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How a Washington state teacher is bringing Palestine into high school classrooms
Linda Bevis wears many hats. She is a Washington state resident, an activist, a lawyer, a mother and a teacher.
And for the past few years, she’s worn a hat that combines many of her previous hats. The 53-year-old Bevis is the force behind the Palestine Teaching Trunk, a one-of-a-kind tool designed to bring Palestine into American high school classrooms.
Bevis’ project is springing into action at a time when the Palestine solidarity movement is growing in the face of spirited opposition–opposition that has also faced off against Bevis. The group StandWithUs has attacked Bevis, with members writing blog posts against her project. Bevis says that the group has pushed for a workshop on the trunk to be canceled.
In 2009, Bevis began work on the “trunk,” both a literal trunk full of educational materials and an online tool teachers can use. (The word “trunk” is often used in education circles to mean a collected group of materials for teaching on one topic.) Three years later, the Palestine Teaching Trunk was up and running. Its promise is to teach high school students about a topic that teachers normally don’t delve too deep into. Bevis’ materials detail how they align with state and national education standards.
The Palestine Teaching Trunk, Bevis says, is an initiative trying to educate Americans about Israel/Palestine and U.S. involvement with the conflict.
Linda Bevis.
“I think a lot of how the United States is viewed in the world has to do with how its involved with Israel/Palestine,” Bevis, who is active with the Seattle-based Palestine Solidarity Committee, told me over the phone. “So I think for students to actually understand anything about America’s foreign policy or anything about how other countries view us, or anything about why 9/11 happened, for instance, they need to understand something about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
Source: mondoweiss.net