In 2007 a group of fifteen Bedouin students studying for graduate degrees in educational counseling attended a course on Developmental Psychology given by our lecturer Dr. Ofer Grosbard. One day I went up to him and said: “May I tell you the truth. What you are teaching us is not going to be of help to us.”
I said that when I become an educational counselor, a parent may come to me one day and say, “A demon has entered into my child” or some similar statement from the same cultural background. “Do you think that what you have taught us here will be of any use to me then?”
“Then what would be helpful to you?” Ofer asked.
I replied with one word: “The Quran.”
I said that, in the appropriate context, quotation of a verse from the Quran has enormous impact on Muslims.
Ofer brought a copy of the Quran to our next lesson. He divided the chapters among us and asked us to locate the educational-therapeutic verses. It transpired that there are many of these in the Quran. The verses exhort individuals to take responsibility, learn the truth, respect others etc. Ofer asked us to compose a brief story taken from everyday life for each verse to illustrate how a parent or teacher can utilize the verse to convey a message to the child. Together we collected more than three hundred stories, and Ofer added to each a simple and brief educational-psychological explanation.
Bushra Mazarib
the student who set the project in motion