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Community Education
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NISPED-AJEEC is dedicated to offering educational programs for children of all ages that meet the needs and traditions of the Arab-Bedouin community. Our staff and volunteers work together with community educators, parents and residents in the planning and running of these programs. NISPED-AJEEC's initiatives include early childhood day-care centers - Bet El-Umm Wal-Tifil (The House of the Mother and the Child) - educational activity centers in unrecognized villages for children of all ages and special summer camps and activities.
Please read below for more information about our past and present programs.
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Parents as Partners
In traditional Arab Bedouin society the mother was her children’s first and foremost teacher. However, as the traditional ways of life disappear, and women are increasingly isolated from the societal mainstream, mothers are at a loss as to how to provide their children with the necessary head-start for life in modern, urban society.
Parents as Partners is a holistic, community-based early childhood intervention program designed to meet the needs of mothers and their children from birth to age 3. The program combines elements derived from the community's own cultural traditions and life style with modern early childhood theory and practice.
Parents as Partners trains women from Arab Bedouin villages as paraprofessional early childhood counselors who then work in their own communities as peer teachers. During the first stage of the program, counselors meet with groups of mothers and their children twice weekly for a three-hour long program of discussions and activities. The time is divided between separate activities for mothers and for children and joint play activities. The program for mothers covers a wide range of topics: nutrition, health promotion and hygiene, accident prevention, family relations, developmental stimulation, behavior management, and the importance of play and literacy.
This stage is followed by the establishment of playschools for children between the ages of 1 1/2 to 3: the Bet El-Umm Wal-Tifil - The House of the Mother and the Child. These playschools serve as a natural extension of the home environment providing the child with developmentally-stimulating activities and attention that individual homes and parents cannot provide. The ‘Bet El-Umm Wal-Tifil’ operates five days weekly from 8 to noon and is run by a team of two paraprofessional counselors and a mother on daily rote.
Parents as Partners was launched as a pilot project in 2002 in the 'unrecognized' village of Abu Quidar. The first two Bet El-Umm Wal-Tifil were established in the spring of 2004. In the fall of 2004, the program was extended to additional unrecognized villages, where a newly-trained cadre of local paraprofessional counselors organized 10 groups of mothers and children.
The program continues to grow; today there are centers in operation in 14 communities.
The Bet El-Umm Wal-Tifil was recently recognized by the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor Early Childhood Division as a unique educational framework that meets the needs of the Arab Bedouin community, and as such, now enjoys government support. As our program grows, the Bet El-Umm Wal-Tifil are becoming cornerstones of early childhood education throughout the Arab Bedouin community.
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Educational Activity Centers in Unrecognized Villages
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This innovative pilot project, initiated in April 2006, provides an enriching, stimulating, accessible and safe after-school environment for children ages 4 to 8 in two unrecognized Arab Bedouin villages, Hashem Zane and Qassar el Sar, where no such services existed.
The playgrounds are located in a readily accessible public space in the village, selected for this purpose by the communities. Each playground consists of a large fenced-in play area and a small playing field. The play areas are equipped with safe playground equipment - swings, see-saws, slides, jungle gyms, sandbox, utilizing recycled materials such as tires, cable spools, and more. Adjacent to the playgrounds are tents that provide sheltered area for indoor play and enrichment activities.
The playgrounds are open daily after school hours, on weekends and during school breaks. Responsibility for operation of the program and care and maintenance of playgrounds are in the hands of a staff of specially trained men and women employed on a part-time basis, assisted by high school students from the community who are trained as junior counselors. During the academic year (November-June) AJEEC's Bedouin Volunteer Center deploys student volunteers to provide educational enrichment, tutoring and help with homework for children in need of assistance and coaching, while parents and other members of the community will be encouraged to volunteer their services to help in running the program.
The playgrounds and educational activity centers are designed and equipped to provide a wide range of activities suitable for both girls and boys of different ages and interests, both outdoor and indoor, within an area sufficiently large to provide ample room for free and easy movement.
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Parental Involvement in Kindergartens - A Past Project
Within the framework of Musharaka's projects - which are dedicated to the development of early childhood education and practices in the Arab-Palestinian society in Israel - we undertook this important project
Background to the Project
In the Arab Bedouin community, there has been little contact between the early childhood educational institutions and the parents of the children. This leadership training program for kindergarten teachers, a joint project developed by AJEEC, in partnership with the Ministry of Education and the Kaye Teachers' Training Seminar, works with teacher to enhance their abilities to act as change agents and to provide them with the skills to involve parents and the community as active partners in the educational process.
With the beginning of the school year in Fall 2006, Mrs. Nur Jaj Amar, AJEEC's project coordinator, met with 16 kindergarten teachers from Rahat, Laquiya, Segev Shalom, Hura and the unrecognized village of El Atrash. A number of the teachers had already begun involving parents in the kindergartens, with mothers taking turns helping out as kindergarten assistants, and fathers, helping with school and yard improvements.
In addition to work in the communities, AJEEC held four workshops in early 2007:
1. Working with a Community Orientation: How to involve parents? How do parents view the teacher and vice versa? What is the impact of parent involvement on the child? How can the kindergarten influence life in the Bedouin community?
2. Planning and Designing Parent Involvement Programs: How to involve parents in the educational process? Setting goals, anticipating difficulties and how to solve them. Planning projects: time-line, budget, who does what. How to involve parents in the planning process. How to measure success?
3. Parents and Children: Concentric circles of involvement: the parent, the child, the community. Mediated learning and parents as transmitters of knowledge and values. The effect of active parent involvement on the child.
4. Direct involvement of parents in the kindergardens: Planning and designing of projects that will directly involve parents: the importance of play; books and the library; preventing accidents in the home and health.
We also finalized preparation of the Hakiba - a project kit which includes sections on the following topics:
Bedouin Heritage
Stages of Development
Sensory Development and Stimulation
Working with Creative Materials and
Mediated Learning
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Swimming Classes for Bedouin Children
NISPED-AJEEC, together with The Center for Jewish Pluralism, ran a unique swimming program for boys and girls from the Arab-Bedouin community. Twenty boys from the village of Um Matnan and 20 girls from Rahat participated in a 16-session course, held in Omer. Mr. Rafi Alsana, from the Swimming with Dolphins school, supervised the course. The children also learned basics of physics from the world of water – hydrodynamics, mass, weights and more. Up to now, Arab-Bedouin children have had few opportunities to learn how to swim, often tragically resulting in deaths from drowning. We will be expanding this program to other villages and towns over the coming year.
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