Polarization is increasing as societies contend with contentious elections, social change, and international conflict (Carothers and O’Donohue Reference Carothers and O’Donohue2019; McCoy, Rahman, and Somer Reference McCoy, Rahman and Somer2018). These dynamics deepen existing divisions, creating rifts within nations and across borders. Educational institutions are impacted immediately as political, cultural, and ideological issues divide campus communities (Ulbig Reference Ulbig2020).
Middle East politics, particularly the war in Gaza, is one such polarizing topic and has recently led to increased anti-Semitism, racism, and Islamophobia in various contexts, with profound implications for educational institutions (Human Rights Watch 2023; National Public Radio 2023). Educators often are ill-prepared to address these issues. Some instructors might even consider excluding contentious topics such as Israel–Palestine from their courses; however, teaching these topics is more pertinent than ever for understanding and critical engagement. This article addresses this urgency by answering the following questions: How do we design our classrooms so that students feel safe, included, and curious? How do we overcome affective polarization and dehumanization to facilitate a deeper form of learning in our classrooms? How can we effectively teach our students about Middle East politics and Israel and Palestine during war and violence?
To explore these questions, we designed a course titled “Politics of the Middle East” that was taught concurrently at two institutions—Middlebury College in the United States and Yeditepe University in Turkey—during the spring of 2024. Against the backdrop of escalating disinformation and political polarization, we convened students from diverse social, political, and religious contexts to engage in shared inquiry around the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Rather than seeking consensus, we created a space in which disagreement could coexist with empathy and convictions could be deepened through intentional listening.
Rather than seeking consensus, we created a space in which disagreement could coexist with empathy and convictions could be deepened through intentional listening.
Turkish and American students approach Israel–Palestine from markedly different vantage points. In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s pro-Palestinian rhetoric, framed as Islamic solidarity, has failed to resonate with secular youth. Increasing Turkish nationalism, fueled in part by anti-refugee sentiment, has further limited pro-Palestinian mobilization among younger generations (Erişen and Uysal Reference Erişen and Uysal2024; Nişancı and Nişancı Reference Nişanci and Nişanci2022). In contrast, in the United States, the support of President Joe Biden’s administration for Israel created a generational divide, with youth questioning long-standing pro-Israel policies through campus activism. In short, American students arrived politically engaged, whereas many Turkish students maintained their distance.
In our course, we pursued three objectives: (1) build students’ historical and analytical understanding of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict; (2) foster empathy, curiosity, and humanization by centering voices from the region; and (3) assess the impact of dialogic pedagogy on how students navigate complex political disagreement (DeTemple Reference DeTemple2020; Head Reference Head2020; Segal Reference Segal2019; Webb et al. Reference Webb, Alvarez, Auer, Eraqi, Patterson, Steemers and Webb2012). To achieve these objectives, we introduced virtual seminars with grassroots Israeli and Palestinian peace organizations; the integration of dialogic practices—shared agreements, engaged listening, self-reflection, curiosity-driven questioning, and structured dialogue (Essential Partners N.D.; Garcia and Ulbig Reference Garcia and Ulbig2024; Sarrouf Reference Sarrouf, Finger and Wagner2023); and structured peer conversations between our students and Israeli and Palestinian university students.
We evaluated the course using a mixed-methods approach, combining brief pre- and post-semester surveys with qualitative data from students’ reflections and final podcast projects. Our findings suggest that dialogic classrooms (1) serve as effective pedagogical tools for teaching the Israeli–Palestinian conflict; (2) reduce polarization even in deeply divided environments; (3) generate meaningful engagement among students who initially appeared disengaged; and (4) foster humanization, curiosity, and confidence in navigating conflict. These outcomes affirm the value of dialogic pedagogy across different institutional and cultural settings, cultivating a shared ethic of inquiry, empathy, and curiosity.
