G.04. Caring Literacy Education: Transforming Hatred and Violence in Divided Societies

Reducing hatred and violence, while promoting critical thinking, is education’s main challenge. This is especially difficult in the context of the Jewish-Palestinian conflict. Hostile patriarchal forces, including those influencing social media and AI, often intervene to serve their own interests. This interference adds layers of complexity, including widespread gaslighting, that make it harder to address these influences. The challenge now is to overcome these barriers during an era of overwhelming media and offer hope to children. I suggest the concept of caring literacy, which aims to undermine violent and dominating narratives in content. This panel invites scholars to submit abstracts that explore the importance of caring literacy in resisting hatred and violence through educational practices focused on care.

A key question in the philosophy of caring education is how to overcome the obscuring of our shared humanity within educational systems that serve the patriarchal interests, and how to resist the reproduction of violent structures. Learning through caring literacy can be emancipatory, transformative, and subversive to these hostile forces because it springs from the duality of conflicts and reconciliation within relationships. It provides nurturing pathways for coping with conflicts. However, this approach requires the amalgamation of lived experience with critical thinking in pedagogy and learning through the integration of ethnographic research with a philosophical analysis (ethnophilosophy). It enables learners to undergo Buber’s transition from I-It to I-Thou.

Although Jews and Palestinians are often seen as adversaries, there exists a unique shared humanity between them that should be fostered and maintained.