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Israeli teaching methods key to future for at-risk kids

Melissa Singer

2 March 2007 - When Mark Leibler walked into Gowie Street Primary School last week as part of a visit of stakeholders in the Yachad Accelerated Learning Program (YALP) to schools in northern Victoria, the first thing that struck him was a massive display about Israel on one of the classroom walls.

“It was very moving to see the pictorial exhibition,” said Leibler, a member of the YALP advisory board and co-chair of Reconciliation Australia.

On February 20, Leibler was part of a 30-member delegation that visited three schools in the Shepparton area where the YALP program, which has seen Israeli educational expertise adapted to schools with large Aboriginal student populations, is successfully being implemented.

The delegation included high-profile businesspeople, including National Bank of Australia (NAB) CEO John Stewart, who chairs the NAB’s Yachad Scholarship Fund, which gave rise to YALP. Other delegates included YALP convenor Helene Taft Teichmann, Debbie Dadon, of the Besen Foundation, and Victorian Minister for Community Services and Aboriginal Affairs Gavin Jennings.

Leibler said the strength of YALP is that other teaching methods impart information in ways that “encourage alienation, or switching off. YALP is interactive.”

He said the Israeli teaching experience and Jewish approach of tradition with integration translate well into indigenous Australian environments.

“What they are looking for is to ... be able to practise their customs but at the same time be fully integrated members of society, so they look at the Jewish community and say, ‘Why can’t we do the same?’”

But the main aim of YALP, Leibler said, is to reduce the “shocking gap” in life expectancy between the Aboriginal and general populations, which he argues would be greatly improved through better educational standards.

Shepparton High School principal Alan McLean, who travelled to Israel in January on a Yachad delegation, said the visit was a huge success.

He said the school, which has around 10 per cent indigenous students, is using the YALP methods to “train our people for long-term sustainability”.

YALP was established in 2003 after the inaugural National Australia Bank Yachad scholar, Professor Marcia Langton, concluded that accelerated-learning programs she studied in Israel could be adapted to schools with a high percentage of indigenous students.

In 2004, the government gave the program a $3-million grant, which has helped fund the program in eight schools in Victoria, Queensland, the Northern Territory, South Australia and Western Australia, as well as trips by Israeli educators to Australia.

Source: Australian Jewish News

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