AMQF’s Educational Research and Development Programme in Gaza and the Walid and Helen Qattan Science Education Project held a preparatory workshop for a number of UNRWA schoolteachers from Gaza that will be working on this year’s Science Days Festival. The workshop was held last Saturday in the city of Ramallah and was led by Samar Qirrish, one of the Project’s researchers, through video conference. Science Days 2016 is planned to be held coming October, on the theme “The Science of Matter”, in partnership with the Ramallah Municipality, the French-German Cultural Center and Al-Nayzak Organization.
The workshop was built around suggestions made earlier by the participating teachers. It started with a presentation of the teachers’ ideas around the festival’s theme and sub-themes, including the characteristics, compositions and interactions of matter and the study of such interactions – not only as chemical and natural phenomena, but also as ways to alter and adapt matter.
The workshop featured brainstorming sessions on the core nature and choice of the offered activities at the festival, as well as their connection to the wider international and Palestinian contexts, and the Gazan context in particular, whose environment and natural resources will be given special attention.
The teachers discussed each other’s suggestions from various angles, including issues of security and safety, complementarity of subjects, the involvement of students in planning and developing experiments, and the use of raw and basic materials that students can handle, process and carry with them to their own environments.
[AO1]A date would probably be less confusing