Continuing education center continues expansion of life-skills education in Palestine

Thirty educational supervisors from districts across the West Bank participated in a three-day training workshop on integrating life skills in elementary education, held on July 1, 2019. 

Organized by the Center for Continuing Education (CCE) at Birzeit University, the workshop featured discussions and seminars on ways to incorporate the center’s specially-designed interactive lessons that integrate life skills- and active citizenship concepts into school curricula. 

The workshop is part of the center’s Experiential Learning Objects (xLOBs) project which aims to create an interactive, participatory learning environment in Palestinian classrooms. The project, now in its first stage, has created interactive lessons for students in grades one through four and has organized workshops, seminars, and training courses for elementary teachers with the cooperation of the Palestinian Ministry of Education. 

Osama Mimi, head of the Learning Innovation Unit at CCE, explained that as the center is working towards institutionalizing experiential learning objects in Palestinian educational institutions, it has recently established a national team to facilitate its implementation. Comprising experts from Birzeit University and the ministry of education, the team aims to entice Palestinian students and teachers to produce new knowledge and export creative, twenty-first-century educational models to improve life skills in the region.

Ahed Ayyash, director of elementary education supervision in the ministry of education, emphasized the importance of the project in instilling essential life skills in Palestinian youth, adding that the recently established team will help teachers and supervisors adopt new teaching methods and procedures that encourage students to produce new knowledge.

In addition to the interactive lessons for elementary-level students, the center has created experiential learning objects for secondary and upper-secondary education. Overall, approximately 50,000 students are expected to engage with xLOBs in the 2019/20 academic year.