Faculty of Education
Student delegation to Kassel University
The course “Educational Initiatives” was founded in the spring of 2019 and is led by Dr. Miri Shonfeld. It is under the auspices of the graduate program “Educational Technology” at Kibbutzim College of Technology and the Arts, headed by Dr. Betty Shrieber. The course is comprised of students who participate together with graduate students from ‘Talpiot College’, a teacher-training college catering to the Jewish religious sector, students from the Arabic-speaking sector, studying towards their graduate degree in English in ‘Kiryat Ono’ College, and students studying English at Kassel University in Germany.
Through this endeavor, diverse groups from four academic institutes are formed, incorporating different cultures and languages. Each group meets online throughout the semester to create an educational initiative with the aim of promoting this multicultural domain worldwide.
At the end of the process, the students from Kibbutzim College visit Kassel University. During this visit, the students from both Germany and Israel present their projects. Each initiative is accompanied by an internet site built by the students to expose their initiative. Kassel University President welcomes the students, as does the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Cultural studies. It is clear to all that the collaborative course is unique for them as well and serves as a source of great pride.
The visit to Kassel University includes a wide range of activities, for example a tour of Berlin, a visit to a public school that housed mainly immigrants, a visit to a bilingual private school, Kassel University, and more.
The combination of the inspiring gathering, the English presentations of the projects at the university, the visits to the schools, and ingathering of culture and academia leave a significant impression on the students, and we hope that this has an impact on educational endeavors in the multi-cultural arena.
The project was founded together with Prof. Dr. Claudia Finkbeiner, Foreign and Second Language Learning and Teaching Research & Intercultural Communication at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Kassel. The cooperation between Dr. Shonfeld and Prof. Finkbeiner started in 2013 together with Dr. Einat Rozner and has involved several hundred participants and more researchers since then. The team at the University of Kassel includes Prof. Dr. Claudia Finkbeiner, Dr. Madeleine Agnes Olson and Wiebke Sophie Ost.
