Stating that healing from the disease of colonization starts with reclaiming learning as a biological ability, which he consider to be the most distinctive characteristic of humans, Munir talks about his journey in pedagogy from the 1970’s to today. With early influences of Khaili al-Sakkakini’s methodologies and through the seventies he was teaching mathematics at Birzeit University and working with schools in the West Bank region, introducing new curricula. During the first Palestinian intifada [1] when Israel closed all schools, universities, and other institutions for 4 years, he founded Tamer Institute for Community Education, which stressed learning environments where people learned without being taught.

He started using the concept of mujaawarahs [2] in the early seventies. These later formed the backbone of the first intifada where young people on their own formed hundreds of neighbourhood committees in the West Bank and Gaza Strip regions.  In 1997 he became a visiting scholar to Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies and established the Arab Education Forum, which he then directed for ten years. During these years he travelled to many countries from India to the Middle East to Latin America and encountered important organisation and individuals like C.K Ranju, Gustavo Esteva and Ivan Illich, with whom he shared ideas on decolonial methodologies.

In 2007, he went back to Palestine and worked mainly in refugee camps rather than in universities building on his pedagogical vision, which rests on the three pillars of mujaawarah, wellness, and nurturing soils.