Many thanks to Shuki Taylor for outlining succinctly the advantages and challenges of experiential education. It's exciting that there are now organisations and centres devoted exclusively to this aspect of learning.
From my corner of experiential Jewish education, having facilitated over 300 workshops worldwide in a "spontaneous midrash" technique in which the group is asked to speak as the characters in the text (the technique's title "Bibliodrama" doesn't do a great job of conveying what is actually done, as it is not acting), I can report feedback along the lines of "This is the most positive Torah learning experience I've ever had" and "I wish they taught us like this in school" and "I now identify with this character when I really did not before."
This speaks to the necessity of familiarising ourselves with the experiential options out there, and using them to the full. I feel as if there so much potential for Bibliodrama, and only a fraction of it is being actualized. The technique is extremely accessible - no need for art supplies, archeological sites or even costumes. The students/participants are automatically moved into right-brain territory simply by asking them to speak in first person and respond to a series teacher/facilitator questions whose answer does not appear in the text. The emotions and cognitions of the characters, in particular.
Shuki discusses stages of processing. Bibliodrama was explicitly designed by its creator, Dr Peter Pitzele, to contain a personalised processing component at the end. I generally ask for sharing along the lines of "It was powerful for me..." and "It was difficult for me..." and I sometime includes the question "What am I taking away?", along the lines of the Abstract Conceptualization mentioned. I thank Shuki for the reminder to try to make sure that this question is asked as often as possible. He is correct that sometimes surprising things will be said at this point - one never knows what people are going through until one actually asks them, and our assumptions about what happened in the room are not always on target.
Yael Unterman
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www.yaelunterman.com]
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/26/2017 08:39PM by mlb.
