Diversity, Segregation and the Prospects of Multi-Ethnic Education: Narratives of Israeli Educators

One challenge for societies under protracted conflicts is to develop educational programs and curricula that would both address ethnic and social differences and bridge social differences between various groups. In particular, a society under protracted conflict immerse itself in managing the conflict, thus it fails to attend to other societal issues. In the 1990s, after the signing of the Oslo Accords (1993) and with the absorption of a significant wave of new immigrants from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia, it was thought in Israel, as elsewhere, that multicultural education would help transcending the national, ethnic and cultural boundaries that separate these various groups.

Notwithstanding the theoretical debates about multicultural education, the challenge of bridging these social boundaries has remained the same. In fact, as it became evidenced during the 2011 social protest (again, in Israel but also elsewhere), for a moment it was as if from 'bottom up' has emerged a new vision of society. In this new vision, the challenge for society was to rebuild its unity and solidarity against the difficulties inflicted by neoliberalism. In education this implied breaking with the "old" divisions and replacing them with a more cohesive educational vision. In this paper we ask to further explorer this vision by interviewing educators (mainly headmasters and teachers) on their conception of multiculturalism in education. Particularly, the research will focus on the Negev area, where we will be tracing the relation between the structural, spatial segregation of education (and habitat) and the possibility of and interest in multicultural education.