Teaching pack details:
Citizenship and Community Cohesion

The pack is highly relevant in promoting Citizenship and Community Cohesion. Its content and suggested activities support the aims of the Education and Inspectors Act 2006, which introduces a duty on all maintained schools in England to ensure that all pupils understand and appreciate others from different backgrounds, gaining a sense of shared values, fulfilling their potential and feeling part of a communty at a local, national and international level.

Through introducing students to an international issue of extreme violence and intense global importance - the Israel/Palestine conflict - it acts as an example to guide students through major Citizenship (curricular) areas including:

• religious and ethnic diversity;
• rights and responsibilities;
• democratic decision making - including the work of the UN;
• the role of the media;

Above all, it suggests ways of dealing with conflict in a seemingly hopeless political, religious and historical context.

Five themes give students a clear framework for exploring conflict:

• work for peace;
• groups in conflict;
• injustice and conflict;
• the role of the media in conflict;
• the unique centre of conflict transformation at Neve Shalom ~ Wahat al-Salam (NSWaS), the School for Peace (SFP).

These themes enable students to analyse conflict against the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict from 1917 until September 2006, as well as in Britain, and in their own lives. with this information and the activities suggested in the teachers' section, students gain the skills to deal with conflict positively and confidently. The educational resources include:

• ready-to-use problem-solving, thought-provoking activities
• collaborative, co-operative work, enabling students to learn from each other
• ideas to develop students’ depth of knowledge in curricular elements of Citizenship, including literacy and research skills
• key questions that stimulate deeper analysis and reflection
• an easy to use approach that suits longer or shorter projects.
• for the Citizenship curriculum, it ticks most boxes and links to PSHE, RE, History, Geography, and English.

There are large, colour photographs illustrating Arab and Jewish student profiles. These add to the users' understanding of how people who have participated in the School for Peace conflict dialogue programme respond to issues they face in their every-day life. Their searing honesty, courage and hope speak directly from the page and challenge us all.

While giving the background and chronology of the conflict, the pack focuses on one organisation working for peace in Israel: Neve Shalom ~ Wahat al-Salam (The Oasis of Peace). This internationally famous community, where Arab and Jewish families - all Israeli citizens - have chosen to live together, works for peace in two crucial ways:

• it is witness to the possibility of peaceful co-operation between the two sides in the conflict, and
• for over thirty years it has run Youth Encounter Workshops, where Arab and Jewish school students get together, almost always for the first time, to confront the reality of their situation and look for ways forward.