Excerpt from "It Takes a Village" Podcast

Last year, Dotan Levi, CEO of Village Way Educational Institute, teamed up with Shlomit, Content Manager at Village Way Educational Initiatives, to launch a podcast, It Takes a Village, on Israel's most popular station, 103 FM. The podcast covers topics related to education in Israel and  is now the most listened to new podcast on 103 FM with 6000 listeners! 

Below is a translated excerpt from an episode released in June.

[Dotan]

Today we’re recording a special episode for the time we’re living in, and the greatest challenge right now: educating in wartime. Educating in a reality that’s so difficult, so painful. Do educators have a special role in this? A meaningful role? Are we able to keep anything stable for our youth when reality says there is no stability? As educators, can we even claim to create an island of stability, or an island of sanity?

[Shlomit]

It’s interesting, because I’m realizing more and more that this expectation for stability, for sanity is already so difficult. I tell myself, maybe we as educators need to understand that our challenge in this time, and for many years ahead, since COVID, is to educate in a constantly changing reality.

Let’s try to filter the idea of education through the Village Way philosophy, in facing a battlefield, with educators trying to teach in wartime.

...You can kind of compare educators to pilots who experience a moment of vertigo. There’s massive confusion. As an educator, I might not even realize I’m in a moment of disorientation, and I desperately need help. I need someone to say to me, “Shlomit, this is an event you’re in. Here’s the map, here’s the direction, and this is how to move forward.” We hear this from school principals and administrators who are asking for that help from educational professionals.

[Dotan]

And in the context of this episode, maybe it’s good you brought up vertigo. For those less familiar, today we mostly think of vertigo as a medical phenomenon, imbalance, dizziness, loss of stability. But in aviation, for pilots, it’s when they can’t tell where the sky is, where the ground is: everything flips, and they have to rely completely on the trust between the pilot and the control tower.

As a society, our trust between people is already challenged. And in this case, someone from the “control tower” has to say, with a confident, clear voice: “You’re in vertigo.”

When I talk about “it takes a whole village to raise a child,” well, right now, we as educators, after October 7th, every one of us has encountered pain at an overwhelming level. We’ve all become a bereaved nation. And we just keep going, constantly. As educators, it’s not just the events of Simchat Torah, October 7th: it’s also my kids in reserve duty, colleagues on staff who are hostages, students who were killed.

At Nofei HaBesor High School, 11 boys and girls were murdered. They have the painful reality that they have hostages among the school staff. This is our current reality. So okay, what’s my role as an educator? The first reaction is, I’m in vertigo. I’m collapsing inward.

[Shlomit]

And emotionally, how can I lead now? How can I guide? How can I see others?

[Dotan]

We’ve also met with educators from the north, who have had to evacuate. We sat with them in one of the seminars we ran: we called it Meshiv HaRuach (“Restoring the Spirit”). There, we identified the role of educators as restoring the spirit, holding onto hope in a hopeless reality.

We don’t have the privilege, as educators, to give that up. Yes, we have moments of breakdown, of pain, of despair, but our whole village must hold onto hope. And even if I, the individual educator, right now can’t stand strong in front of the youth, I need to find who, in the whole village, can hold that hope for me, and for the teens.

That vertigo brings me back to the question: what does an educator in vertigo look like?

In the field right now, it might be someone falling apart in front of a class, unable to hold themselves together, despairing, not believing there’s hope. On the other extreme, it’s someone who hasn’t experienced the reality, saying “Everything’s fine, trust me, it’ll be okay, let’s carry on as normal, no need to worry.” That’s also vertigo. It’s in the extremes. The ones who understand the complexity: those are the people we can work with. We have to hold that complexity in order to create stability, an island of stability.

You can find the full episodes available in Hebrew at https://103fm.maariv.co.il/tags/tag.aspx?gntVQ=ILKLF