“Education Week” (17 – 24 May) was an important time for The Abraham Fund Initiatives and its impact on national education in Israel. During the week, Dadi Korem, Director of the Language as a Cultural Bridge Initiative, presented the programme to an audience of various professionals in the field of education, and fellow coexistence education practitioners. During this conference, other coexistence educational programmes were presented in order to share ideas and lobby the government for the importance of national policy geared towards coexistence education.
The Language as a Cultural Bridge Initiative is a comprehensive educational program to establish the study of spoken Arabic and Arab culture as a compulsory subject in Jewish public schools throughout the Israeli educational system. The immediate goal is the acquisition of Arabic language skills by Jewish school children and a greater understanding of Arab culture. From this we expect to see attitudinal and behavioral changes amongst Jewish students, teachers, parents and principals that reflect a greater acceptance of and openness toward Arabs, their language, and their culture. Recognizing that the status of Arabic language and culture plays an essential role in promoting coexistence and equality, we aim to establish public legitimacy for Arabic language and culture.
In the current school year – with a critical mass of schools, a fully developed curriculum, an accompanying interactive website, and a national teachers training mechanism in place – the initiative, which began as a pilot programme in 2005 with 15 Jewish elementary schools in northern Israel, has reached full capacity and is moving from the “laboratory” phase into the “stabilization” phase. We now work with 100 schools and 10 000 students.
In this stage, while embedding the Ya Salaam programme [The unique curriculum designed specifically for the programme, that includes interactive websites and text books] in schools, cultivating its quality, and creating continuity of Arabic language instruction between elementary school and junior high schools, we intend to focus on increasing the commitment of programme partners in local authorities and the Ministry of Education; the evaluation; and significant Advocacy actions to promote the Initiative’s goals.
Saeda, a teacher in the program, commented on the programme’s commencement.
“I began working as a sort of fill-in teacher, teaching Arabic lessons occasionally, in schools that wished to hire me. Later I finally found a job with one school, but the curriculum was still in disarray. With the advent of the “Ya Salaam” Curriculum I was able to better teach the classes and the students became much more receptive. I began teaching for the Language as a Cultural Bridge programme of the Abraham Fund Initiatives on a full-time basis, and I have seen with my own eyes the attitudinal transformation these students go through. Even though some students were very hard to deal with, the programme is designed to help them better accept it, even if some take more time than others. The seeds of hatred and discrimination grow deep, and some of those that at first didn’t want anything to do with the course turned out to be my best students.”
One of Saeda’s students is clearly a fan of this initiative, commenting, “The class is really fun, we get to play games, and we learn things while playing the games.”
The ways that the children are able to connect with the language has proven to be very successful. Stories taken from Arab lore are also seen in traditional Jewish stories, allowing the children a plane on which to relate to one another. Many Jewish students return from meeting Arab students with positive attitudes, established friendships, and newfound knowledge about “the other”. One young girl even came back to Saeda requesting that her teacher write down in transliteration (Arabic written in Hebrew letters) a series of questions and answers so that she could communicate with an Arab girl living in her neighborhood! Examples like these would not have been possible without such a programme, that is to say, without access to a colloquial Arabic teacher – and to take it one step further and perhaps more importantly, the desire to communicate would most likely be absent were it not for the special programme.
To see a video about the Language as a Cultural Bridge Initiative, click here and click on ‘download now’.
Thanks to Media Line for the image used in the newsletter.
