Gail Baker is a co-founder of The Toronto Heschel School. She is Head of School and Director of the Lola Stein Institute. Judith Leitner is a Cofounder of The Toronto Heschel School and its Director of Arts. Her book, The Judaic Arts Compendium: 150 Integrated Visual Arts Programmes, will be published shortly. Pam Medjuck Stein is the editor of think: The Lola Stein Institute Journal and a founding parent of The Toronto Heschel School. See the related article, “Tefillah Studies and Visual Arts in Grade 5” here.
Art became the helpmate of religion, and rich was the offspring of that ultimate union.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
1. Learning through the arts
Transformative, arts-based, Jewish education parallels Judaism in answering the intellect, the senses and the soul. We use the arts to teach ethics and values. Our paradigm is clear – the medium is the message. Judaism is ethical, ecological and inspirational – and twenty-first century Jewish education must be just that.
The Jewish intellectual tradition is to struggle in dilemma, questioning ideas and searching for diverse perspectives. Arts-based Jewish education places children in decision-making roles as they learn. It renders their education experiential, steeped in critical, aesthetic and creative thinking. We introduce our students to their world and their Judaism simultaneously and their Judaism becomes as relevant to them as the great world around them.
The threshold requirement for transformative education is to provide young learners with a strong knowledge base from which they can debate content, analyze implications and identify their personal roles. The senses provide the physical channels which facilitate the neurological acquisition, storage and retrieval of knowledge, and the arts are the language of the senses. Indeed, the arts are naturally multi-sensory, whether visual, auditory, kinesthetic or a combination thereof. Learning through the arts facilitates the optimum pedagogical response to the differentiation contemplated by Professor Howard Gardner’s treatise, Multiple Intelligences. Each of every student’s senses should be invoked in the learning process.
Learning through the arts esteems meaning as beauty. Children want to create beauty and be acknowledged in the process. Our senses thrill to beauty, and when students imbue their creativity with meaning, we see learning. We use the arts to energize the senses and the senses to invigorate creativity. Properly supervised, the arts invite the diligent effort, discovery and achievement that lead students to find meaning in their work. They come to appreciate the inherent value in skill and the gratification of productivity. The capacity to intentionally create something meaningful is an important aspect of a child’s development. When a six year old sees her handmade silk-screened hallah cover on the family Shabbat table, the message of creative achievement is as significant as when a fourteen year old sees his poem selected for publication in an anthology. Appreciating creation is a meaningful part of Judaism.
We match learning goals to specific art forms through an assessment of what type of expression can most profoundly relay the ideas and themes being studied. The mode of expression must elucidate the relationship between thinking and feeling. We hand students a specific artistic medium as a vehicle for expression, whether literary, dramatic, musical or visual, and guide them how to use it. For example, a grade six leadership theme begins with Humash study of the Book of I Samuel and culminates with parents’ applause when the class performs I Samuel as an original piece of musical theatre. The book’s dramatic narrative particularly suits the medium of theatre. Students study the ancient text, then compose an original script in Hebrew (or any language), score and choreograph the production themselves, build the sets and finally perform to their community. The learning about power and leadership is embedded in the Humash drama; in parallel, the students collaborate to master various elements of theatre. The medium and the message blend.
2. Our pedagogical response to modernity
A school day divided between Jewish and universal studies no longer mirrors the everyday experience of the Jewish child, who lives a unified identity all day long. We integrate learning so students view the world through two overlaid lenses, one universal and one Jewish. The Jewish perspective is a constant overlay, not a divisible disciplinary focus. The Jewish overlay is content rich and rigorous in discipline, but it becomes stunted if shaded from the open and universal vision of Jewish children. Especially now, when assimilating globalizing cultures abound, integrated learning enables the profile of the Jewish people to emerge in accurate silhouette so that our children understand clearly who they are.
In sharp distinction from technological screen-fed education, in which students sit neutrally in the face of information, arts-based learning is interactive and uses knowledge dynamically – they construct their learning by putting themselves “inside their artwork.” The learning is active and intentional, not passive and incidental. In Five Minds for the Future, Howard Gardner recommends we propel education towards students’ need to understand the changing world, to creatively and flexibly meet challenge, to synthesize information, and to live respectfully and ethically with peers. Learning through the arts applies these very skill sets to the transmission of Jewish values. Simply collecting and remembering Jewish information is no longer sufficient.
