Higher Education Resisting Settler Colonial Transfer in Palestinian Bethlehem

This article analyzes the perceptions and actions of Palestinian faculty and administrators at colleges and universities in Palestinian Bethlehem. We explore the meaning of higher educational practices and structures under settler colonial conditions of gradual dispossession of ancestral land. The physical conditions and policies of occupation and settler colonialism create a hostile epistemological environment for Palestinian people and bodies of knowledge. Within the knowledge production/distribution environment of higher education, there are ways in which institutions recreate or resist oppression. Participants in this study described their aspirations for students, the challenges they perceive that their students face, and their efforts to help students resist forces to weaken connection to land and knowledge. Finding that Palestinian educators seek to nurture student commitments to remain rooted to the land, this article surfaces the notion of adaptive pedagogies and epistemological resistance.