1 2 3 4 5 6 1. Prologue 1 “Deen prootah kedeen me’ah” The Sages When its external conditions changed along its 68 years of existence and it gradually ceased to be responsive to the population it was serving, the Tel-Aviv School went into a downward spiral and in the late 80s hit rock bottom. This trajectory turned into an ascent when the school’s operation and the ideology upon which it reinvented itself were changed over the past 12 years to more closely fit its populations’ specific needs. The Tel-Aviv school of the present is a niche school – a school occupying a unique social niche to which it has adapted well. The school and its students are thriving and it has become a national example in Israel of good schooling. The school’s present social niche consists of a highly diverse and fluid student body originating from about 30 different countries, speakers of many languages, students who enter and leave the school throughout the year, come from vastly different educational backgrounds and are on different educational and literacy levels. In general, it serves a population in a very low socio-economic status and in high levels of distress. It is a public school within the Israeli education system and currently occupies a relatively large, overhauled, well maintained and adequately supplied physical facility. The faculty of the Tel-Aviv School have initiated, developed and led a rethinking of their school, its goals and organization in order to meet the needs of their highly diverse student body. They have negotiated the concept of schooling and reconceptualized it to suit their population’s specific circumstances and have adapted their pedagogy in response to the real and direct needs – social, emotional and academic - of the children. Within these educational dynamics, they have created a safe space of coexistence in which multiplicity is cherished and celebrated as it is held together by a pedagogy of fusion, allowing all the children to grow with possibilities for flourishing. The following work will provide the reader access to the people of the Tel-Aviv School, their activities and processes, pedagogy, curriculums, organization and ideologies, bringing to 1 “The respect for a penny is the same as for a hundred”, the literal meaning of this expression is that even the comparatively worthless penny shall be treated as if it was worth a hundred times that. The symbolic interpretation refers to the equality of human worth, a foundation of pedagogy at the Tel-Aviv School. 7 light their everyday work and their journey of rethinking and reconceptualizing the school. I am inviting the reader to join me on this journey to and through the school and for those who decide to come for the ride, I promise an intriguing experience and a safe landing back home, hopefully however, in a state of mind open to and ready for looking outside of the box and rethinking our own educational Discourse in the context of the changing world around us. 1.1. “What if?” - On the way (literally) “Failing in school is a tragedy that never ends”2, was something I had learned very quickly in my educational career. After years of teaching special education and watching my students caught in a vicious cycle of failure and hopelessness out of which, to the best of my knowledge, few would ever emerge. I saw children being victimized in schools as they were blamed for their own failure to learn, a failure that was very often the fault of the system itself rather than their own3. I was in despair4. Failing in school as children often leads adults to a life on the margins of society, handicapping those who failed in their attempts to build futures. Many adults I know, who had learning problems in school, still carried with them bad memories of negative school experiences and feelings of failure, unable to overcome the sense of defeat and worthlessness originating from their earliest negative educational experiences. Being a teacher and a mother of a child in the special education system, I couldn’t accept the status quo of exclusionary practices and prevalent failure (for some groups significantly more than for others) as the final answer. I felt a compelling need building up in my mind and in my heart to embark on a search for possibilities and hope for the many students who were being victimized, marginalized, ignored, failed, dropped-out and denied their right to a significant education for reasons that were many times no more than their being, in some aspect, “different”. At first I set into academia looking for pointers and, indeed, academia didn’t disappoint. Great thinkers, wonderful theories, excellent plans of action were revealed in texts, both written and oral. But the situation in the real world didn’t seem to be meaningfully open to change, largely due to the enormity of the educational system in the U.S. (numbers of students, numbers of states and lawmakers, text-book publishing economics and politics, the 2 Vang & Flores, 1999, p. 13. 3 Kate Witkin (1977, p. .ix) describes her special students as “children for whom learning was difficult, if not downright discouraging”. 4 Pamela Mueller calls these children “Lifers” as is the name of her book (2002, Heinemann) about “students who have spent all of their lives in remedial programs”. 8 politics of testing, etc.) and the political atmosphere with its strong emphasis on increasing standardization and a concomitant shrinking interest in the individual child. Even if all advocates of social justice in education would take to the classrooms and the podiums around the country, we would be up against a formidable mountain of fossilized institutions and hardened attitudes. So I took my search on the road, looking for an actual educational practice, discourse or pedagogy in which all children are valued and respected as knowing and creative beings. I sought a working educational system that recognized and shouldered its responsibility to teach all children, every single one of them. And to complete the wish list, this pedagogy needed to be practical, easily implemented and universal in a way that would be appropriate for teaching children wherever they were (physically as well as conceptually), without the need for major revolutions, reforms or monetary investments. What if, I thought (I dreamt), there actually was a working pedagogy somewhere out there that was based on the consensus that all children are smart, willing and able to learn, that all children are entitled to achieve success in school (Down with the bell-curve!)? What if, there were others out there who believed that every child is as worthy as all others and has an equal right of receiving an education of quality and that it was our responsibility, as the adults of the society, to work with them (not fight them) to afford them this right; that it is the responsibility of the teachers and the education system to reach and teach every child? What if this hypothetical group of people were actually carrying out this dream. Luckily, the dream found me. After returning to the United States from a vacation in Israel I had to turn straight back and go there again to help my mother who had been hurt in an accident. Suffering from jet lag, I was up, uncharacteristically, very early one morning watching the news on TV through a daze, when a short segment aired about the Tel-Aviv Elementary School, a school that serves several economically depressed neighborhoods in the south of Tel-Aviv. Mrs. Yahalom, the soft spoken, smiling principal of the school, talked about the diversity of the student population in her school (children from over 30 countries, speakers of 18 languages), about the school's efforts to reach every child through her own language and culture, their pedagogy of assessing students progress individually and their goal of creating a community of learners inclusive of every student in the school. The language Mrs. Yahalom was using – words and expressions such as “love”, 9 “warmth”, “together”, “creating a second home for the children”, “allowing all children an experience of capability” - sounded like music to my jaded ears not used to hearing this kind of discourse in relation to education, especially not under trying circumstances such as those I later found at the Tel-Aviv School. I was totally awake by the time the two-minute segment was over, and I was intrigued. Having heard so many wonderful slogans about children and education in the past that ultimately turned out to be a façade, I was painfully aware of “…the tremendous chasms that exist between the rhetoric of equality and the reality of oppression” (Nieto, 1999, p. xx). But, what if that which I had just seen and heard was actually happening? What if all children at the Tel-Aviv School were in reality accepted and included? What if love of children was somehow part of the school pedagogy? Then, I thought, I may have stumbled upon a path of pebbles to lead me out of the dark forest of educational inequality in which I thought I was lost. What I ultimately found at the Tel-Aviv School was a humanistic, child-centered and individually-focused pedagogy aiming at the inclusion of all children in the learning process. I found a school that has been dynamically adapting itself to its population and that population’s circumstances and specific needs (groups in high levels of distress - new immigrants in a new culture and language environment, illegal migrants living in fear and uncertainty, poor children whose families are marginalized in Israeli society, children who would normally be considered ‘problematic’, ‘difficult’, ‘unable’), continually rethinking its mission and adjusting its pedagogy to provide each of its students equitable access to a meaningful education.