What is Educational Empowerment

Museum in a Suitcase is a mobile museum dedicated to the voice and tradition of the Ethiopian Jewish community in Israel, whose culture and stories are barely heard. By using critical pedagogy, the “Museum” seeks to empower the pupils of the community and reexamine the social positions of underprivileged groups in the Israeli society. This innovative pedagogical practice was examined using ethnographic fieldwork in 4 workshops that took place in a 4th grade class in an underprivileged school in Israel that includes pupils of Ethiopian origin. The findings suggest that the educational process the pupils underwent brought on a positive change in the ways in which the Jewish Ethiopian culture was presented. However, its perception as peripheral and secondary to the hegemonic culture remained unchanged. It seems that it is precisely this process, and in particular the expression and place given to the Jewish Ethiopian culture in the class, that reflected and reproduced its peripheral status. These processes expose the existence of a gap between the assumptions of critical pedagogy and the results it yields, and therefore necessitate further research that will examine in depth both the complex ethno-class contexts in which this educational model seeks to operate, and its ideological-educational assumptions.