By Avigayil Kadesh
Facing a severe shortage of school psychologists in the Bedouin communities of the Negev Desert, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) is training Arab-Israeli and Bedouin master’s students to fill the gap.
“I think it’s very important, and it was my first initiative as head of the educational psychology track,” says Prof. Shifra Sagi, who also holds the university’s Shane Family Chair in Education. This is a joint effort of the departments of education and psychology.
A similar program existed years ago but was discontinued because of funding and other difficulties. Sagi revived it in the 2011-2012 school year following a request from the Israeli Council for Higher Education. BGU has several other academic programs geared to the Negev Bedouins, a population where higher education is not the norm.
Of an estimated 160,000 or 170,000 Bedouins in Israel, about 110,000 live in the Negev – and some 70,000 of those reside in “unrecognized” villages with little access to government services.
Sagi believes it is imperative to provide counselors who understand the problems from the inside and who speak the same language – literally and figuratively – as the children.
While many of the issues school psychologists encounter are similar everywhere (“A school is a school,” as Sagi puts it), others are particular to the Bedouin. “In Rahat [a large Bedouin city near Beersheva] there is overcrowding in the schools and a lot of violence. There are struggles between families that are expressed in the schoolyard, and you need to understand the culture and background very well.”
In addition, counselors may encounter emotionally difficult situations stemming from polygamous marriages and the genetic effects of consanguineous marriages, since Bedouins often marry close cousins.
“There is a lot of work to be done,” says Sagi, who is also involved in a conflict-resolution forum in the Bedouin community.
A one-year prep course
BGU always welcomed applications from Bedouins and has special programs to help outstanding students advance. One of Sagi’s doctoral students is a Bedouin school counselor who took advantage of such a program.
However, few have the educational background to gain admittance in a highly competitive field of psychology candidates. To address this problem, the 11 students enrolled in the new program were offered a year of special preparatory courses to bring their skills up to speed before starting the two-year master’s program.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t enough for five Bedouin students with college degrees from Jordan, says Anan Srour, an Arab-Israeli psychologist who teaches in the program.
“Their BA is not on the same level as a BA in Israel,” he relates frankly. “We gave them supplemental help but they felt they could not succeed.”
The remaining one man and five women are graduates of Israeli universities, including one Bedouin with a bachelor’s degree from BGU. The rest come from northern Israel, where educational opportunities are richer.
“We are trying to get more Bedouins into the program in the future by lowering the grades they need to get into our undergraduate program in psychology,” Srour says. “Once they complete that, they will be ready for the master’s program. They need a master’s degree to be licensed as school psychologists.”
He strongly believes in the program. “It helps close the gap in the general Palestinian community but particularly in the Bedouin community where shortages are a hundred times more severe,” says Srour.
Despite the setback, Sagi looks forward to next year, when the six students from the prep course will join the regular master’s program. “The most exciting part for me is that the group will consist of half Arabs and half Jews,” she says.
“We will need to adapt our program for this composition and this is very challenging and interesting. It’s a personal mission for me because we must learn how to work together. From my experience, I know it doesn’t come so easily.”
All the master’s students receive on-site training in Jewish and Bedouin clinics all over the Negev.