Teacher Training & Enrichment
Introduction
Based on the ‘best practices’ of the CCECH's twenty three years of experience in the School-Communities Pairing Programmes, we have designed courses to run in partnership with Teacher Training Colleges or Municipal Departments of Education. Jewish and Arab, Israeli and Palestinian, participants are provided with an opportunity of working through the fragility of daily life together, learning how folklore can be used as a tool in multicultural education, co-existence education, conflict resolution and peace studies.
Course Goals
Arab and Jewish educators learn how the exciting mix of home-cultures in their classrooms can be used to enhance mutual respect between diverse ethnic, religious and cultural groups. Harnessing folklore as a tool in co-existence education, participants learn how to bring Jewish and Arab school-communities together, seeing parents and grandparents as educational resources, who come to work with the pupils in school settings as tradition-bearers and folk-artists. The potential impact of this work reaches beyond each year's participating teachers, into the communities of the pupils with whom they will work.
Course Objectives
- To develop participants' skills in identifying and utilising the educational resources in the cultural diversity of every class-community;
- To develop partnerships between Jewish, Moslem and Christian educators in order to implement active co-existence programmes between their own school-communities.
Course Content
Themes include: the use of folklore in multicultural and co-existence education; ethnographic research methods for collecting cultural traditions; strategies for bringing parents and grandparents into classrooms as tradition-bearers and folk-artists; and methods for designing and implementing joint activities between diverse populations. These courses may include a practicum in which participants design their own activities.
Teacher Training Course
From 2004-2019 CCECH staff taught Researching Home Culture as a Tool for Co-existence Education as one of the courses offered by the Multi-cultural Project of Kaye Academic Teacher Training College, Beersheba, to 50 Bedouin and Jewish student-teachers each year. Learning about each other's cultures enables these students to develop empathetic, challenging and personal dialogues.
