Contestation as an innovative construct for conflict management and activist pedagogy

For the past 25 years, I have been facilitating dialogue groups between Arab and Jewish students on campus. In one of the classes, I asked each of the students to share with us something good that had happened to them during the week. Hiba, a veiled Arab student who was one of the nicest and most pleasant students in the class, stood up and asked if she could share something bad that happened to her during the week, and then she burst into tears. We tried to reassure her and she explained:

This week I was fired. I worked at the mall, at a store selling hats, bags and accessories. Earlier this week, a shopper came into the store who looked a little strange and started talking to me. He said to me: ‘Why should an Arab woman work in a Jewish mall?’ He was being provocative, but I decided to ignore him. I called my girlfriend on my mobile phone and spoke to her in Arabic. I was upset and told her what had happened. Two minutes later, he called the police and two policemen entered the store. The frightened shop owner ran up to them and asked what had happened and what they were doing there. They replied that they had received a call from a man who was in the store. The man approached us and said that he had called the police because I was talking on the phone in Arabic and I had a strange expression and he thought I was going to carry out a terrorist attack.

I asked the students in the class what they thought about the incident. The students were upset and expressed disgust at that person’s behavior, and there was a consensus in the class that it was inappropriate. The discussion on the subject could have ended at that point. All the participants were in agreement, and an atmosphere of unity was ostensibly created, which is good for starting a class, and that would have been that.