A PRAXIS Ireland–Palestine Partnership Resource
The Right to Learn
Education, Technology and Solidarity in the Context of Genocide
A third-level Global Citizenship and Development Education resource based on the PRAXIS Ireland – Palestine partnership. It connects the destruction of education in Palestine with questions of educational rights, digital power, open learning, partnership and responsible solidarity.
About this resource
Education is more than a building or a platform
Education is a right, a social relationship and a way communities hold knowledge across generations.
When learners and educators are killed; schools, universities and libraries are destroyed; archives and laboratories are lost; movement is restricted; and electricity and communications are cut, the harm reaches far beyond interrupted classes. It attacks an educational ecosystem and a people’s ability to create, preserve and transmit knowledge.
This resource was developed for lecturers, tutors, professional staff and students in education, law, human rights, global development, politics, digital learning, technology, media, arts and the social sciences. It can support a single seminar, two longer workshops or a short module.
A note on language and legal status
The resource uses the term genocide because it reflects the analysis of the Palestine partnership team and the finding reported by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry in September 2025. The International Court of Justice proceedings in South Africa v. Israel remain a distinct legal process. Its provisional-measures orders are binding but are not a final judgment on the merits.
Date note: The legal and evidential framing in the downloadable resource was checked to 18 August 2026. Time-sensitive figures and case status should always be checked before teaching or publication.
Education in the context of genocide
Six dimensions of an educational ecosystem
A buildings-only account cannot show the full educational meaning of destruction. The resource invites learners to examine six connected dimensions.
1. People
Children, students, educators, researchers, librarians, technicians, families and community knowledge-holders.
2. Places and systems
Schools, universities, libraries, laboratories, arts spaces, qualifications, governance and finance.
3. Knowledge and memory
Curricula, books, archives, records, research, oral histories, cultural heritage and data.
4. Material conditions
Safety, shelter, food, water, health, psychosocial support, electricity, devices, time and connectivity.
5. Freedom and mobility
The ability to reach, teach, learn and research without attack, detention, censorship, siege or forced displacement.
6. Agency and futurity
A people’s capacity to name their world, create knowledge, imagine a future and decide what education is for.
Scholasticide and sophicide
Scholasticide names the systematic destruction of education and academic capacity: institutions, infrastructure, archives, resources, students, teachers and intellectual life.
Sophicide reaches further towards the destruction of Indigenous knowledge traditions and the people who carry them. These terms should be used to organise evidence and responsibility, not merely as dramatic labels.
The partnership story
Learning to listen and allowing partners to change the plan
The PRAXIS Palestine partnership brought colleagues at University College Cork into collaboration with Birzeit University and a wider network of Palestinian and Irish educators during a period shaped by genocide, occupation, restricted movement, destruction of infrastructure and profound inequality of resources.
The Irish team initially proposed examining the “dark side” of artificial intelligence, including its use in surveillance, targeting and oppression. Birzeit colleagues identified a more immediate priority: how AI and digital education might support educational continuity, quality and teacher learning.
The project changed direction. That pivot became one of the partnership’s most important Global Justice Education lessons.
What the team did
Completed
Needs assessment
Online conversations identified priorities including AI and academic integrity, transparent GenAI expectations, Moodle integration, digital wellbeing, Arabic Open Educational Resources and access under unreliable connectivity.
Delivered
AI in Higher Education webinar
A cross-institutional webinar for Birzeit colleagues on 24 March 2026 addressed AI, academic integrity, assessment, Moodle, digital wellbeing and classroom practice.
Completed
Educational resource directory
The team compiled and shared digital competency, AI literacy, online teaching and open-education resources with Birzeit colleagues.
In development when reported
OpenEduSumoud
A Moodle-based proof of concept for teacher learning, OER design and sharing, translation, peer collaboration and low-connectivity learning.
Purchased but not yet assembled or distributed when reported
Three InfoSpots
The proposed low-cost digital hubs were intended to make locally stored educational content available through a local Wi-Fi network when external internet access is interrupted. The team report was clear that assembly, delivery, installation, training and local governance remained to be completed.
Difficulties were part of the learning
Activity began later than intended; the original lead became unavailable; leadership had to be redistributed; fund transfers were difficult; the scope expanded; and summer schedules affected participation. The Lajee Center withdrew following slow and uncertain progress.
The team’s candour matters. Ethical intentions do not make a partnership equitable. Pace, reliability, communication, budgets, translation, maintenance and delivery are part of justice. A partnership can reproduce inequality by consuming a partner’s time even when no harm is intended.
Technology, power and educational continuity
Technology can enable harm and possibility
The partnership did not replace a critical account of AI with an optimistic one. It asked who controls a technology, whose knowledge and language it recognises, what infrastructure it assumes, what data it consumes, who can refuse it and who is placed at risk.
Ask about power
Can a tool support translation, access or feedback while also intensifying surveillance, bias, commercial extraction or unequal treatment?
Design for real conditions
A useful resource should work on a phone, use small files, offer printable or offline alternatives, support Arabic and local curricula, and avoid requiring costly platforms.
Begin with governance
An offline hub needs local decisions about content, access, energy, safeguarding, privacy, repair, moderation, software updates and maintenance—not only hardware.
OpenEduSumoud and the GHOSHEH model
Sumoud is commonly translated as steadfastness. Here it honours Palestinian persistence, educational agency and collective life. It must not be used to suggest that people should simply endure preventable harm.
