Symposium on Controversial Issues in Citizenship Education: Insights from Israel

The Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies and the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley are hosting a symposium to explore insights from the Israeli context on controversial issues in citizenship education.

Public dialogue about issues of civic concern is essential to a healthy common life in any open, liberal, pluralistic, democratic society. This includes the discussion of controversial social, political, and economic policies that may cause deep divisions and over which conflicting views may be based on alternative values and methods of analysis. Indeed, with the dramatic increase of migration across the globe over recent decades, the very idea of who should be afforded citizens’ rights, including the right to participate in the public discourse of a democracy, has become one such controversial issue.

The extreme challenges of discussing controversial issues has led to increased attention in the educational research and policies of many countries around the world, including Israel and the United States, as to the possible purposes, pedagogies, and products of citizenship education.