Collaborative for Liberal Education for Adolescents (CLEA) Project at AQB
WHAT IS CLEA?
CLEA offers semester-long seminars, at no cost to students and their families, in eight schools from different Palestinian cities. The seminar is key to building the foundational skills that students need in college and life.
The seminar is conducted on Saturdays for 3 hours completing a total of roughly 32 hours. Each class will consist of an average of 15 students. The seminars are conducted in both languages: Arabic and English.OBJECTIVES
- The seminar will help students to develop their capacity for critical thinking and analytical skills.
- The instructor will help students become independent thinkers and learners allowing them to read, write, discuss, and express their ideas orally and in writing.
- The Program will also prepare students for their careers and readies them for lifelong learning.
STUDENTS DEVELOP THE FOLLOWING INTELLECTUAL AND PROFESSIONAL SKILLS:
- Express thoughts, write and think both critically and creatively
- Challenge themselves and other forms of authority when dealing with texts or new ideas (e.g. challenging the author).
- Explore and organize their own thinking by analyzing certain texts or themes.
- Discover and express their own voice as a writer and speaker.
- Find and make connections between texts, themes, concepts, etc.
- Develop habits of thoughtful reading and discussion of texts
- Express thinking with confidence and respect other perspectives and thinking
- Develop a different orientation toward the culture of learning
WHAT DO WE TEACH AT CLEA?
The main theme of our current course delves into the normal and the new normal as a response to the impact of COVID-19 on different perspectives of life. The course will help students question the ‘normal’ and what does it mean to them? What is the "new '' normal? and why? Who decides what is normal and what is not? Can normal be changed? What does normal mean to you? Translate. Students will reflect on the normal and the new normal by reading a variety of texts under several categories ranging from Home/Exile, Value, Science, Truth/ Mystery, and Culture.
PHOTOS OF THE SEMINARS THAT ARE CONDUCTED EVERY WEEK IN THE EIGHT PARTICIPATING SCHOOLS
STUDENTS GATHERING FOR CLEA SCHOOLS
The objectives of this gathering were to bring together students and engage them collaboratively in close reading of texts and exchange ideas. The students were mixed and distributed into seminar groups giving them the opportunity to meet and get to know each other.
