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“As long as we have the faith, the desire and the resilience”: Interview with Tahani Al Dahdouh for the OLIVE Project (Part 2)

On May 22nd, 2024, Anaïs Duong-Pedica from the OLIVE project interviewed Tahani Al Dahdouh, an educator and postdoctoral research fellow at Tampere University. Originally from Gaza, Tahani’s research focuses innovativeness, digitalization and professional development in higher education. In Part 1 of this interview, published last week, Tahani talked about higher education in Palestine and the impact of Israeli colonialism and occupation on Palestinian education, online teaching and learning, and teachers’ resilience in Gaza. In Part 2, we talk about Tahani’s research on Palestinian teachers use of online teaching, transnational pedagogical development training in Palestinian higher education and her thoughts on resuming education in Gaza.

Tahani at the library at the Islamic University of Gaza. Photo: Tahani Al Dahdouh

Anaïs Duong-Pedica (ADP): What challenges and opportunities does online teaching pose for teachers in Palestinians universities? In part one of the interview, you already mentioned this lack of access to electricity, difficulty accessing the internet, and in terms of opportunity, the fact that online teaching allows to continue education in a situation of emergency. But are there any challenges and opportunities that you think about that you’ve not mentioned?

Tahani Al Dahdouh (TAD): All of these challenges were cited by participants in the article and some of them are also shared by teachers worldwide: suddenly moving to teach online and increasing the workload and the difficulty to achieve a work and life balance, because teachers were working mainly from home. But other challenges were specific to conflict areas, such as in Palestine, like the lack of resources, the lack of infrastructure, the lack of Internet and electricity connections, financial constraints, and so on.

But for me, I can see that the online teaching experience during the pandemic has brought several affordances to teachers there. As the proverb says, it was a blessing in disguise. This is also the case in the words of the teachers themselves: They said that without COVID, they would have perhaps never delved into online teaching, and people are the enemy of what they are ignorant of. During the COVID pandemic, they were forced to delve into online teaching, and they were also forced to collide with the reality, to explore different techniques and reflect on their practices to navigate what worked and did not work. For example, I can give you a quote from a teacher, when he said that “at the beginning, when we shifted to online teaching, I relied on the PowerPoint presentation that I already had prepared even before COVID.” When he started to teach using the Zoom, he discovered that this is not the right way to teach. He felt there were some issues related to student engagement and interaction. He didn’t know if the students are following him as he uses the Powerpoint slides. What happened with that teacher is that he started to reflect on the way he taught, and he started also to rebuild and re-develop the learning materials in order to make them more engaging for the students. This is how teachers also changed their behaviors, attitudes and perceptions when they experienced online teaching during COVID.

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‘You understand?’  Visual Images of Craftwork from East Jerusalem and Palestine – An Exercise for Geo-ethnographers

You understand?’ is a visual exercise that aims to provoke the ethnographer’s thinking and practice that combines digital and visual data.

I shot the images with my smartphone to capture the ‘moment’ on the move during a visit in the Old City of Jerusalem, in late May 2023. Looking back to this research experience from a time-space distance, I see it as a synthesis of encounters and discussions that constitute a ‘moment’. I choose ‘moment’ rather than ‘trajectory’ even though my ‘moment’ embraces the elements of a trajectory, the movement, the visual and sensorial aspects, and the different emplacements of the researcher on the move (Gomez-Cruz, 2016). This is, however, an exercise for training the geo-ethnographic gaze and creating a basis for geo-ethnographic imagination and thinking. Geo-ethnographic methods allow positioning encounters in time and place on demand and, thus, offer one way to deal with possible memory gaps and other sources of bias.

Geo-ethnography is nothing but new. Surprisingly, it has been a tool for historical research since the Classical times when Herodotus applied geo-ethnographic methods to get to know the ‘facts on the ground’ and separate myths from reality (Masalha, 2021). The smartphone has in-built technology that makes possible the convergence of image creation and locative metadata and, thus, becomes geo-ethnography’s good friend (Vivitsou & Janhonen-Abruquah, 2024).

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“Education has always been a source of hope and resilience for all Palestinians”: Interview with Tahani Al Dahdouh for the OLIVE Project (Part 1)

On May 22nd, 2024, Anaïs Duong-Pedica from the OLIVE project interviewed Tahani Al Dahdouh, an educator and postdoctoral research fellow at Tampere University. Originally from Gaza, Tahani’s research focuses innovativeness, digitalization and professional development in higher education. In Part 1 of this interview, Tahani talked about higher education in Palestine and the impact of Israeli colonialism and occupation on Palestinian education, online teaching and learning, and teachers’ resilience in Gaza. The second part of the interview will be published next week.

