Intercultural Music Teacher Education in Israel: Reimagining Religious Segregation Through Culturally Responsive Teaching

Abstract

This chapter is a result of a rare effort of interreligious dialogue between two colleagues in Israeli music teacher education – an Orthodox Jew and a devout Muslim. In this act of collegial sharing, intercultural conversation is used as an instrument for research. The documented effort to communicate respective culturally grounded perspectives to one another illuminates taken-for-granted norms and habits and expands respective understandings of cultural assumptions that currently underlie structures of religious segregation in Israeli music teacher education. Working to reimagine such structures, the authors question the possibility of inter-culturalism in the context of segregation. Tracing the constraints of cultural diversity further, considering policy and music teacher education, the authors re-imagine socio-religious segregation in Israeli music teacher education as an opportunity for culturally responsive teaching. The analysis and the envisioning are grounded in the experiences of the two authors as lecturers in two specialized segregated programs of music teacher education geared towards Arabic speaking populations and the Jewish Ultraorthodox community. Conclusions aspire towards cultural specificity within each community as a platform for future intercultural sharing that the authors believe can enrich Israeli society at large.