Children Teaching Children

Children Teaching Children (CTC) is a two-year civics study and encounter program that has reached over 30,000 teachers and students (8th and 9th grades) in Arab and Jewish schools over the past 27 years of operation. Integrated as part of the formal and informal curriculum in Arab and Jewish schools, the program equips Jewish and Arab students, teachers and principals with the tools to foster mutual understanding and shared citizenship. Jewish and Israeli Arab teachers and middle school-age students are guided in grappling with complex issues of national and individual identity, community life, and conflicting narratives in a shared land. The children visit one another’s schools, have discussions and participate in activities in both indoor and outdoor settings. The program is currently being implemented in 9 pairs of schools in the Wadi Ara region of Israel.

Heart to Heart

Since 2011, twenty alumni of the Children Teaching Children program,  ten Jewish and ten Arab, attend a two-week overnight summer camp experience called Heart to Heart in Shomer HaTzair's Shomria camp in Canada. There they take part in camp programming, interact with local campers, share a cabin, learn to get along in close quarters round-the-clock, and have the unique opportunity to cultivate the deep friendships characteristic of summer camp, across ethnic borders that are ordinarily impermeable. The unique atmosphere of the Shomria summer camp, immersed in a natural setting and insulated from Israel's political climate, combined with exposure to Canada's multicultural society, allows for the development of profound connections among the teenage participants, who are then uniquely equipped to return to their home communities as leaders and ambassadors of a shared society.