The Mandel Foundation–Israel is pleased to announce the appointment of
Professor Tamar Ariav as the new academic director of the Mandel Foundation–Israel. Before joining the Mandel Foundation, Professor Ariav was president of Beit Berl College from 2008 to 2020. She was a faculty member at Beit Berl from 1985 until 2020 and served in a variety of positions there over the years. From 2002 to 2008, she was a member of the Council of Higher Education in Israel, where she worked on a number of committees and chaired the Teacher Education Frameworks Committee in 2006. In 2021, she received the Council's Prize for Higher Education in the "Head of Institution" category, in recognition of her outstanding service as president of Beit Berl College.
Professor Ariav graduated from Tel Aviv University with a bachelor's degree in economics and statistics and a master's degree in curriculum studies. She earned her doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia) in the field of curriculum and instruction. Her areas of expertise include curriculum planning and assessment, and her research in the past two decades has focused primarily on the fields of teacher policy and education. She has published books, book chapters, and papers and has given presentations in conferences in Israel and abroad.
Professor Ariav has taught in schools in Israel, Germany and the United States, worked in Jewish education in the United States, and was a visiting scholar at the University of California, Irvine.
She describes her vision for her role at the Mandel Foundation–Israel as follows:
The position of academic director of the Mandel Foundation–Israel is a newly reinstituted and challenging post designed to support the organization's intent to increase its impact in educational and social leadership in Israel. As the academic director, I plan to help revise the curricula of the various programs and create horizontal synergy between them. Among my main tasks are the development of a shared pedagogical vision across programs, diversification of target populations that would contribute to the improvement of the Israeli educational arena, and professional development of the faculty. I plan to expand collaborations with the Ministry of Education, education related agencies, third sector players, and municipalities, in order to leverage the Mandel Foundation–Israel's access and success in placing its graduates in influential roles and organizations.
