UPDATE: Michigan Educators Offered State PD Credit for Activist-Led “Teach Palestine” Workshop

UPDATE: This piece has been updated with the Michigan Department of Education’s response.

Michigan teachers can receive State Continuing Education Clock Hours (SCECH) by attending a “professional development” seminar on ‘how to teach about Palestine” hosted by the Arab American National Museum (AANM) along with Rethinking Schools, and Visualizing Palestine.

The free workshop is titled “Palestine In The Classroom.”

SCECH can be used towards the 150 professional development credits needed by teachers to renew or further their certifications and licenses issued through the Michigan Department of Education.

According to the Michigan Department of Education, SCECH’s are earned by attending professional development activities provided by SCECH sponsors and which have been approved by the Michigan Department of Education.

The AANM is an approved sponsor of SCECH professional development activities.

The NAVI K-12 Extremism Tracker has reached out to the Michigan Department of Education to clarify whether the Department did indeed approve of this workshop.

Educators received an email from Dave Serio, the Curator of Education at the Arab American National Museum, where the teacher training is to be held, advertising the workshop.

Rethinking Schools

NAVI K-12 Extremism Tracker has covered Rethinking Schools extensively.

Rethinking Schools describes itself as a

nonprofit publisher and advocacy organization dedicated to sustaining and strengthening public education through social justice teaching and education activism. Our magazine, books, and other resources promote equity and racial justice in the classroom. We encourage grassroots efforts in our schools and communities to enhance the learning and well-being of our children and to build a broad democratic movement for social and environmental justice.

Our Zinn Education Project — coordinated with Teaching for Change — has more than 100,000 educators who have registered to access our “people’s history” materials.

Rethinking Schools book, Teaching Palestine offers an unbalanced view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, downplays the Holocaust, erases the events of October 7th, and portrays the United States as complicit in genocide. Israel is portrayed as a racist, settler-colonial state.

Lessons in “Teaching Palestine” include role plays for students to “simulate” the “apartheid system” in Israel.

Another lesson by Rethinking Schools’ Managing Editor Adam Sanchez, “The United States and Palestine-Israel: Fifty Years of Choices (1956–2006),” asks students to “imagine… we had a government that cared about promoting equality, justice, and ending oppression.”

In describing student feedback to the lesson, which he has already taught in his classes, Sanchez:

concludes with a quote from a student that the lesson helped her “understand the frustrations that led to Oct. 7” and another who said that “[t]he U.S. helped Israel ruin so many lives and helped kill countless children and civilians. People need to understand this as the buildup to Oct. 7” (Teaching Palestine, 54). (emphasis added)

Rethinking Schools’ magazine includes an article called “Don’t Stop Teaching About Gaza,” and one titled “What’s Missing In Holocaust Education” from CodePink’s Marcy Winograd:

And yet the common approach in K–12 Holocaust education is to teach the Holocaust as an isolated and unique horror. Students in middle or high school are generally not taught the nightmare that followed the immigration of Jewish refugees to Palestine, where Zionist militias massacred Palestinians, burned their olive trees, and erased Arabic names from streets and towns. The failure to teach the trauma of Palestinian displacement and dispossession sanitizes the violent establishment of a Jewish state on Palestinian graves and erases Jewish voices of resistance to the colonization of Palestine. In a comparative curriculum, students could learn of the cycle of abuse — Germany exterminating Jews, Zionist militias slaughtering Palestinians — and the inherent danger in a state defined by ethnic superiority.

…

While students throughout the United States read Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl to imagine themselves cooped up in an attic for two years, hiding from Nazi storm troopers, few learn of the Nakba. Even fewer are taught the Holocaust and the Nakba simultaneously or back-to-back, not as isolated historical chapters but as interlinked tragedies of scapegoating and ethnic cleansing that continue to this day.

A reading of Anne Frank could be followed by the story of Hind Rajab, a 5-year-old Palestinian girl who dreamed of becoming a dentist.

…

In his chapter in The Holocaust and the Nakba detailing the Kowalskis’ story that began this article, Confino asks us to imagine a “counterfactual” history, a “what if” scenario: “What would have happened if the Jews, whose justification for settling in the land of Israel derived from the Bible, would have exercised a policy in 1948 based on the principle ‘What is hateful to you, do not do to others’[sic]?”

