Edutopia - August/September 2008 - (Page 52)

learns as the w rld As Others See Us In Macedonia, a radical approach to teaching tolerance brings healing to students who live together but are worlds apart. By Erla Zwingle here are two sides to every coin, or so we’re told. But in much of the world, where war, suffering, and hatred have instilled suspicion, mistrust, and fear, this helpful little proverb doesn’t get much use. That’s because survival depends on clear distinctions (us versus them) and a powerful sense of being right, or of having been wronged—precisely the attitudes that can make ethnic tolerance pointless, and therefore impossible. Violeta Petroska-Beska and Mirjana Najcevska wanted to see if they could turn the coin over. Petroska-Beska is a professor of psychology and Najcevska is a professor of law, vocations that serve them well as codirectors of the Center for Human Rights and Con⇓ict Resolution, in Skopje, Macedonia. Like many other Balkan nations, Macedonia is the complex result of clashing histories; since gaining independence from the former Yugoslavia in 1991, the country has been trying to achieve a cultural balance among its major ethnic components, primarily Christian Macedonians and Muslim Albanians. “Albanians see themselves as being deprived of their own country,” Petroska-Beska explains. “On the other hand, you have Macedonians who feel deprived because they aren’t recognized as a nation by neighboring Bulgaria and Greece. So both ethnic communities have their grievances, but neither ever thinks of how this division affects the other.” In 2006, the two educators developed an experimental approach to teaching Macedonian history so unusual that it has proved almost as dif⇒cult for teachers to accept as it is for their students. Taking an idea that originated in Israel at the Peace Research Institute, and aided by a grant from the United States Institute of Peace, they worked with committed history teachers and colleagues from Macedonia’s Institute of National History to develop a framework for introducing high school students to the point of view of the community they had been brought up to regard as “the other.” T Balkan Barriers The need for such an initiative becomes clear immediately if you open any history of the Balkans covering the past thousand years. When you consider that this region was dominated by the Ottoman Empire for ⇒ve centuries, that the present Macedonia has at various times been commingled with Bulgaria, Albania, Greece, and Serbia, that it’s had a series of of⇒cial languages and two frequently incompatible religions— Orthodox Christianity and Islam—you begin to grasp how daring it is for teachers to suggest to students that “we” see things “their” way. To the point that the two groups lived together more or less peacefully, PetroskaBeska responds, “we say there was no con⇓ict, but the two groups were living in parallel worlds. There was no communication. You could ⇒nd neighbors who were friends, but who had almost no mutual interests.” “Children had absolutely different knowledge of the same things,” she adds. “Not the same event from different perspectives, but two different stories altogether.” Every phrase here carries its own ethnocentric, emotional payload. For instance, a Macedonian would normally believe that the “Ottoman Empire brought only suffering, nothing positive,” she says. “When you talk about Turks, you talk about ‘occupation.’ But when you talk about Slavs, you talk about ‘peaceful settlement,’ as if it was empty space they came to.” So Petroska-Beska and Najcevska edited a workbook entitled Narratives in Our Histories. Each page covers one historical event, but one part of the page relates the Macedonian version, and the other tells the Albanian side. They decided on three key subjects: Religions in the Ottoman Empire, Division of the Macedonian (or Albanian) Ethnic Territory 1878–1919, and Macedonians (or Albanians) in the Second World War. “The point was, we wanted Albanians to see that Macedonians were also divided,” Petroska-Beska says. “It’s not true that only Albanians suffered for being GETTY 52 EDUTOPIA AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2008

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Edutopia - August/September 2008

Edutopia Contents Up Front Feedback Dispatches Sage Advice Ask Ellen Head of Class Cool Schools Design: Building on Disaster What's Next Full-Service Schools In the Trenches Moral Aptitude Serious Gaming Behaveyourself.com Media Is the Message The Way of the Wiki A Match Made in Cyberspace Hail to the New Chief Rise of the Robots Disrupting Class As Others See Us Heart & Soul Pop Quiz: Moby

Edutopia - August/September 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.