The following sections outline our theoretical framework and course design, describe our methodological approach, and present our findings. We conclude with reflections on the implications of dialogic pedagogy for teaching contentious topics across sociopolitical boundaries.
DIALOGIC PRACTICES IN THE CLASSROOM
Our design was informed by existing research on the dialogic classroom as a remedy for polarization, as well as political discourse skills, which emphasized the importance of structured engagement in fostering productive conversations (Garcia and Ulbig Reference Garcia and Ulbig2024, 218; King, Taylor, and Webb Reference King, Taylor and Webb2021, 726). Dialogic practices have emerged as a robust response to polarization, fostering openness, curiosity, and engagement in the classroom (Sarrouf Reference Sarrouf, Finger and Wagner2023).Footnote 1 Sarrouf (Reference Sarrouf, Finger and Wagner2023) asserted that dialogic teaching enables students to reflect on their personal experiences and values while remaining open to diverse perspectives.
Prior research suggests that engaging with diverse opinions in emotionally safe classrooms, combined with active listening, promotes political open-mindedness and the development of empathy (Garcia and Ulbig Reference Garcia and Ulbig2024; Levy et al. Reference Levy, Babb-Guerra, Owczarek and Batt2019). Structured dialogue further enhances students’ ability to critically engage in politically charged discussions without becoming defensive, making them more receptive to alternative perspectives (King, Taylor, and Webb Reference King, Taylor and Webb2021, 728). Furthermore, Garcia and Ulbig (Reference Garcia and Ulbig2024) emphasized that learning from peers rather than authority figures reduces defensiveness and promotes curiosity, leading to more meaningful engagement in classroom discussions. By cultivating curiosity, dialogic education encourages students to explore contentious topics with an open mind rather than reinforcing polarization (Welker et al. Reference Welker, Duong, Rakhshani, Dieffenbach, Coleman and Haidt2023). Furthermore, DeTemple (Reference DeTemple2020) demonstrated that dialogic classrooms yield robust student engagement with course content and a marked willingness and ability to speak and listen across differences, even about contentious subjects. Following these studies, we designed our course on dialogic principles.
THE COURSE DESIGN
We began the semester by mapping the conflict in a realistic and historically grounded manner. Both syllabi placed early emphasis on the legacy of colonialism, nationalism, and state formation. We bridged this conceptual and historical content with the current reality through readings (see online appendix A) and a series of joint panels featuring speakers from Israeli and Palestinian grassroots organizations. By the time our panels began, students had been introduced to the origins and dynamics of the conflict and could situate the panelists’ personal testimonies within broader political, historical, and structural contexts.
Our panels involved six organizations: Friends of Roots, Holy Land Trust, Women Wage Peace, Itach Ma’aki, Forum for Regional Thinking, and Combatants for Peace. These conversations redefined the region as a space of lived trauma, human agency, and potential for peace rather than a distant, intractable conflict zone. Students, therefore, engaged with a deeply humanized and multilayered reality of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
The first event emphasized the human and relational dimension of the conflict. A Muslim Palestinian and an Israeli settler from Bethlehem represented Friends of Roots. Their accounts offered parallel narratives of trauma and recognition, grounded in the necessity of hearing one another’s truth and building trust across historical divides. A Christian Palestinian from Bethlehem’s Holy Land Trust provided a spiritual and integrative lens, highlighting the role of nonviolent activism rooted in healing from fear, radical love, and collective liberation. All three speakers underlined coexistence as a moral imperative sustained by mutual humanization.
The second panel focused on gender agency, structural injustice, and the refusal of despair. A representative from Women Wage Peace spoke about maternal grief and cross-border solidarity with Palestinian women, explicitly rejecting revenge as a response to violence. From Itach Ma’aki, a feminist legal perspective exposed how Palestinian–Israeli women face compounded exclusion—denied citizenship, shelter, and protection—while remaining central actors in the struggle for peace and justice. Both speakers framed peace building as deeply feminist, embodied, and resistant to nationalist dehumanization.
