Spreading Light Through Teaching

About a week after the outbreak of the war, in mid-October, Prof. Yohai Carmel from the Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering came across a volunteer academy project . This new and exciting initiative is designed to harness members of the academic and administrative faculty, doctoral and master’s students to assist in the teaching of students evacuated from the north and south during the war and to support them. Prof. Carmel contacted the originator of the initiative, Dr. Lev Talor from Ariel University, and offered to help not only with the teaching but also with the organization.

Following this, Prof. Carmel is currently coordinating the initiative in the Northern District. Meanwhile, Dr. Ronit Cohen, director of the Ecology Laboratory at the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning, has taken it upon herself to coordinate the activity in the Haifa District. In cooperation between them and Michal Meir, who coordinates the “Mutual Guarantee” initiative at the Technion, an email was sent to all Technion faculty members, and as a result, many academic faculty members and managers from the Technion volunteered for this initiative. According to Prof. Carmel, “More than 500 volunteers are currently registered in the ‘Volunteer Academy’ in Israel. Happily, the Technion leads by a margin over all other academic institutions, with more than 150 volunteers.”

The students at the Technion also joined the teaching effort, and this initiative is led by Amit Pelati, a master’s student at the Faculty of Science and Technology Education who works at the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning at the Technion. “So far, about 120 students have volunteered to teach math, science and English,” he says. “I am working on the connection between the volunteers and the temporary schools set up for the evacuees in hotels (for elementary schools) and colleges (for high schools). It is very complex, because things are very dynamic. It happens that we arrange for a student to volunteer at a temporary school – and the next day we receive an update that there is no longer a school there. These are huge numbers: thousands of evacuees from the north are in temporary places in Haifa, Karmiel and around the Sea of ​​Galilee, apparently for a long time, and assistance to the educational teams is really essential these days.”

The main volunteering within the “Volunteer Academy” is in the schools, but many also volunteer in learning centers that operate in the afternoon. In the supplementary learning center at the Hof Guy Hotel in Kinneret, for example, volunteers are Prof. Yizhar Or from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, the Dean of the Faculty of Materials Science and Engineering Prof. Giti Frey, Dr. Yosef Frey, Dr. Moran Benhar from the Rapaport Faculty of Medicine. The learning center is attended by students from the evacuated schools of kibbutzim and moshavim in the Nahariya area, which were integrated into the Kaduri High School.

Prof. Carmel himself teaches science in grades 8-10. According to him, “I don’t stick to the curriculum but try to be interesting and relevant for them. Even so, it is difficult for them to concentrate on their studies during this period, after they were displaced from their home and moved to live in a temporary hotel, for an unknown period of time.”