This exchange took place when there are currently no university left in Gaza due to Israeli attacks. This is part of what Palestinian Professor Karma Nabulsi called “scholasticide“, during the 2008-2009 Israeli assault on Gaza, to refer to “systematic destruction of Palestinian education by Israel.” Much of what Tahani explores in this conversation is also echoed in the “Open letter by Gaza academics and university administrators to the world” published a few days later. The open letter notably underlines the importance of online teaching in the current circumstances and highlights that “the rebuilding of Gaza’s academic institutions is not just a matter of education; it is a testament to our resilience, determination, and unwavering commitment to securing a future for generations to come.”

Anaïs Duong-Pedica (ADP): Good afternoon Tahani. Thank you so much for accepting to be interviewed by the OLIVE project, and to answer a few of our questions on what you’ve been working on, and on higher education in Palestine. Before we start the interview, could you introduce yourself and say a little bit about the work that you’ve been doing?

Tahani Al Dahdouh (TAD): Thank you very much for inviting me. It’s my honor to be here and speak a little bit about higher education in Palestine. My name is Tahani Al Dahdouh. I’m Finnish Palestinian, originally from Gaza. I’m currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at Tampere University. I studied for my bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG) and came to Finland 10 years ago to pursue a PhD in education through an Erasmus Mundus partnership project between Europe and the Islamic University of Gaza. In 2020, I defended my article-based dissertation, which focused on investigating higher education employees’ innovativeness. After that, I worked as a principal investigator for two projects on developing digital pedagogies in higher education at Tampere University.

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OLIVE Project statement of support to the Gaza Encampment at the University of Helsinki

Gaza encampment at the University of Helsinki

We, the undersigned professors, teachers, researchers, and members of staff within the OLIVE project, partly based at the University of Helsinki, express our support for Students and Researchers for Palestine, who have started an encampment in solidarity with Palestine at the City Center Campus.

Within the OLIVE project, our goal is to work collaboratively with our Palestinian colleagues to contribute to the development and transformation of teacher education in Palestinian universities. One of our partner universities, Al-Azhar University in Gaza, was razed to the ground in three successive airstrikes between October and November 2023. Our other partner, Birzeit University in Ramallah in the West Bank, has also been the target of several raids and arrests of Palestinian students by the Israeli army. Most recently, on May 15th, 2024, Ayser Muhammad Safi, a second-year student at the Faculty of Education, was shot and killed by Israeli forces. This led to the university closing for a few days in order for students and staff to mourn their loss. A few days later, on May 19th, 2024, the occupation forces arrested Mahmoud Abdul Gawad Angas, a third year student in the Computer Science programme at Birzeit University, prompting the institution to demand his immediate release as well as that of all political prisoners detained in Israeli prisons.

The OLIVE project has built strong relations of mutual respect and trust with Palestinian colleagues in Gaza and Ramallah. We mourn the loss of lives of Palestinian students, researchers and teachers in Gaza and the West Bank. We are alarmed by the situation of our colleagues and their families in Gaza, trying to escape death and suffering. We are concerned by the fact that there are currently no universities left in Gaza. We support the right to education of all Palestinians and condemn the attacks on Palestinians and their education system. We believe that education is the most powerful tool to build democratic and just societies. This is why we support the demands of the encampment and call for the University of Helsinki to follow its own Ethical Guidelines and — in line with its commitment to promote universal human rights and defend academic freedom — join the academic boycott of Israeli universities called by Palestinian civil society. Hence, the University of Helsinki must immediately:

1) Revoke its exchange agreements with Tel Aviv University (TAU) and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJ);

2) Stop collaborating with Israeli universities and state institutions in research projects. These include centrally the research projects funded by the EU. Through the Horizon 2020 and the Horizon Europe programmes, the University of Helsinki collaborates at least with TAU, HUJ, the Weizmann Institute, Technion, and Ben-Gurion University;

3) Provide full disclosure of the University’s financial investments in companies that profit from Israel’s apartheid regime and the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

At the OLIVE project, we believe in peace education, antiracism, equality, and global responsibility in education, which aligns with these demands. It is worth reminding that the academic boycott targets only institutional connections to complicit Israeli universities, not individuals working at the Israeli universities. Indeed, the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movements’ guidelines for the academic boycott stipulate that it “rejects on principle boycotts of individuals based on their identity (such as citizenship, race, gender, or religion) or opinion” since it is “anchored in precepts of international law and universal human rights.” Israeli universities, however, should be boycotted as they are “profoundly implicated in supporting and perpetuating Israel’s systematic denial of Palestinian rights” and academic freedom. This strategy is not new nor specific to Palestine. Indeed, divestment was a powerful and successful strategy that helped to end South African apartheid, which university students were influential in instigating.

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Activism for human rights and women’s rights in Palestine – the case of the Palestinian Youth Union

Cold floors, Artistic installation of stone and tile fragments, Amir Zuabi, Palestinian Museum

“There are more than 100K families in Palestine where the head is a matriarch, most often a widowed woman. Half are poor families that the Union tries to support. Forced by poverty, some of these women work in the settlements or live in camps. Union support means providing the families with both money and material means to make a livelihood, machines, and equipment, but also livestock. […] For example, there are poor families with members with disabilities asking for sheep or machines to make a living and educate their children”.