In the third panel, a former Israel Defense Forces elite member and an ex-Hamas militant from Combatants for Peace shared their personal histories, spanning from armed struggle and military service to joint nonviolent activism. Their reflections foregrounded power asymmetry, accountability, and the centrality of humanization. A policy expert from the Forum for Regional Thinking contributed a structural critique of prevailing political discourse, drawing attention to internal fragmentation within Palestinian society and dissenting voices within Israeli academia and policy circles. The speakers framed coexistence not as equivalence but as both a structural and an ethical challenge. All of our panelists acknowledged the limitations of nonviolent activism in the face of ongoing violence, and they shared their reflections on how to sustain principled resistance amid feelings of despair.
Following the speakers’ remarks, students met in small groups to reflect and formulate questions shaped by American and Turkish contexts. After each panel, students also wrote reflective essays to reconsider their assumptions, reframe their understanding, and draw connections between panel discussions and their personal experiences.Footnote 2 These essays invited students to be aware of the limitations of their own perspective and to open themselves to the insights of others, thereby deepening the learning process.
We complemented our panels and reflections with dialogic practices. Early in the semester, students established ground rules for respectful engagement, and then they practiced active listening and structured dialogue. In a facilitated dialogue on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, students shared an experience that has shaped their perspective; how that experience influenced the way they felt about the current situation; what was at the heart of the matter for them; and one thing they would like people who have a different perspective concerning the conflict to understand about their experiences and values.Footnote 3 The dialogue enabled students to reflect on their experiences, listen to their peers who have diverse perspectives and values, and gain a more nuanced understanding of various views on Israel–Palestine.
Finally, we paired our students with Israeli and Palestinian college students in an online dialogue. Regrettably, mounting security concerns prevented the participation of Palestinian students at the last minute. To address this gap, we incorporated episodes from the Third Narrative Podcast, which feature personal accounts from two Palestinian college students at al-Quds University. Although it was not an ideal substitute, this approach ensured that Palestinian perspectives were included.
The final project—preparing a podcast episode—encouraged students to rethink Israel–Palestine through alternative narratives, blending analytical rigor with personal reflection. We invited students to engage critically with three central prompts: (1) What is the conflict about? Who are the actors and what are their interests? What is at stake for them?; (2) What have you heard in your conversations with Israeli students, in the Third Narrative Podcast, and in our panel discussions that was new, surprising, and interesting? How do these takeaways differ from what you knew about the conflict before this semester?; and (3) What has changed in your understanding of the conflict throughout the semester?
FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION
We assessed the pedagogical effectiveness of dialogic practices in teaching the Israeli–Palestinian conflict through students’ responses to these questions and pre- and post-semester surveys. In our assessment, we explored their understanding of the conflict, the course’s impact on polarization regarding the Israel–Palestine question, and their ability to engage with difference and disagreement. Whereas the survey data provided a basic map of shifts in students’ self-reported attitudes, our primary focus was based on capturing the interpretive and intellectual transformations expressed in their own words. Therefore, we aimed to understand how students come to engage with discomfort, complexity, and moral ambiguity through dialogic learning.
The “Politics of the Middle East” course is a popular elective at both institutions, often drawing students who are interested in international affairs. Although they were shaped by distinct institutional and cultural environments, each class provided a sociopolitically diverse sample. The Middlebury College class had 22 students and the Yeditepe University class had 26 students. Both classes had balanced gender diversity; the Middlebury class displayed greater diversity of religious identification and half of the Yeditepe class identified as Muslims. The Middlebury class was predominantly white, with the remainder populated by students of color from diverse backgrounds in Asia and the Middle East. The overwhelming majority identified as progressives (see online appendix B). This profile was broadly representative of Middlebury College, a liberal arts institution with a predominantly liberal and white student body and a growing body of students of color and international students (Buke Okyar and Gumuscu Reference Buke Okyar and Gumuscu2025).
