"Beer Sheva-Moscow-Warsaw" (2022-2023) – an international online project in the field of teaching Hebrew as an additional language
under the direction of Dr. Irena Blanky-Karlin
This year (2022-2023) we continue the international online project specializing in the Hebrew language as part of Dr. Irena Blanky-Karlin's course "Learning and teaching – teaching Hebrew as a second language in an electronic environment". The innovation this year is: the students from the University of Warsaw also joined the project.
You can read about the first international project "Beer Sheva-Moscow" in Blanky-Karlin's article (2022) here:
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL5550
On December 11, 2022, a Zoom meeting was held between the Jewish and Bedouin students from Kaye College and between the students at Kosygin Russian State University in Moscow and the students at the University of Warsaw. During the Zoom meeting, the students from the three countries introduced themselves, talked about the importance of the project both for improving knowledge of Hebrew as a second language and providing the tools to teach it in an electronic environment, and for becoming familiar with each other's culture.
In the next stage all of the students were divided into rooms: in each room there was a team of Jewish teachers from Israel and two teams of their students (our Bedouin students and students from abroad). All learning in the course is cooperative, and each team of Jewish teachers is responsible for both teams of students. In the rooms, the students discussed the holidays in Judaism, The difficulties of the Hebrew language, the topics that the students whose Hebrew is their second or additional language will want to focus on later in the course and more.
Finally, everyone returned to the main room, filled out the survey, and concluded the meeting. The reactions during the meeting were enthusiastic, and the students were very happy that they were given the opportunity to meet with people from other sectors and other countries.
On 18.12.22, a meeting took place in a similar format with the second half of the class. The meeting started in the last moments of the World Cup. After dividing the students into rooms, the teacher teams discussed with their student teams mainly about the Hanukkah holiday since the meeting took place in Hannukkah eve – after the lighting of the first candle.
Below are some of the students' responses to the course as it has been conducted so far:
We want to say that a project like this really gives us, as we said in the lesson, a lot of knowlage about multiculturalism, Accepting despite the difference . We think that a project like this allows us to learn from different experiences, strengthen the language, think outside of the box, that is how can we as a society learn different things from other societies. How can we as teachers teach our students about this concept of "multicultural". We learned that every holiday has a certain background that is an interesting story. We realized that most of the teachers emphasize that you need to know and respect others thier behaviors they have.
Today's meeting was stunning and fascinating, an international meeting that started with the World Cup…. We as a group from the Bedouin sector, want to teach the beautiful things and norms of the Bedouin sector; the rituals that exist in the society and the values that characterize it.
The truth is, in the beginning it was difficult for us to connect with the group members, but in the end we did. Thanks and happy holiday!
The project is very important and helps us meet new people from different parts of the world and also the Bedouin students who are with us at the college. The first Zoom meeting went nicely and pleasantly, we laughed and enjoyed passing on our knowledge to the students from the other teams, answering questions and getting to know each other. We will be happy to teach the teams later on the topic of writing – writing letters or writing a short story about a character.
The difficulties we encountered were mainly language difficulties, but we manage to understand each other and speak fluently after all.
We see the project as very important.
The fact that we are also teachers in our professional role allows us to experiment in another way as well.
The "students" from our group are very curious to know and learn new things and so are we.
As a result, we are given the opportunity to learn in an interesting and unique way.
So far we have learned that it is possible to teach and learn using all kinds of different options and methods.The Zoom meeting united us and allowed us to dedicate ourselves more to the special process.
We are sure that as long as we show willingness we can learn a lot from our "students" and vice versa.
Warsaw University