Critical pedagogy in a conflicted society: Israel as a case study

This study would like to adopt the phenomenological resistance approach in order to explore the way social agents react to knowledge provided to them. For Giroux (1983), such an approach, that takes human agency seriously, leads to possibilities of oppositional pedagogy and meaningful interventions in schools. The main question presented in this paper is what happens when the knowledge being reproduced and provided is critical of the social order, hegemonic ideology, and inequalities in the distribution of power and other resources among social groups. How do students from different groups and minorities react to this knowledge being reproduced institutionally? These questions will be examined by analyzing the way different “critical” sociological theories were accepted by students from different Israeli groups and minorities that attended sociology classes that took place in four different Israeli academic institutions.