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The Al-Quds Bard Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) Program is based on the model of graduate teacher education inaugurated by Bard’s program in 2004. The Al-Quds Bard MAT Program adapts Bard’s program structures to the particular needs and ambitions of Palestinian education while preserving key principles that shape this singular approach to school improvement. The Al-Quds Bard MAT Program recognizes that students in schools are generally unprepared by typical approaches to curriculum and instruction for the demands of the modern world. Students need to be challenged to engage with the questions and problems that motivate the thinking and practical work of core disciplines, developing the knowledge and intellectual habits that foster continued learning, promote deep civic engagement, and provide the basis for a productive future. This requires teachers who possess deep understanding in their respective fields and the practical knowledge to create contexts for classroom learning that respond effectively to the individual needs of students. The Al-Quds Bard MAT Program educates teachers through a two-year program of graduate study in an academic field and key areas of education that are closely integrated with experiences in classrooms so that aspiring teachers deepen their understanding in the context of practice.
The Al-Quds Bard MAT program will enroll its first cohort of approximately 50 students in August 2009. In its first year, the MAT program will recruit in-service teachers from a cluster of designated ‘pioneer’ schools in Jerusalem and the West Bank. During the first year of the two-year program, these teachers will continue to teach, integrating graduate study with ongoing practice. With close support from MAT graduate faculty, teachers will reconsider their classrooms from the perspective of what they are studying and work to revise and restructure curriculum and pedagogy to advance student learning. In year two, teachers will continue their studies through the completion of an academic research project that engages them in the knowledge making of their particular field and a classroom research project that builds a model of reflection that is essential to the clinical work of teaching effectively.
By working with in-service teachers in its first year, the MAT Program creates a cohort of mentor teachers as adjunct MAT faculty who can mentor MAT apprentice teachers in the years that follow. Beginning in 2010, the Al-Quds Bard MAT Program will admit new teacher candidates as well as in-service teachers. These new candidate teachers will satisfy requirements for a teaching diploma in their first year and finish their masters degree during the second year as they begin to teach in MAT partner schools and other schools in Palestine. The expanding population of MAT graduates will become a larger teaching community, and the MAT faculty and graduates will contribute to professional development initiatives for teachers throughout the region to foster and sustain continued school improvement. |