3. The value of the arts in cultural transmission and spiritual growth
The soulfulness of learning through the arts stands out among its most transformative aspects. When children experience Judaic texts telling them they are made in the image of God and should be God-like as original, purposeful, creative and collaborative beings, they open to the possibilities they were born to have. Artistic creativity links the texts and traditions of Judaism with students’ inner lives, hopes and dreams. Pre-teens can identify with the nightmare of Jacob’s wrestling with an angel and match it to their own friction with challenge and risk. Focus on the child’s inner life leads to extraordinary results. Students develop self esteem as they recognize their own purposeful expression as beautiful. Their sense of self-worth grows as they create something meaningful. They are tzelem Elokim, and appreciative of the source of this sentiment.
The search for expression deepens understanding and nurtures meaning. That which often seems most incommunicable can find its way through creative or “aesthetic” expression. We focus on the understanding that we want to see emanate from student effort. For example, as Eli misinterprets Hana’s fervor in I Samuel, junior high students reflect that they too may be misunderstood even when trying their best. The frustration this may engender in a pre-teen can be danced and drummed more easily than discussed. The arts nurture soulful pursuit in the direction that is Judaism.
The creative arts have intensified Jewish expression and carried intergenerational messages through the ages. Through the arts we tell and remember our personal experiences and our communal story – we are blessed with narrative Midrash, stunning poetry from 12th century Spain, visual interpretations by Marc Chagall, the cultural Talmudic stylings of Fiddler on the Roof, the lyrical Mi She-berach of songstress Debbie Friedman z”l, and the passion of dance.
The transmission of Jewish values requires sustainable learning. In Smart Schools: Better thinking and learning for every child, David Perkins writes that the cornerstones of sustainable learning are understanding and the expression of understanding. The arts engage students to understand the subject matter and then they deepen this connection through creative interpretation; we ask students to perform what they understand. For instance, a young child, who scrambles enthusiastically onto a boulder to call out the Shema for all to hear, performs his understanding of the credo of his people. A child who churns the colors of the spectrum into a mysterious abstract expression performs an understanding of the primordial chaos of tohu va-vohu.
Clothes, conveniences, and customs evolve, while human emotions and dreams endure. These are the purview of the creative arts and underlie the arts’ power to bridge generations. This basic human correspondence through time helps explain how the arts cultivate the components of our tradition for the future. Students become engaged by an emotional connection and, when engaged, they are in the moment of their learning – just as children become lost in the flow of a game at hand. In this flow, ideas embed themselves. For example, as students experience for themselves the anguish felt by Yehuda Halevi for Eretz Yisrael they begin to sense the yearning at the heart of a Zionism that is spiritual, not just political. To get to this state they must first understand passion generally in literature, be it classical poetry or the lyrics of rock and roll. The arts bring students into the Judaic curriculum through their feelings, where they think and express themselves as Jews. This personal connection and emotional satisfaction nurtures their Jewish identity.
We examine how we communicate meaning. Meaning is a process, not a product, and a school that integrates the arts into its daily ethos does much to advance Jewish values and culture. An ethos is a value system and disposition that surpass decor and ritual. The creative ethos at The Toronto Heschel School includes middot and mitzvot, derekh eretz and community, how we create curriculum, the design of our classroom, and our methodology of teaching. The distinctive forms of thinking used to create pieces of art – whether paintings, musical compositions, dance or drama – are manifest throughout all aspects of an arts-based school. We also examine ourselves and find that being a responsible creator is important to living Jewishly. We see that everything we do is predicated on who we are. Creativity is an optimistic and positive stance of possibility; we follow God who saw that the light, His first act of creation, was good. The school’s ethos value system reflects what Judaism holds dear; the very first thing that God calls holy is a piece of time, the Sabbath. Such are our values and who we are.
4. Conclusion
Transformative Jewish education through the arts addresses the whole child and the whole of Judaism. Children fall in love with what they learn. It is truly their own and they become what they learn. The creative ethos that nurtures effort into accomplishment simply mirrors the rewarding mindfulness of our Jewish lifestyle. Our deeds matter more than our words. Our performance in the world reflects our knowledge and our morality. This is the paradigm through which we teach. Learning through the arts trains children to master the skills they need to express what is important and meaningful to them. Soulful expression is beauty in itself and no one is more allegiant that the child who feels gratified. As Heschel advised, we invoke in our students, “Above all, remember that you must build your life as if it were a work of art.” It can start at a Jewish day school.