sending...The vision of Mahapach-Taghir is a just Israeli society with equal socio-economic and educational opportunities for all, and a strong democratic civil society. The following principles guide our objectives and our methodology:
Critical Pedagogy and Community Activism
Critical pedagogy is a teaching approach which enables students to achieve critical consciousness by encouraging them to question and challenge domination, and the beliefs and practices that govern. The use of critical methods in education empowers marginalized communities through a focus on relevant skills and emphasis of the link between the available knowledge and tools within disempowered communities and their ability to take responsibility for their own future.
Paulo Freire, thinker and educator, was an important theorist of critical pedagogy whose work was very influential on the founders of Mahapach-Taghir. Drawing on Paulo Freire, Jane Thompson writes:
There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the ‘practice of freedom,’ the means by which men and women deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.
Critical pedagogy is a continuous process of unlearning, learning and relearning, reflection, evaluation, and the impact that these actions have on the students—especially children and youth like those in Mahapach-Taghir’s communities who have been historically disenfranchised by traditional schooling. According to this, each Mahapach-Taghir community operates a civic center together with a Learning Community. Through a critical educational process platform, this civic body strives to involve more residents in its activities, and to coordinate between the particular skills and abilities of the residents and the particular needs of each community. The combination between the Civic Center and the Learning Community is vital in transforming the neighborhood into a community – an organic and united body that successfully conducts action in the neighborhood, develops local leadership for both youth and adults, and empowers the children, residents, and academic students.
Feminism
At its core, Mahapach-Taghir is a feminist organization, grounded in feminist principles. Values as cooperation, inclusion, equality, openness, transparency, empathy and joint decision making guide Mahapach-Taghir’s work and are translated into its structure and its action at the grassroots, staff and strategic levels.
One of the main manifestations of these values is Mahapach–Taghir’s focus on empowering women and their families. Widespread social change often begins with mothers and their struggle to provide their family’s needs. While women are mostly unaware of their personal and public capabilities, they often find themselves sat the forefront of nearly all local activism. Mahapach-Taghir’s struggle for women’s empowerment - fighting for women’s rights, knowledge, and leadership — grew organically from our emphasis on local leadership and is one of our most important goals.
Participating women not only learn about human rights and feminist issues but also gain experience initiating, coordinating, and carrying out communal campaigns. They are provided with the tools needed to develop local initiatives based on particular interests into national-scale campaigns in the field of education.
Mahapach-Taghir has also formed a joint nation-wide women’s leadership group, composed of women from our different marginalized Communities, both Jewish and Palestinian, in order to promote equal opportunities in education.
Mahapach-Taghir’s strive for women’s equality and empowerment is also embodied in organizational structure, methodology and culture, constantly considering the specific needs and challenges of women in our communities, on our staff and in our society.
Palestinian-Jewish partnership
In Mahapach-Taghir, we promote an alternative discourse that endorses familiarity and acceptance of the other’s narrative and needs, nurturing a positive perspective on identity, and encouraging inter-communal solidarity and partnership based on shared human rights values:
One of the first steps taken towards establishing the joint Arab-Jewish partnership is the Arab-Jewish Co-Directorship of Mahapach-Taghir that began in June 2006. This feminist and equal management model sends an important message to all of Mahapach-Taghir’s communities – that a Palestinian-Jewish partnership is not only possible, but one which gives the organization strength. We facilitate the establishment of a platform upon which Jewish-Palestinian partnership can be built for our women’s leadership groups and our students by exposing repressed narratives and by encouraging collaboration and teamwork. Through numerous workshops and lectures, we reacquaint Palestinian communities with their repressed and forgotten narrative and heritage, and we encourage dialogue and cooperation between Palestinian and Jewish communities on the basis of shared interests, joint action plans and common objectives.
Many concerns are shared by the women in all of Mahapach-Taghir’s communities and serve as a foundation that encourages partnership between Jews and Palestinians, bringing about an inclusive dialogue between communities that often identify one another as competing over the same resources. By building women’s communal leadership, Mahapach-Taghir aims not only to promote a feminist agenda but also to promote an inclusive Jewish-Palestinian women’s partnership based on a shared civic agenda of human rights.