01-11-2008
During November and December, QCERD had the pleasure of welcoming Professors André Mazzawi and Michelle Stack , both from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Professor Mazzawi held two in-depth workshops on new methods in educational research , focussing specifically on definitions of good practice and the role of the researcher's values and life experience in acquiring knowledge and analysing it.
Professor Stack worked with a number of teachers over a period of two days on media education and ways of collaboration between teachers and young people in producing media materials. How does the media reconstruct reality and how does this affect teaching practice? These questions laid the ground for a wonderfully enriching exploration of what media education actually entails and of the importance of developing a critical media education programme in schools that is in line with a truly democratic education system.
In parallel, the Gaza team ran a workshop with 15 school headmasters and supervisors on teaching ethics .
A highly successful workshop on 3D animation , given by animators Gary Rosborough and Jan Caspers, was held with a number of teachers from schools in the Ramallah and Al-Bireh area, as well as a group of girls from Silwad Secondary School. In mid-November Wasim Kurdi, QCERD Director, gave a two-day workshop on the use of storytelling in early childhood education attended by a number of kindergarten and early childhood teachers. In early December, the Drama Teachers' Forum shared with its members a number of new experiments during a one-day meeting, In addition, another seven fora held meetings in the Gaza Strip, including two with guest lecturers May Nayef and Nazhmi Al-Masri .
Last but not least, the Centre in Ramallah had the pleasure of hosting a fascinating lecture by Mohammad Batrawi on the Palestinian curriculum under the British Mandate , in which he made a detailed comparison between the learning conditions of Arabs and Jews during that period, especially the mechanisms of determining content and British censorship of the Arab text books in comparison to the Jewish ones.