Docu Mail Project – Year II
The Fifth Question Program
This year the Docu mail program is a connection between Amirim Junior High school in Kfar Vradim and Hyman Brand Hebrew Academy in Kansas City.
The prime objective of the program this year is to create a channel of communication that will facilitate dialog between the Israeli teen and US Jewish youngsters and enable them to get to know one another. We hope to reinforce the individual and social identity of both groups and to discover common denominators as well as differences between the two cultures.
The program encourage the participants to present and to explain themselves and their standpoint, to exchange opinions and place the topic on the agenda, all of which will foster awareness of the topic and will furthermore reinforce identity and bonds. We likewise hope that by engaging with this content pupils will develop the desire and the curiosity necessary to develop the topic in rewarding directions.
With a view to engaging in issues of Jewish, Zionist and Israeli identity, we have chosen to focus the project this year on the four figures of the Passover Hagadah.
The schools will exchange four electronic postcards (short films), each of which will address a particular figure / concept: wisdom, evil, innocence, and the one who knows not how to ask (which may be interpreted in different ways – he knows not because he hasn’t learned, or perhaps cannot ask because he is handicapped, disabled, different, exceptional, etc.).
The teachers of the classes in both schools will lead a discussion with the pupils on the various concepts. They may begin by defining the concept; what is wisdom? What is evil? What is innocence? What does not being able to ask mean?
The Course of the project
Each pupil will upload the “electronic postcard” to their page on the Docu mail web site that was built especially for that purpose ( www.docu-mail.com ) and their counterparts abroad will be invited to respond to the films. There are also SKYPE calls which allow the students to communicate directly.
Beyond the films uploaded, we hope that informal links will develop between all the pupils who participate in the project. This will be manifested through posts that each participant may make and through social relations that will evolve on the Docu-mail site, which will serve as a kind of social network.
Toward the end of the project the pupils will prepare a postcard / film containing a question or statement of interest to them and which is connected to the content of the postcards in which they engaged during the course of the year.
This project is part of the Beren – Galila initiative led By our Beren Fellow: Vered Osman the Director of Docu Village Foundation