Yeditepe University is a large institution with a socioeconomically and geographically diverse profile. The campus encompasses a diverse range of political and ideological orientations, reflecting Turkey’s sociopolitical landscape. The Yeditepe class reflected this ideological breadth: approximately two thirds of the students identified as progressive and the remainder identified as moderates, conservatives, and libertarian/classical liberals (see online appendix B).
In both settings, students self-selected into the course, which reflects a degree of interest or curiosity but not necessarily preexisting political commitment or knowledge. Because students were unaware of the dialogic design of the course during registration, we did not expect any self-selection effects in our findings—other than students’ overall interest in the Middle East. This allowed us to generalize our findings to elective courses that cover contentious topics.
As with any classroom-based intervention, our findings should be interpreted with awareness of methodological limitations. Specifically, our sample size was small, providing limited statistical power. Because our survey responses were anonymous due to privacy concerns, we were unable to conduct a matched-pairs analysis; this constrained the strength of our causal claims based solely on our surveys. We therefore treat the survey data as a backdrop against which deeper qualitative patterns can be understood. Our emphasis lies in the rich data of student testimony: that is, the ways in which students narrate their transformations, interrogate their assumptions, and reflect on encounters with alternative perspectives. This qualitative evidence is compelling and strong, and the quantitative evidence supports the same direction, although it is somewhat noisy.
We are also aware of potential confounding factors, including evolving peer dynamics, survey familiarity, and external events. Data triangulation, combined with student reflections and process tracing of key events throughout the semester, enabled us to assess the impact of these factors. Because students described learning moments in their written and oral reflections, we could trace authentic growth and genuine engagement rather than surface-level adaptation or peer dynamics. Regarding external forces, the pedagogical intervention was implemented amid escalating campus polarization and heightened national tensions surrounding the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. These external developments were not only unsupportive but also actively countered the aims of the dialogic design. In this context, the intervention lacked reinforcement from sociopolitical structures. At Middlebury College, the Conflict Transformation Collaborative organized a series of events to foster depolarization, with a few students participating. There was no similar initiative at Yeditepe University. Given that students experienced depolarization, empathic engagement, and humanization of divergent perspectives under adverse external conditions, it is reasonable to attribute the observed changes primarily to the design and delivery of the intervention. Our findings are summarized in the following sections.
Understanding of the Conflict
The course has advanced students’ self-reported knowledge about the Israel–Palestine conflict at both Middlebury College and Yeditepe University, as measured in our pre- and post-semester surveys.Footnote 4 At Middlebury College, the mean response increased from 5.22 to 7.22. Similarly, at Yeditepe University, the mean response increased from 5.62 to 7.68, which suggests a pronounced and statistically significant learning effect and robust alignment in both classes (table 1).
Table 1 Pre- and Post-Semester Survey Results
The students’ self-reflections reinforce these results. Several students compared their experience with our dialogic approach to the Middle East with more conventional approaches and highlighted the pedagogical value of the former in their learning experience. One student, for instance, called their conversations with Palestinians and Israelis life-changing and noted: “I wouldn’t have been able to learn as much as I did if I just continued to read articles or watch videos.” Another student agreed that meeting with individuals directly impacted by the conflict was “the proper way to study regional politics,” allowing them “to internalize the topic much better.” Another admitted, “Seeing the human side of the conflict through direct interactions taught me that I don’t know as much as I thought about what people go through.” Several students reiterated the pedagogical impact of interacting with Israelis and Palestinians; for example: “Hearing about the shared fear and trauma of people on both sides made me understand the conflict in a new way.” One student called our panels eye-opening: “It was a very different experience to have this very practical and hands-on type of learning in a politics class….It was so essential to hear from those people going through the conflict and experiencing it firsthand.” Another student echoed that our course allowed for a different learning experience: “I know so much more now [and in] a deeper way too….We’ve just learned a lot more than surface-level knowledge on the topic.”
