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The chapter presents four systemic cooperative learning (CL) long-term programs conducted in northern Israel, with Arabs and Jewish schools in mixed cities or neighboring communities. In each of those programs the teachers-educators expanded their roles implementing reforms based on cooperation. The first program extended the classic method of Group Investigation (GI) to Innovative Technology (IT) sites of learning. The second program expanded the "face to face" model of "The Six Mirrors of the Classroom" to classrooms using complex investigations in the open spaces and the highway of technology. The third broadened the role of teachers to become facilitators of a CL school-family partnership within the school and across schools. The fourth, formed a principals community of leaders, who based on cooperation transformed their vision, skills and knowledge to generate a vision of critical cooperative pedagogy aimed to empower and bring equality to the schools and the community at large.

This paper describes a communication project carried out between fourth grade pupils at Kibbutz Ma’agan Michael and Ayalon School in Tel Aviv. Pupils communicated with each other, once a week, via computer on subjects related to their social and personal worlds. Topics included presenting themselves, describing hobbies and collections, composing serial stories, dealing with personal and general conflicts, and exposing to each other different cultural elements, ceremonies and festivals on kibbutz and in the city.

Cooperative learning in schools is not a new idea. Deutsch’s theorizing, published in 1949, about cooperation and competition has become a foundation for much of the development and research on cooperation in education (Sharan, Hare, Webb, & Hertz-Lazarowitz, 1980; Slavin, 1983).

This book was written and edited as a project of the International Asso- ciation for the Study of Cooperation in Education (lASCE). It grew di- rectly out of the second conference of the lASCE, held at Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, in [uly 1982. The chapters in the book were originally presented in some form at the Provo conference, though most have been considerably revised since that time. This is the second book sponsored by the lASCE; the first, Cooperation in Education (Provo, Utah:Brigham Young University Press, 1980),edited by Shlomo Sharan, Paul Hare, Clark Webb, and Rachel Hertz-Lazarowitz, was based on the proceedings of the first conference of the IASCE in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1979. The IASCE is a group of educators interested in studying, devel- oping, or applying cooperative methods at various levels of the process of education. It includes researchers, teacher educators, teachers, and school administrators from more than a dozen countries.

Israel is a country of immigrants whose ethnic ties are roughly divided into two groups: Jews who emmigrated to Israel from the Muslim countries of the Middle East, Asia, and North Africa (referred to as Middle Eastern), and those who came from Europe, the Americas, and South Africa (referred to as Western). The integration of these two major ethnic groups is acknowledged to be one of the central problems confronting Israel’s educational system. The population of the country is roughly equally divided at present between the two groups. Research on various aspects of school desegregation in Israel has been extensively summarized in a recent volume (Amir & Sharan, 1984).

One of the primary institutions for socialization in society is the school. The entire school and classroom system can be viewed as a critical arena for the study and development of prosocial behavior. However, to date, a substantial amount of research and theoretical writing has accumulated concerning how parental childrearing at home, and other adult influences outside the school system, contribute to the development of positive behavior in children (Staub, 1978, 1979). In recent publications, several attempts have been made to apply theoretical concepts and laboratory findings to other social settings, especially to schools (Bar-Tal, 1978; Bar-Tal & Raviv, 1982; Harris, Eisenberg, & Carroll, 1982; Staub, 1981). The assumption is that a “teacher” replaces the “parent” in the socialization sequence and thus the same processes that enhance prosocial behavior in general are applicable to teacher-student relationships in the classroom. However, since there are very few research findings to support such an assumption, one may question its validity especially in light of the vast differences between “life in the classroom” (Jackson, 1968) and in the home environment.