Save Hewar Alternative Arab School in Israel!

“This is my second year as a teacher at Hewar” says Paulina Abboud, who teaches mathematics at the school. “When I first started working here, I didn’t know much about alternative education, but I was interested in giving it a try. After a while, I realised it was something that really resonated with me and that I wanted to learn more about.”

We join her one morning for a maths class with Hewar’s fourth grade students. The topic of the lesson is fractions and Paulina hands out printouts of pizzas, which the children will use as props for their exercises. “In my classes I use a variety of methods that help children develop their logical thinking skills”, says Paulina. “The idea that there is only one way of teaching children, the way it is done in the traditional education system, really bothers me. Not all children develop in the same way, at the same pace, or have the same strengths and weaknesses.”

During this particular class, Pauline used the methods of experiential learning, which allowsstudents to get a more hands-on experience of the studied, while also emphasising the integration of subjects. “The idea that each academic subject should be taught in isolation from others is simply flawed; in real life all learning and experiences are interconnected,” Paulina states. “That’s why I try to bring out the connection between what we are studying and things the students can connect to in real life; such as pizza!”

Before joining Hewar, Polina taught at a regular school, but she says she wasn’t very happy there. “I felt like there was no freedom there; neither for myself as a teacher, nor for the students. They aim to raise a monotonous group of “good citizens” where individual differences are rarely respected, but rather disapproved of. In addition to her work at Hewar, Paulina has also decided to pursue an MA research degree in Alternative Education at Haifa University: “Teaching using alternative methods is also about my own learning as a teacher. It’s an ongoing process.”