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Education and Employment in Multi-Cultural
Environments
A group of Mandel Graduates attended, in Brussels, a course on "managing diversity" in multi-cultural environments

These topics were chosen because they accurately represent the challenges that Mandel graduates who are principals and educational leaders grapple with in the course of their jobs as educators, policymakers, administrators, and teachers.

Social and cultural diversity within schools, particularly in Israeli society, raises questions concerning policies, resources, group identity, and curricular differences. “Although Israel has been wrestling with diversity in education for the past 60 years, the participants were sent to Europe because there are additional [aspects] worth being exposed to,” explains Granit Almog Bareket, one of the organizers of the course. According to her, the aim is to encourage educational administrators to develop a different vision, one that strives to realize the potential benefits of diversity.

Mendy Rabinowitz, the outgoing principal of Hadassah Neurim, describes the challenge in the Israeli context. In his words, “In Israel, there is insufficient acceptance of diversity, of otherness, and there is much debate on the subject.” According to him, the course offered a broader perspective. “We learned how they conduct planning and thinking processes in Europe—the minute they identify a problem they address the challenge seriously, building creative solutions and ways of thinking.. We in Israel could learn from this.” The question of how to translate and implement the management of diversity in the Israeli setting was part of the participants’ agenda. “In the European Union the issue of diversity is a top priority,” notes Yehuda Maimran, the founder of the Morasha network. “The question is how to import this to Israel. The discussions in Brussels granted a kind of professional legitimacy to the issue, a sense that this is indeed an important issue that many people are struggling with all over the world.”

Many resources were invested in the seminar. The lecturers—experts from leading universities around the world, such as INSEAD and Oxford—came specially to Brussels to teach the Israelis.

"In my work as a principal I deal with a lot of diversity among pupils, teachers, and parents,” says Orly Fruchter-Yagodovsky, principal of the Kesem school. “The Mandel course in Brussels stimulated me to change my ideas. This year I intend to invest a lot in the issue of diversity in the classroom, as a subject to be taught and in work with pupils from heterogeneous groups.”

“There are 1,400 pupils in my school, and there is great diversity among them,” says Hezi Sagiv. “The Mandel course in Brussels was very helpful in getting us to reflect on the subject of diversity. In the coming year I will do a better job of mapping diversity in my school. We will identify pupils who need different treatment. We will emphasize patience, tolerance, and openness. I thank the Graduates Unit for this opportunity. This was a special opportunity to participate in the program and to spend time in an academic institution in Brussels.”

The Mandel Graduates Unit works to further the professional level of Mandel graduates so that they can go on to develop educational and social initiatives. One of the Unit’s objectives is to build a community of graduates that will serve as a network and an impetus for collaboration and learning among the graduates. The Brussels course was another stage in the community’s development: “The encounter between graduates of different years and in diverse fields makes it possible for the participants to forge significant new ties among themselves,” relates Michal Shavit, principal of Hayovel junior high school in Mevasseret Ziyyon. “There were wonderful conditions in the seminar for thought-oriented learning.”

How Does One Translate International Ideas for the Local Israeli Context?

Throughout the course in Brussels the organizers, lecturers, and graduates dealt with the question of how to translate a European approach to administration or education for use in the Israeli environment and Israeli society. One of the conclusions reached in other courses of the Graduates Unit (such as graduate courses that took place at the Sorbonne) is that the way to contextualize different approaches is to study them as a team, as a community that includes professionals from a variety of educational enterprises in Israel and constitute a sort of microcosm of Israeli society. The great diversity and learning together in a workshop format throughout the course provided a new perspective on the implementation and translation of foreign ideas. The last day of the Brussels course was devoted to a workshop with international experts who discussed the difficulties, challenges, and characteristics of Israel society, and how European approaches and methods of managing diversity can be applied in various ways in Israel.

“The diverse fields and professional backgrounds of the members of the graduates group, not to mention of the instructors and international experts who lectured to us, expand the basis of our knowledge as graduates and leverage our ability to make progress on issues that are at the core of our educational and social endeavors,” summed up Nasser Abu Safi, an Education Ministry inspector for the Arab sector.

To read more about the Mandel Graduate Unit Click here