Kosanksy, Associate Professor of Anthropology, collaborated with several other faculty and staff members to bring the idea to fruition. Kosanksy explained the reasoning behind creating a course for students to explore this topic, rather than just continuing to facilitate community dialogues.
“There are a variety of reasons that it’s congealed in a course,” he said. “One is to honor the time and investment that students would give. If you’re going to devote yourself to this, we should honor it, commit to it.”
He also emphasized the importance of trust-building within the course.
“In issues where people come together with different points of view, and in ways where there’s not necessarily an immediate, intuitive sense of trust, showing a commitment to doing this kind of cooperative trust-building work says we’re not going to do it once, we’re going to do it several times,” Kosanksy said. “It takes time to build that relationship with trust. So that’s a big part of why we’re doing it over an extended period of time.”
“The dialogues and discussions will be for five to eight students, depending on how many enroll,” he said. “But we can build out multiple sections, because we have multiple faculty who are willing to be involved. The teach-ins will be open to the Lewis & Clark community.”
Each teach-in will consist of a panel of faculty speakers and a Q&A session at the end. Trained facilitators will lead all community dialogues. The remaining sessions will reflect the structure of an undergraduate seminar and will involve reading-based discussions and dialogues led by faculty.
He noted that the course has limited space, due to limited staffing and funding, but that he hopes to accommodate as many students as possible. Approximately ten faculty members across several departments have expressed a commitment to being involved with varying components of the course this semester.
“There’s been a lot of student interest. We can accommodate five to about 65 students,” he said. “We’re hoping to accommodate as many as we can.”
Each section will have five to eight students. The number of sections will depend on the level of student interest.
Janet Bixby, The Director of Community Dialogues at Lewis & Clark, said her involvement in this course arose from last semester’s community dialogues on the Impact of the Conflict in Gaza and Israel at L&C.
“My responsibilities are to help promote dialogue in all kinds of ways: In classes, to help support faculty, as well as in student life, residential life, and then to actually hold specific community dialogues wherever they may need to arise,” Bixby said.
She shared that the idea of bringing more student involvement and interest to these dialogues solidified when she met with Oren Kosanksy and Hilary Martin Himan over the summer.
“Oren really took the lead on creating this idea of having it be a class that involves community dialogues.” she said. “We really want to have folks in dialogue about what’s happening in Palestine and Israel, and to understand the complexities of it and how it’s impacting all of us.”
She described the components of the one-credit course and noted that there may be more than the seven classes listed below.
“There will be three community dialogues, which are the 90-minute structured opportunities … there will be two teach-ins, and then there will be two discussion sections, which will also have dialogic components to it,” Bixby said. “There’s a place for debate, there’s a place for lecture, there’s a place for protest and there’s a place for dialogue. In this class, we’re really promoting dialogue.”
Although the class is geared towards undergraduate students, separate community dialogues will be held throughout the semester for those who cannot register for the class, such as faculty, staff, graduate students and law students.
Support for the course comes from the Middle East and North African Studies program, the Community Dialogues Program, the Center for Spiritual Life and the Chamberlin Lectureship.
There will be an info session on Wednesday, Sept. 4, at 4:45 p.m. in JR Howard 102 for students hoping to learn more.
Anyone who can’t attend the info session or is interested in registering for the course can contact Oren Kosansky at kosansky@lclark.edu.
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