Grace Feuerverger knows that children bring many languages and cultures to the classroom. Her job? To train teachers to listen.
Feuerverger’s mission is to teach peace, something she learned many years ago in a classroom in Neve Shalom, also known as Wahat al-Salam, a village established in Israel some 35 years ago by a group of Jews and Palestinian Arabs.
“Beginning in 1990, I spent big chunks of time there for nine years as an ethnographer doing research,” she says. “The experience saved my life.”
Today, Feuerverger is a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. She lives in Berkeley part of each year with her husband.
Her experiences “teaching and learning peace” in Neve Shalom, as well as growing up with parents who were Holocaust survivors, led Feuerverger to write two books and to make a shift in career. “I know my life is meant to inspire teachers — and anyone interested — to provide a good education for children coming from places in the world at war,” she says.
Feuerverger’s work in Israel focused on two schools where Jewish and Arab teachers taught Arab and Jewish students together.
“I was interviewing people in the midst of conflict, feeling their anger and rage and pain, their worry and anxiety. Over time, I began to share my story with them,” Feuerverger says. “That was the first time I had ever done that in a public space, and it was a huge moment for me.”
Two books came from her experiences in Israel: “Oasis of Dreams: Teaching and Learning Peace in a Jewish-Palestinian Village in Israel” in 2001 and “Teaching, Learning and Other Miracles” in 2007. Feuerverger also has written more than 100 scholarly articles and has won numerous awards for her work on global peace and literacy initiatives.
“In the books, I say that education will always be about compassion, about uplifting the human spirit, about allowing students to feel they have dignity. Those are words that are missing in education today in the U.S., where everything is about test scores,” Feuerverger says.
Growing up in Montreal, Feuerverger adored the cosmopolitan city and the French Canadian culture. “Our neighborhood offered me a window to a future I didn’t know existed,” she recalls. “Because of the Holocaust, I was deprived of a big family. My parents were emotionally broken people after what they had been through, and I was brought up in a bleak, difficult environment. When I saw all the joy and vitality in the homes of our French Canadian neighbors, I found a way to survive.”
She earned a Ph.D. in education from the University of Toronto after studying at several universities around the world, including U.C. Berkeley. She met her husband, Andrey Feuerverger, in Berkeley, and their appreciation for the East Bay city led them to keep a home there.
An invited member of the Canadian Commission for the United Nations’ Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, Feuerverger teaches graduate courses she developed, including ones on multiculturalism, language and children’s literature.
“I want to open the minds of all teachers about the complexities of children made vulnerable by immigration or war,” Feuerverger says. “I want to open their minds to the wonderful assets these children bring to the classroom.”