Young children in Israel.

Dr. Orit Dror, Director of the Israeli Institute for Early Childhood Education.

Graduates of the IIECE's Changemakers: The Leadership Hub for Early Childhood Education Directors in Israel at the closing ceremony in October 2022 at Oranim College. Dr. Orit Dror is second from right, first row.

Dr. Orit Dror wants a better future for her children, so she decided to go to the ‘hottest’ place that the State of Israel rarely touches and sort it out.

QIRYAT TIV ON, ISRAEL, ישראל, February 19, 2023 /EINPresswire.com/ -- In northern Israel, near Haifa, Oranim College was established 70 years ago, and with it the track for early childhood educators. Since then, thousands of educators have been trained in this program and have received a B.Ed in Early Childhood Education. Since its inception, the program has served as a nurturing ecosystem for innovative pedagogical ideas and methodologies and has contributed to Oranim College's long-term commitment to impacting Israeli society.

“We could not ignore the growing distress of early childhood education in Israeli society," says Dr. Orit Dror, Director of the Israeli Institute for Early Childhood Education at Oranim College. "Over the years, we have seen how social processes offer parents the right and the necessity to join the race of work-career-livelihood. We see how the hours of early childhood education frameworks do not correspond to their parents’ extended workdays, how daycare centers are being opened in homes, and random spaces such as balconies and storage rooms, and how the "afternoon care" system arose. We have seen how the edu-care frameworks are becoming overcrowded, how the shortage of staff is becoming more acute, allowing anyone who needs a job to become an early childhood educator. Some of these frameworks have become miserable places for children.”

"In other words, in Israel, early childhood education – the gateway to life, – has long been one that is just not good enough, that does not develop opportunities and options for a good start in life. This is especially true when it comes to disadvantaged groups. Israel has allowed early childhood education to become a 'no man's land'”.

“We watched, we cringed, and we realized that it is crucial that we take action," says Dror, "Our college is a public college of education. By virtue of this and certainly with its DNA towards social responsibility, it is committed to society as a whole, and to providing an example to its students. This sounds as if it should almost be taken for granted, but in practice it is not. The natural expectation from academia is research and teaching. We have been conducting research, and training those who choose to pursue an academic education for decades. But in recent years we realized that there are tens of thousands of edu-carers who are not required to have any training at all, and this has a dramatic impact on hundreds of thousands of young children. We realized that unless we take initiative, the situation will never change. So, little by little, we began to organize our activities, and to put them on a clearly defined strategic path: we established the Israeli Institute for Early Childhood Education in 2019. The Institute is under the auspices of the Office of the Provost, a fact that indicates its importance in the eyes of the college administration. The Institute's goal is to advance all of the professions connected with early childhood, as well as their professional status. It operates through three strategic channels: developing and implementing quality training programs for all edu-carers, conducting research, and promoting policy on the local and national levels."

The Institute's management consists of six women involved in early childhood education who serve in key positions at the college, and who jointly coordinate all the activities of 60 faculty members, some of them graduates of Oranim's M.A. programs.

The Institute has forged strong partnerships with other significant players who are working together to advance the field: key non-profit organizations; foundation partners (especially the Beracha Foundation, the Bernard Van Leer Foundation, and the Roni Foundation); relevant government ministries, particularly the Ministry of Education; local authorities; other institutions of higher education; parent organizations; entities that operate daycare centers, and groups of early childhood educators and directors.

In the past year, the Institute has further established its place at the national level with programs and activities that advance its goals: "Together with the NGO ‘121 Engine for Social Change’, we founded an annual Early Childhood Policy Conference, which brings together politicians and leading stakeholders in the field; we established the first professional conference for all edu-carers with the Duet Center from Ben-Gurion University; we established (together with ‘121 Engine for Social Change’) a prestigious leadership program for daycare center directors to empower them to become activists in their field, following which we created a professional forum for hundreds of early childhood directors nationwide; we published the first accessible e-textbook intended for early childhood edu-carers; and held a seminar on early childhood education for cadets designated for middle management positions in municipalities. Together with Nof HaGalil, a mixed city in northern Israel, the Ministry of Education and the Rashi Foundation, we have developed a city-wide early childhood education program for multicultural and multilingual localities. “

Dror explains, “The path is already clear to us. Most children in Israel need a better education. Most early childhood educators must also be better trained, and much more appreciated and valued in society. They are one of the most important and influential educational figures in a child’s life, and we have entrusted them with what is most precious to us – our children. We must elevate their status and nurture them. The Israeli Institute for Early Childhood Education that we established at Oranim College is an initiative that, as the well-known Israeli song says , “woke up, started walking and became a nation”.

Tali Laufer
Oranim College
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