We also assessed student learning through an in-class midterm exam and their final podcasts. Students’ performance in course assignments improved considerably compared to the previous iteration of the course that was designed without dialogic practices. Average midterm-exam scores of Middlebury and Yeditepe classes improved by 4 points, whereas overall course grades improved by 4 and 13 points, respectively. The content of students’ final podcasts also confirmed that our dialogic approach facilitated deeper learning. Students gained a significantly more nuanced and complex understanding of the conflict’s core, its long and complex history dating back to World War I, and postwar colonial designs, as well as key actors and their interests and intentions. They also recognized the complexities of the lived reality in Palestine and Israel, and they identified challenges before a peaceful resolution. These challenges included the power asymmetry, competing interests, deep polarization, short-sighted domestic political interests, and lack of accurate and objective media coverage.
Depolarization and Humanization
In addition to assessing students’ understanding of the conflict, we evaluated the impact of dialogic practices on polarization, empathy, and humanization regarding the Israel–Palestine issue using their reflections and pre- and post-semester surveys.
Our survey questions asked about students’ feelings toward those who agree and disagree with their position on Israel–Palestine. Pre-semester responses indicate that Middlebury students expressed stronger positive feelings toward individuals who share their views compared to those who disagree. This revealed a clear affective polarization: the tendency to emotionally distance or devalue those with opposing views (see table 1). Post-semester, the gap narrowed slightly, as students felt slightly more favorable toward those who agreed and disagreed with them, although the results were not statistically significant.
These results suggest that the semester fostered increased empathy toward disagreement, indicating a modest decline in affective polarization. Given the increasing polarization and conflicts on US campuses regarding the issue of Israel and Palestine in 2024, we believe even this modest decline is meaningful.
The data reflect slightly contrasting developments in Yeditepe students’ interpersonal attitudes toward agreement and disagreement surrounding the Israel–Palestine conflict. Students’ warm feelings toward those who disagreed with them slightly declined, accompanied by a consolidation of opinion, whereas their attitude toward those who agreed with them slightly shifted in the opposite direction (see table 1). Only the latter is statistically significant.
We do not think that this slight change should be interpreted as increased polarization because we attribute Yeditepe students’ pre-semester self-reported neutrality toward those with whom they agree and disagree on the issue of Israel and Palestine to non-attitude reporting and satisficing. Their neutrality at the beginning of the semester arguably was due to their disengagement from the conflict within the larger context of domestic polarization in Turkey around the government’s expressed Islamic solidarity with the Palestinian cause. This self-reported neutrality gave way to deeper engagement by the end of the semester. We argue that the course’s dialogic and human-centered account triggered a search for ethical positioning and, aligned with Sarrouf’s (Reference Sarrouf, Finger and Wagner2023) framework, enabled students to surface their own stories, confront discomfort, and form their convictions. What may appear in the data as slightly reduced openness to disagreement instead can be understood as a shift from abstraction to affective awareness, in which students become more attuned to the emotional and moral weight of opposing positions. More important, our qualitative evidence suggests otherwise, as discussed in the following subsection.
Student Reflections
Survey trends provide only a partial account. Our qualitative evidence supersedes the limitations of our small sample size and further strengthens and contextualizes our findings, thereby providing complementary depth and nuance that reveal meaningful shifts in student dispositions, skills, and emotional reflection. A more substantive transformation emerged in students’ reflective accounts, which consistently pointed toward heightened empathy, depolarization, and humanization. This suggests that students engaged in relational and affective learning that quantitative measures alone may not fully capture.
Specifically, the students’ self-reflection indicated a profound shift from their initial, often limited or biased understanding of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict to a significantly more nuanced and complex appreciation of its multifaceted nature. The move away from affective polarization and toward dialogic empathy reflects an affective outcome that complements shifts in knowledge and attitude. It signals a deeper type of learning: that is, one rooted not only in facts or frameworks but also in an evolving understanding of what it means to coexist across ideological differences.
