Reimagining the Landscape of Religious Education

Professor Zehavit Gross is the dean of Faculty of Education at  Bar Ilan University in Israel. She is the Head of Graduate Program of Management and Development in Informal Education Systems and  holds the position of UNESCO Chair in Education for Human Values, Tolerance Democracy and Peace and is the Head of the Sal Van Gelder Center for Holocaust Instruction & Research, Faculty of  Education Bar-Ilan University. She was the past President of the Israeli Society for Comparative Education (ICES). In 2016, she was invited to the United Nations to participate and give an address in a special discussion on the future of Holocaust Education all over the world. Her main areas of specialization are peace education, interfaith and religious education and Holocaust education. Her research focuses mainly on socialization processes (religious, secular, feminine and civic) among adolescents. She is currently involved in four international research projects and is Honorary Research Associate at the University of Sydney (NSW). She is the recipient of the  2016 Ursula Thrush Peace Seed Award of the American Montessori Society (AMS) and a research fellow at the  The Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She is also the recipient of the 2017 Distinguished Scholar Award from the Religion& Education SIG at the American Education Research Association (AERA). She is the co- editor of the International Age Publishing (IAP) book series on Intercultural Education and International Perspectives. She has won an award (2018) from the Israeli Science Foundation (ISF) to conduct a research on The Construction of a Reflective Culture of Remembrance among Arab and Jewish Students in Israel .She is also the recipient of the Good Work Award (2017) from the Association of Moral Education (AME) and the 2019 Rector award of the Israeli Good Hope for an outstanding research project with practical implications on her special program on conflict management between Palestinian and Jewish students in higher education in Israel. She won recently (2020) the Israeli Hope in Higher Education Award from Ben Gurion University. Her latest publication is Migrants and Comparative Education: Call to Re/Engagement (Brill/Sense, 2020) , Her book together with Prof. Suzanne Rutland entitled: Special Religious Education in Australia and Its Value to Contemporary Society was published by SPRINGER in 2021. She is the recipient of  the 2022 NSW Premier Award for Outstanding Contribution to Religious Education in Australia both in Theory and Practice.