As one of Shuki Taylor's hundreds of trainees that also gained experience as a day school educator, I was delighted to see his expertise on display in this forum.
When I joined Shuki's program several years ago, I saw experiential education as a foil to the conventional methods of Jewish education. In fact, I would have to admit that I viewed it as an integral part of what a progressive -- and entirely different -- "21st Century" approach to Jewish Education would look like. The prospect of injecting experiential education into the day school environment was exciting, complicated and daunting. Those feelings resurfaced when reading the bulk of Shuki's post.
In simple terms, experiential education tends to focus on holistic experiences, values, character and identity formation, whereas conventional, subject-based education celebrates the transmission of particular subjects, skills, insights and knowledge. Trying to marry these two fundamentally different orientations could lead one to question the sanity of the shadchan. Indeed, I found a number of subjects that I tried to teach this way enormously difficult in the day school environment. There simply weren't the necessary resources in time, space, class dynamics etc. to both convey content comprehensively and manicure value-laden experiences exquisitely.
Yet, as I soldiered on as an educator (just as I pressed on reading the post), I often found myself questioning whether the philosophy of experiential education as Shuki defines it, and the practice of Jewish Education as day schools have implemented it, are really all that far apart after all.
His reference to the heated Talmud debate in the same breadth as climbing Masada suggests that Shuki would agree that generally speaking classroom learning is as viable an identity building experiential setting as they come -- as long as the rules of effective experiential education are enforced.
Could conventional curricula absorb a few tweaks, thereby adapting to Kolb's guidelines? Perhaps. It would seemingly only be possible if we presume that Jewish knowledge is intrinsically a Jewish value and that each distinct subject of Jewish study impacts a student's Jewish identity in a meaningful way.
It's not inconceivable to suggest that when a student positively experiences an immersion into the study of the korban Olah, for example, that student will forever consider him/herself a "korban person". And that educational experience was effective, not because it navigated the values of the korban olah through Kolb's experiential benchmarks, but because each class thrust the student's encounter with the valuable subject into (at least one stage of) Kolb's experiential cauldron. In this case, the student emerged from the experience of that curriculum with the powerful perception of a Jewish subject capturing a piece of his/her Jewish identity.
Most of the time experiential education forms identity through a process of self-determination. Here, identity was constructed out of achievement or mastery motivation. Yet, a classroom exercise guiding the student to explore the korban asham using the same essential skills that the student utilized in studying the korban olah would likely satisfy Kolb's capstone phase of active experimentation -- and would seem relatively familiar to the classroom educator.
In this vein, might we see experiential Jewish education and conventional day school education as viable partners in the continued molding of Jewish minds and Jewish identities?
Gabi Spiewak
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/06/2017 10:12AM by mlb.