Now that’s a question for classroom discussion (emphasis added).

A Rethinking Schools workshop shared with the NAVI K-12 Extremism Tracker opened with an introduction by Sanchez and Kassouf. Sanchez discussed the “livestreamed genocide” which motivates these workshops. In his opening remarks, Sanchez said that “Zionist Jewish voices” say that :

all this began with October 7th, the Al Aqsa Flood, breaking through the barrier in Gaza and the deaths that occurred on that day. And that is a narrative that really has taken hold in western media. 1200 were killed that day, 251 hostages. That is the emphasis of where to begin the clock. And we really wanted to start with this Jewish Voice for Peace statement that talks about how reality is shaped by when you start the clock.

Suzanna Kassouf:

So we’re going to be doing this lesson by my, I’m honored to say, my mentor and friend Bill Bigelow. Actually, he tested this lesson in my ninth grade social studies classroom in early 2024 in January. So yeah, like Adam said, reality is shaped by when you start the clock. So if you start the clock on October 7th, 2023, you’re going to have a very different story than if you go back further in time. One thing Bill did when he came into my classroom was he brought a rubber bullet and he actually drops the rubber bullet on the table. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a rubber bullet before. I hadn’t. It makes this sound like a hard metal thump. It’s very intense. And he collected that bullet when he was in Gaza in 1989, the year that I was born.

And during that time, the IDF was shooting into schools and he collected that bullet from a school that a child brought to him. But we’re not going to even start back in 1989. We’re going to zoom all the way back to the birth of Zionism.

We’re going to be doing a super condensed version of this lesson. When I did this version in my classroom, it took five 90 minute classes (emphasis added).

Rethinking Schools’ material is so biased that New Jersey Rep.Josh Gottheimer called on the New Jersey Education Association to cancel the Teaching Palestine seminar.

Visualizing Palestine

Visualizing Palestine produces posters and graphics to “visually communicate Palestinian experiences to provoke narrative change.” The posters accuse Israel of genocide and contain other libelous statements.

Visualizing Palestine has received grants from the Sparkplug Foundation, the family foundation of Emmaia Gelman, the activist behind the Drop the ADL Campaign and the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism.

Nora Lester Murad is on the board of Visualizing Palestine.

On October 7, 2023, Murad claimed that it offered a “glimmer of hope” for Palestinians and shared the hashtag #GazaUnderAttack. On October 17, 2023, Murad filmed herself tearing down posters of the hostages held by Hamas, claiming that they were a distraction to “the genocide.”

NAVI K-12 Extremism Tracker has reached out to the Michigan Department of Education for comment on the following:

1) The SCECH overview on the department website states that: “SCECH are hours earned by attending professional development activities provided by SCECH Sponsors and approved by the Michigan Department of Education.”

Did the Michigan Department of Education approve the “Palestine In The Classroom” workshop?

• If so, which office or division within the Department is responsible for reviewing and approving SCECH-eligible professional development activities?

• What criteria does the Department use when determining whether a professional development activity is eligible for SCECH approval?

2) If the Department did approve this activity, at the time of approval, was it aware that the AANM was partnering with Rethinking Schools and Visualizing Palestine?

3) Is the Michigan Department of Education aware that Rep. Josh Gottheimer has criticized Rethinking Schools for its anti-Israel bias and materials which justify October 7, present inaccurate or incomplete information, and depict Israel as a racist and settler colonial state?

4) Has the Department reviewed materials produced by Rethinking Schools or Visualizing Palestine in connection with this workshop, or more generally? If so, does the Department consider those materials to meet the standards required for SCECH-eligible professional development?

The Michigan Department of Education gave the following response:

The Michigan Department of Education values continued learning for teachers and provides a process through which educators can earn state continuing education clock hours. Sponsors of professional learning courses can apply for their courses to be eligible for state continuing education clock hours. The Arab American National Museum is an approved sponsor and has an approved application. State law does not give the department the authority to approve the content of professional development that’s eligible for state continuing education clock hours.