Students began with partial or one-sided views of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, often shaped by national identity, media framing, and cultural proximity. As one student noted: “I was exposed to mostly one side of [the conflict] being an Arab….It was my first opportunity to talk to someone Israeli, and it was really valuable.” Another added: “I had preconceived notions…and didn’t value the research conducted in the area. This course proved me wrong.”
Students reassessed their assumptions and gained a more nuanced understanding of the conflict’s historical, human, and political dimensions while also exhibiting an observable shift away from affective polarization toward relational openness. At the beginning of the semester, several students expressed strong emotional allegiance to their in-groups or wariness toward dissent. One student explained, “I felt a sense of loyalty to the Jewish state and the need to support Israel.” Another reflected, “I used to think the Israeli–Palestinian conflict was black and white. Now I see how that mindset stops dialogue.” As a result, students began to reject simplistic frames. One student stated: “Conflicts are never binary, never good versus evil,” and another emphasized that “the ‘us-versus-them’ mentality is what’s preventing peace.”
This evolution was driven primarily by direct engagement with diverse voices—including Israeli students, Palestinian activists, and representatives of peace organizations. Students began to humanize those they previously had seen as opponents. Hearing personal experiences was pivotal. One student declared, “Understanding personal stories is transformative.” Another student agreed that “seeing the conflict from afar made it easy to dehumanize individuals, while direct engagement changed that.” “It’s bigger than just politics,” one said. “It’s mothers, it’s families…communities are being broken.” These stories grounded abstract geopolitics in lived reality, encouraging students to see the conflict through a deeply human lens. As a result, they also rejected simplistic portrayals of Israelis and Palestinians. One student admitted, “Hearing an Israeli student share her fears and frustrations made me confront my biases and see her as more than just a representative of her state.” Another added, “Meeting Palestinians and Israelis helped me see the nuances and reject stereotypes.”
This was not a flattening of belief but rather an emotional broadening. As one student described: “I didn’t agree with the Israeli student’s politics, but we stayed kind and tried to empathize. It showed me that empathy doesn’t mean agreement.” The dialogic structure of the course played a key role in this transformation. Conversations were not about finding a middle ground for the sake of consensus but instead about cultivating the emotional and intellectual stamina to hold multiple narratives simultaneously. One student stated: “This conflict is a test of our capacities to have empathy for people that differ from us…and to envision peace together.” Others described how protests and classroom learning happened in tandem, enabling them to “see people around them in a whole new light.”
Notably, students expressed that empathy and conviction were not in conflict. One wrote: “Understanding nuance doesn’t mean having no opinion….You can still come out of it with defined beliefs.” Another added: “I now approach the conflict with more humility. That doesn’t mean I abandoned my stance, but I learned to listen before asserting.” Students articulated that embracing nuance does not mean indecision either; instead, it builds stronger, informed convictions. As one student reflected: “You’re allowed to take a stance…but it only reaches its full potential if you have a baseline of nuance and complexity.” Curiosity became central to students’ growth, fostering inquiry over confrontation and promoting open-mindedness (Sarrouf Reference Sarrouf, Finger and Wagner2023; Welker et al. Reference Welker, Duong, Rakhshani, Dieffenbach, Coleman and Haidt2023). In one student’s words: “I learned a lot from [an Israeli peer] when he was asking about the campus protests….It opened me up to more conversations now.” Another student described the course as a place where “you really need to hear all sides,” not to “bend your principles” but to “understand the fears and hopes and humanity of everyone involved.” Curiosity helped students to move beyond political rigidity, enabling them to engage with complexity while maintaining thoughtful convictions.
Students also affirmed the timing of our dialogic intervention. The fact that classroom dialogue and campus activism unfolded simultaneously at Middlebury College deepened their emotional involvement. “Having those two experiences happen at the same time was really moving….It made you look at the things happening around you in a new light,” one student shared. Another added: “This class gave me autonomy and control over what I’m thinking….I’m very thankful for that.” Several appreciated being given the appropriate tools and opportunities to explore this conflict in a nuanced manner amid ongoing violence. Dialogue did not dilute passion—it helped to refine it.
