המכללה האקדמית בית ברל > English > About Us > News > Newsletter > Summer 2019 Newsletter > The Museum as a Space of Multiple Meanings

The Museum as a Space of Multiple Meanings

Arab and Jewish art students at Beit Berl's Faculty of Arts-HaMidrasha created a bilingual museum education module for high schools.

The innovative and unique course, “Multi-Cultural Dialogue in the Museum,” was part of the new Shared Education Leadership Training Program launched this year at Beit Berl College in partnership with UJA Federation of New York. This program is one of many pioneering initiatives conceived by Beit Berl’s Center for the Advancement of Shared Society.

The Beit Berl students – eight Arabs and eight Jews – met for nine intensive full-day workshops held at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art and the Umm el Fahem Art Gallery. During these training workshops, they learned together how to guide high school pupils. Dr. Vered Heruti and Dr. Ariela Bairey Ben Ishay helped prepare them for bilingual co-teaching.

The art students then conducted separate preparatory days for sixty 10th graders from two high schools: Metro-West in Raanana and Tomashin in Kalansuwa. The Beit Berl students encouraged the 10th graders to represent their ideas and feelings through art, and then led mixed groups from the two schools in the museums – one day in each museum – discussing the meanings of various paintings and sculptures. The high school pupils then created artworks in the museums on the subject of “multiple meanings.”

Both Arab and Jewish teens reported that the common language of art helped them get to know each other and open up to different thoughts and views. Leaving their comfort zones, they entered a space in which they created meaning for themselves, and for those very different from themselves, together.