These are the words of Muharram Barghouthi, General Director of the Palestinian Youth Union (PYU) during an interview discussion we had at the premises of PYU in Ramallah in mid-May 2023. During the discussion, different topics came up, including Muharram’s own childhood and youth years, with memories of his mother’s daily life that are characteristic of other Palestinian women’s lived experiences. These memories are tightly linked with lifetime choices and his current role and work with PYU.

PYU’s mission includes empowering the Palestinians to resist the Israeli violent acts and be able to stay in their land despite the settler colonialism regime. The Union encourages community involvement and supports social cohesion and solidarity in Palestine and internationally through a marked media presence and advocacy for youth interests, human rights, political and public participation of youth and women, and other issues concerning youth and women inclusiveness.

Toward this direction, Barghouthi and his team work on building an international profile for the Union, by seeking cooperation, for instance, with EU member states. Barghouthi started as an activist journalist writing and thus spreading the news about youth volunteer work to rebuild communities in rural and urban areas all over Palestine. In this way, he shaped his leadership with equality and equal opportunities for youth and women as landmark and mission. On the way, Barghouthi’s and other activists’ work was met with reactions from different directions. The Islamic movement was one such source with their claims that women’s position is only in the home with the family.

Despite odds, constructive activist work has earned the trust of Palestinian families and gradually it becomes possible for young women to take action, move to the city, get educated, claim a livelihood and build a future beyond confines for themselves and their families.

Born in a poor family, Barghouthi attended the local school before he transferred to a government school. There, for the first time, he met with people from other villages. Soon he became the leader of the school students’ council that was coordinated with students from Birzeit University. Barghouthi’s activism against the colonialist regime covered areas such as economic measurements (e.g., the price of olive oil), land deprivation and the settlements. His work as journalist for a popular Palestinian newspaper gave the opportunity to address wider audiences and share the vision for equality, human rights and women’s rights.

In our discussion, Barghouthi did not seem to think twice about why he chose to take distances from those traditions that limit the freedoms of women. Throughout his life, he has been inspired by the story of his mother and all those Palestinian women who, day after day, throughout the years, from generation to generation, carried the water from the spring, to plant the home garden, bring in the wood to cook on the fire, pick up in the olive season, nurse the sick and seek income for the family.

These same women were kept hostages and saw their sons arrested when their own homes were invaded by Israeli soldiers. A story with constant repetitions in the ‘70s, the ‘80s and today.

At the same time, women’s position, especially in rural areas in Palestine was oppressed. Not only did the colonial regime harden the lives of mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters. It was unfathomable for local societies to recognize young women’s education as a right. And that was a narrative that had to change.

Nowadays, the landscape is different. More and more women are recognized professionals, university teachers, researchers, medical doctors, practicing lawyers, musicians, working and studying home and abroad. But it took some years and some activism and hard work to turn parochial beliefs and allow a dynamic perspective for the future of Palestine to emerge.

The struggle toward this direction is ongoing.

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Teaching together in action: the case of creative situated writing

Collaborative teaching for relational rigor

Co-teaching or collaborative teaching or teaching with colleagues is a common practice in Finnish teacher education (e.g., Kokko et al, 2021; Kähkönen & Airo, 2019; Pesonen et al., 2020). The practice can take different forms (e.g., teaching and observing, teaching and assisting, parallel teaching, alternative teaching etc.). In all cases, co-teaching involves the combination of teachers’ abilities and skills in course planning, implementation and evaluation and learning together. There are different benefits listed in the relevant literature, including work in heterogeneous classes and setting up reciprocal environments (e.g., Kokko et al., 2021). Importantly, as Kähkönen & Airo (2019) argue, co-teaching contributes to the transformation of university teaching with the possibility for experimentation and community building that it offers.

In our article, where we discussed metaphors of mentoring for education without walls, we argued for the need to decolonize engagement with learning (Stein et al., 2022) through narratives of relational rigor. Relational rigor requires seeing education otherwise and this means opening up spaces of hope. We see spaces of hope as being tied with the process of collaboration and the need for a critical understanding of reality, given that we aim for sustainable systems and sustainable futures. In their study of collaborative teaching in school environments, Pesonen et al. (2020) found that the practice is linked with the sense of belonging of those involved in the co-teaching situation. The sense of belonging, therefore, depends on with the ways relations are built with colleagues, the leadership and the wider school and societal context.

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Women in STEM in Palestine and Finland– current situation, challenges and opportunities for more equality in the future 

A Checkpoint on Southern Haifa Beach, artwork by Abed Abdi, 2016

OLIVE project and the pedagogical cafe organized a panel discussion on the topical issue : Women in STEM – current situation, challenges and opportunities for more equality in the future. The discussion took place online on Tuesday 31 January 2023.

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