Dr Dua Ghosheh Wahbeh’s model begins with learners and context, designs participatory activities, builds in formative assessment and shares openly for adaptation and peer improvement. Its significance is that Palestinian educators and learners are positioned as knowledge producers, not recipients of imported content.
Use in third-level teaching
Three activities to begin with
The full resource contains eight activities. These three can be adapted for education, law, social sciences, technology, human rights and interdisciplinary programmes.
Activity 1 · 45–60 minutes
Map the right-to-education ecosystem
Give each group one of the six dimensions: people; places and systems; knowledge and memory; material conditions; freedom and mobility; or agency and futurity.
- Identify what this dimension contains and how it connects with the other five.
- Use reliable evidence to examine what happens when it is attacked or removed.
- Name what a buildings-only account would miss.
- Identify one educational, institutional or public responsibility arising from the analysis.
Critical question: What is destroyed when a society loses not only classrooms, but educators, records, language, mobility, relationships and the capacity to imagine a future?
Activity 2 · 50 minutes
The project pivot: who defines the priority?
Present the partnership case: an Irish university team proposes studying AI-enabled oppression and surveillance. Palestinian university partners identify educational continuity and constructive digital practice as the more urgent priority.
- Identify who holds funding, institutional authority, contextual knowledge and exposure to risk.
- Decide what should change: aims, methods, budget, timeline, outputs, authorship and accountability.
- Draft three partnership principles that would make partner influence real.
- Apply the principles to a partnership or project familiar to the group.
Critical question: Is a partnership participatory if partners are invited to contribute but cannot change its central question?
Activity 3 · 75–90 minutes
Design the smallest useful low-connectivity resource
Ask teams to create one small learning resource for someone using a shared phone with intermittent electricity and internet access.
- Begin with the learner, context, language, risks and a single realistic learning outcome.
- Choose a small, editable and accessible format: text, compressed audio, purposeful images or a printable page.
- Provide an offline alternative and avoid unnecessary collection of personal data.
- Use Palestinian and locally relevant knowledge; add a clear open licence where appropriate.
- Test the draft with another group acting as critical friends, then revise it.
Critical question: Does the design expand local educational agency, or create another dependency on an external institution or platform?
The complete resource also includes activities on AI harm and possibility, the GHOSHEH model, accountable offline learning hubs, critical source inquiry, and moving from solidarity statements to responsible action.
Facilitating difficult learning
Teaching genocide while it is happening
Build the learning carefully
- Name and historicise the context rather than reducing it to an unexplained “conflict”.
- Distinguish legal rulings, UN reports, journalism, testimony and advocacy.
- Begin with Palestinian educators, students, scholars, artists and organisations as knowledge producers.
- Connect structures, institutions and material conditions with lived consequences.
- Offer content notes, alternatives, pauses and purposeful closing activities.
- End with agency, responsibility and proportionate action.
Do not reproduce harm
- Do not simulate genocide, bombardment, famine, forced displacement, checkpoints or bereavement.
- Do not use graphic images as a shortcut to engagement.
- Do not require personal disclosure or ask affected learners to educate the room.
- Do not turn people’s right to exist, learn or be safe into a classroom debate.
- Do not permit antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Palestinian racism or other group hatred.
- Do not stop at empathy: connect feeling with evidence, analysis and responsible action.
Educational resource trail
Continue the inquiry
Rights, genocide and education
International Court of Justice: South Africa v. Israel
UN Commission of Inquiry: 2025 legal analysis
OHCHR: UN experts on scholasticide in Gaza
Teaching, open learning and digital justice
INEE Minimum Standards for Education
UNESCO: Teaching about genocide and violent pasts
UNESCO Recommendation on Open Educational Resources
The GHOSHEH model: open-access article
UNESCO guidance on generative AI in education
Download the complete resource
The Right to Learn
The full teaching resource includes eight classroom activities, facilitator guidance, assessment and research ideas, practical checklists, educational links and complete references.
Authorship, credits and acknowledgement
Written and compiled by: Dr Gertrude Cotter.
Partnership basis: Based on research and materials developed through the PRAXIS Ireland–Palestine partnership and the PRAXIS Project Partner Report: University College Cork & Birzeit University, Palestine, covering February 2025–July 2026.
Palestine partnership team: Elaine O’Mahony; Christine Chasaide; Carolanne Mahony; Dr Simon Woodworth; Dr Dua Wahbeh Ghosheh; Dr Kareema Ali; and Dr Anwar Abdel Razeq, Dean of Education at Birzeit University.
OpenEduSumoud proof-of-concept contributors: Ian Cullinane; Jerry Deasy; Tom O’Mara; and Eoin O’Sullivan.
Webinar and resource contributors: Loretta Goff; Sarah Thelen; Sheila McDonald; Oonagh O’Brien; Jim O’Mahony; Eman Abboud; Harun Siljak; Tom O’Mara; Cliodhna O’Callaghan; and the wider network acknowledged in the partnership report.
Partner institutions: University College Cork and Birzeit University, alongside a wider network of contributors in Palestine and Ireland.
PRAXIS project coordination: Dr Gertrude Cotter, University College Cork.
Funding acknowledgement: This work was supported by Irish Aid through the PRAXIS Project. Responsibility for the content rests with the author and contributors.
Suggested citation
Cotter, G. (2026) The Right to Learn: Education, Technology and Solidarity in the Context of Genocide. Cork: PRAXIS Project, University College Cork. Teaching resource based on the PRAXIS Ireland–Palestine partnership.
