Personal story as passport: Storytelling in border pedagogy

The Coexistence Workshop is a course in the teacher education program at an Israeli university. Its purpose is to promote the ability of prospective teachers to educate their pupils for a democratic society in which diversity is honored and coexistence becomes a reality. Teaching the Coexistence Workshop allows me to explore the usefulness of personal storytelling in learning about diversity and enabling students to become border crossers. The concept of border pedagogy (Freire, Giroux) speaks to issues of social justice and equality among groups divided in very concrete ways by the powerful but often invisible borders of race, social and economic class, gender and, in this case, ethnic-national identity. I examine the experience of border-crossing afforded by the Coexistence Workshop through an account of selected events, interrogating and interpreting this account by way of a discussion of the requirements of border pedagogy in the work of Giroux. My purpose is to elucidate some of the concrete meanings that the metaphor of border-crossing points to in the Israeli context, to gain insights for a pedagogy of difference in teacher education, and to illustrate some of the possibilities of mapping out terrains of commonality, connection and shared concern.