Introduction

I arrived in Palestine in November 2021, never having lived here, but born and raised a Palestinian, deeply imbued with love of land, history, and a commitment to our cause for liberation. I grew up with stories of connection and belonging to this place that my foremothers and forefathers lived in, and in which we could trace our history back to the sixth century (last time I checked). My having been born into the Palestinian diaspora exposed me to cultures, realities, experiences, communities, ideologies, and belief systems that both rooted me in my own cultural community while expanding what the notions of both “culture” and “community” meant to me.

When I arrived in Palestine, I was under the impression that the Palestinian experience (yes, singular) was identical to my own—interconnected, interwal, and global in its outlook. What I discovered is that my privilege (middle class, dual citizen, educated in the West, whose life experiences were neither shaped nor constrained by the brutality of occupation and borders) had misinformed how I would relate to my Palestinian students at Al Quds Bard College.
Over the course of more than a year, I stepped back from my privileged perspective, listened to students and colleagues, engaged with them outside of my own positionality, and did in Palestine as the majority of Palestinians do. What I realized is that this was a challenging process because as much as I tried to remove my own privilege and unwavering belief in the intersectionality of global struggles for liberation, I simply was not able to.

In the 2022 Fall Semester, I taught a course on Resistance and Social Movements. The goal of the course was to expose students to various struggles for liberation, undergirded by theoretical perspectives on liberation, and to relate these struggles to the Palestinian struggle for liberation. The pedagogy I used in this course was learned through my participation in the Center for Liberal Arts and Sciences Pedagogy’s (CLASP) Fellows Program, an innovative, two-year program in which I engaged with colleagues from around the world on how to use writing as a tool for teaching. CLASP is a project of Bard College Institute for Writing and Thinking (IWT), a center for pedagogy that centers writing practices in the classroom to engage students in their own learning.

The question that I used to guide my course (theoretically and pedagogically) was, “How do writing practices inside the classroom affect how Palestinian students relate to global struggles for liberation?”