CONCLUSION
Our course design demonstrated the potential of dialogic practices to transform classrooms into spaces of empathy, critical engagement, and mutual respect when addressing contentious issues in political science. Student statements affirmed that teaching Middle East politics, particularly the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, during times of war and violence proved critical for encouraging informed and empathetic engagement. This approach provided a framework for contextualizing current events, making sense of rapidly unfolding developments, and overcoming biases in the mainstream media.
Last-minute changes, including Palestinian participants dropping out before we could complete peer-to-peer dialogues, were setbacks that we managed to improvise and overcome. Future iterations of this course should include more substantial representation from Palestinian voices. Despite these drawbacks, dialogic practices superseded the effects of local political contexts, mitigated polarization, fostered humanization, and stimulated curiosity and a willingness to engage across differences and disagreements regarding the Israel–Palestine conflict. This study presents robust qualitative evidence; future research should investigate the effects of dialogic practices using larger samples of students and in required courses to enhance generalizability. Future studies should also go beyond the immediate effects of dialogic engagement to test its long-term impact on students’ political attitudes and engagement.
…dialogic practices superseded the effects of local political contexts, mitigated polarization, fostered humanization, and stimulated curiosity and a willingness to engage across differences and disagreements regarding the Israel–Palestine conflict.
Although our cross-institutional collaboration enabled the pooling of resources (i.e., honoraria, connections with Israel and Palestine, administrative assistance, and Zoom access) from two institutions, it also necessitated coordinating across multiple time zones and student teams across two institutions. This model could be adopted easily on a single campus, where colleagues must rely on their institution’s resources with less coordination.
We also believe that this template can be adapted to various polarizing topics in political science, including race, religion, gender, populism, nationalism, immigration, and democratic decline. These issues, often framed through fixed identities and deep-seated polarizations, benefit from a pedagogical approach that encourages students to surface their assumptions, examine the historical and affective dimensions of conflict, and grapple with the possibility of mutual understanding as well as the reality of structural contradiction. By situating students within real dialogic spaces that foreground lived experience, ideological entrenchment, and power asymmetries, this pedagogy may scaffold cognitive and emotional skills that allow them to inhabit uncomfortable contradictions—an essential skill when addressing conflict that becomes intractable and destructive in an increasingly fragmented world.
…this pedagogy may scaffold cognitive and emotional skills that allow students to inhabit uncomfortable contradictions—an essential skill when addressing conflict that becomes intractable and destructive in an increasingly fragmented world.
SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL
To view supplementary material for this article, please visit http://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096525101674.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors thank the editors and anonymous reviewers at PS: Political Science & Politics for their constructive feedback. We also extend our gratitude to our students at Middlebury College and Yeditepe University for their thoughtful participation and engagement throughout this project. Special thanks to the organizations Friends of Roots, Holy Land Trust, Women Wage Peace, Itach Ma’aki, Forum for Regional Thinking, and Combatants for Peace for sharing their experiences and insights. We also are deeply grateful to Tsamaret Levy-Daphne and Dror Ze’evi for their generous assistance in facilitating key contacts and connections; Betsy Hayes for sharing her expertise at the early stages of this project; and Sarah Stroup for supporting us throughout the project. Many thanks to Cihan Artunc and Cengiz Erişen for their valuable feedback on previous drafts of this article, and to Emirhan Duran for his excellent research assistance. Special thanks to Linda Booska for coordinating our speaker series. Middlebury College Ada Howe Kent Faculty Grants supported the design of this course.
DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT
Research documentation and data that support the findings of this study are openly available at the PS: Political Science & Politics Harvard Dataverse at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/G1QJOM.
CONFLICTS OF INTEREST
The authors declare that there are no ethical issues or conflicts of interest in this research.
