Launching Educators for Liberation

Last week, we rolled out the first session of our Educators for Liberation Programme,  a new branch of our work dedicated to building power and nurturing communities’ abilities to access principled, accurate, reflective liberatory education on the Palestinian struggle from wherever they are located. Since launching the invitation for submissions in mid-June, we received over 60 applications from people worldwide.

It was an inspiring and grounding start, bringing together nearly 25 participants from Britain, Lebanon, India, Ireland, Egypt, Mexico and beyond, who will be coming together every week for the next 5 weeks to co-learn on how to support Palestinian liberation and other struggles for justice through facilitating community learning spaces rooted in transformation. As one participant shared: 

“It has been inspiring to hear each other’s activist origin stories; the myriad life experiences that have mobilised this group of people toward engaging with this cause in their own way. Intersectionality takes on a concrete quality in these talks. I know I’m about to learn a lot.”

The first session that we led provided a brief historical overview on Political Education & Palestine, both past and present, explored how censorship is taking place today, and the importance of political education for our movements. Some of the activities we facilitated engaged in collective discussions on which movements have influenced our own struggles, how they inform our strategies and thinking, and who we learn from. 

Reflecting on the first session, another participant described it as:

“A thoughtful, caring, intentional and focused session that supported participants to explore the role of education in Palestine liberation work.”

By the end of this year’s programme, we will have over 50 people globally who will not only have deeper knowledge of what political education is as an ongoing liberatory practice, and the ability to lead on delivering our ‘Reframing Palestine’ & ‘Communications’ training to their networks, and will be equipped to train up another 5 people each within their community to become liberatory educators within the next year.

We look forward to checking back in next week after we roll out the second session of the programme.