“From Exclusion to Inclusion” – if only, amen, inshallah!
The conference “From Exclusion to Inclusion” was held on Tuesday 14/01/20, and was attended by 400 TEC students from colleges in all population sectors of Israeli society.
Exclusion is commonly discussed in the context of women’s exclusion, but exclusion occurs in multiple contexts in Israeli society, and, true to form, our conference engaged with the transition from exclusion to inclusion in a multicultural setting.
The conference began with greetings from Dr. Arielle Friedman, head of the Forums and Think Tanks Division at MOFET Institute, Dr. Doron Lederer, coordinator of Field Programs at MOFET, and Dr. Leslie Bash, a guest lecturer from England and Secretary General of the International Association for Intercultural Education (IAIE). Incidentally, this organization is scheduled to convene here in Israel next year, but all in good time.
The students then split into the small multicultural work groups, about six students per group from different colleges and population sectors, in which they participate in the TEC Center’s year-long collaborative intercollegiate course. The groups, which collaborated online until now, met for the first time this year for about two hours of joint work, during which each group prepared learning products associated with the content of the course.
The students photographed their products, and also took a selfie of the group, and posted it on CollagoRate, a collaborative collage app. CollagoRate was specially developed for TEC Center by Yuval Shafriri, an educational technologist engaged in incorporating technologies in unique learning projects. The collage consists of 9X9 squares representing the groups from the four courses who participated in the conference. A long click on the image of a group’s product flips it over and shows a photograph of the group members (and vice versa), and clicking on the TEC logo in the center of the collage reveals the inscription: “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts”:
TEC (Technology, Education, and Cultural Diversity) is a cross-cultural program that operates through the joint efforts of the Pedagogical Secretariat at the Ministry of Education, Kibbutzim College of Education, Technology and the Arts, and MOFET Institute. Throughout the year thousands of students, teachers and lecturers, Jews and Arabs, religious and secular, from all over the country, study in small multicultural groups in a stigma-free online environment. The activities, which are conducted in accordance with the TEC Model, create trust between the participants, and prepare them for exciting face to face encounters, which is indeed what happened at the “From Exclusion to Inclusion” Conference.
The conference was a precursor to TEC Center’s main annual event, the Online International Day, which will be held on 18/03/2020 with thousands of participants from Israel and abroad.
Save the day, and let’s talk cultural diversity with TEC!
Dr. Miki Kritz and the TEC Team
Student Conference Photo Album
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