Joan S. Kaye, Ed.D., served as CEO of the Orange County, CA, Bureau of Jewish Education and is an adjunct faculty member at Pepperdine University. A graduate of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, she completed her doctorate in organizational leadership at Pepperdine University.
The primary focus of the Bureau of Jewish Education (BJE) in Orange County, CA is adolescent programming. In addition to specific curricula and a major emphasis on issues of identity, there were a series of unspoken values underlying all of the BJE’s work. In 2000, Jay Lewis, the Bureau’s Director of Youth Programs, and I had been talking about surfacing those values, looking at the ways in which we taught them, both through the written curriculum and through what one might call the “hidden” or unspoken curriculum.
With our first serious conversation, it became clear that the project had implications far beyond our youth program. We saw it beginning with youth and spiraling out to effect how our staff related to one another and our participants, how the Board functioned with the staff and as representatives of the agency, and, since we were dreaming, we imagined it could even reach out into the community and become a community conversation of how people functioned both within individual agencies and across agencies.
Our initial plan was to invite the board to determine the core values and the program staff to work with us to curricularize them. We envisioned three stages: 1) collection of information; 2) visioning by the Board; and 3) curriculum design by the staff. We saw this taking place over the course of a year and a half, at the end of which, if successful, we would “take it on the road” by demonstrating our results and offering our help to engage other segments of the community in similar processes.
Information collection
There were four aspects to this phase, which took place from January through March of 2001. The first involved reading and discussing two books which offered a theoretical perspective on which to base our work: Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice, to provide a balance to the Kohlbergian framework from which I tend to operate, and Carol Ingall’s Transmission and Transformation to offer the most recent perspective on moral education in a Jewish setting. Second, we met with people whom we thought would help to inform our work and clarify our thinking. Our third task was to collect for review the existing written curriculum which dealt specifically with values.
From these materials and other written curricula on Jewish values, and discussions in which we tried to “surface” the values from our unspoken curriculum, we developed a list of what we considered to be the 13 most important Jewish values for adolescents to learn:
Kavod (respect), Derekh eretz (courteous behavior), Hesed (kindness), Klal Yisrael (community), Hakhnasat Orhim (welcoming strangers), Tikkun Olam (repairing the world), Tzedek (justice, fairness), Talmud Torah (Jewish learning), Ahavat Yisrael (Love of the state of Israel), Simhah (celebrating special occasions), Ruah (spirit), Rahamim (compassion), Shabbat
In addition to what we learned from our own curriculum, we gained a lot of insight from our readings. One key point we learned from In a Different Voice was that “masculinity is defined through separation, while femininity is defined through attachment” (Gilligan, 1982, p. 8). Due to this orientation, women construct moral problems differently than men, and even use a different moral language than do men. In resolving moral dilemmas, women struggle between conflicting moral responsibilities, unlike men, who make decisions about contradictory rights.
Our experience had taught us that girls generally responded much more positively to the BJE’s ninth grade program (Adat Noar) than did boys, and Gilligan’s work offered an interesting possible explanation to the phenomenon. In the ninth grade program, we tended to emphasize relationships and caring for one another within the context of teaching “respect.” One of the considerations we then had to examine in curricularizing the values was the conceptual language and examples with which we explained them.
While Gilligan’s work offered interesting insights, Ingall’s book had very direct relevance to our work. She posits a central dilemma for Jewish moral education, one expressed in the title of her book, Transmission & Transformation. This dilemma is the conflict between passing on Jewish values (transmission), which tells us to behave in a certain way because we are commanded by God to do so, and creating morally autonomous human beings (transformation). Ingall discusses the discomfort not only of the students, but of Jewish educators, with the concept of “commandedness,” as well as with God-talk. With the exception of the most Orthodox among us, we are operating out of a Western tradition that emphasizes the right of the individual. While Jewish tradition is one of obligation, American culture is one of rights. Furthermore, our clientele tend, more often than not, to come from upper middle class families in which parents are single-mindedly focused not on helping their children become more pious,but on ensuring that they reach their fullest potential as human beings. Ingall sees these two world views as “radically divergent” and considers their reconciliation to be a major part of the task of Jewish moral educators (Ingall, 1999, p. 71). Given the typical adolescent’s drive toward autonomy, the task of reconciliation becomes even more critical.
Ingall offers an interesting framework for the design of a moral education project, incorporating both the logical dimension as expressed by Kohlberg, and the dimension of caring appearing in the work of Gilligan and many feminist writers. However, she doesn’t limit her view to modern ideas of moral development, but incorporates resources from classical ethical thinkers, modern research, secular educators and Jewish tradition as she develops her thesis. She unerringly targets the pitfalls that weaken Jewish moral education, and offers concrete methods for avoiding them. While she doesn’t completely resolve the transmission/transformation conflict, she does offer a compelling vision of what moral education can and should be.
The final step in the information gathering process was to develop a survey and to schedule several follow-up sessions in which we would take this list to our TALIT (Teens are Leaders In Training) seniors to see if there were a correlation between what we thought we had been teaching and what they were learning.
The survey and meetings with our seniors were the most rewarding parts of this entire process. We divided the group into three sections and met with each group separately. We began by asking them to fill out a survey designed to help us do two things: understand what had kept them participating in religious education throughout their high school years and help us in the development of a new curriculum. We developed a series of questions that we refined after each group session. It turned out that the two most productive ones were: 1) “Which of these values do you think were the most important to us?” and 2) “How do you know? What did we do or say to make you think that?”
The survey results indicated that the areas in which we thought we had put the greatest emphasis were, with one exception, the ones in which they felt that emphasis most strongly. However, it was from their comments that we learned the most. One young woman, when asked how the values were actualized, talked about our constant use of mixers (ice breaker/team-building activities) as a way of demonstrating the value of “welcoming guests.” Another, in talking about the emphasis on “respect,” said: “You don’t just do what everyone else does, tell us how much the kids have to respect the counselors. You talk about how the counselors have to respect the kids, too… and how we need to respect each other. And you act the way you talk!” Perhaps the most telling comments, and there were several in this vein, dealt with the lack of curricularization that we had been feeling. The teens made it clear that those values which were actively taught in the curriculum, such as those which formed the subject matter of a minicourse, had the greatest impact. We were pleased with the results on two accounts: one, our unspoken curricular messages were being heard; and two, our intuition about the need to “speak” them through the curriculum seemed to be on target, as well.
A new process emerges
Armed with all this information, we sat down to review the process we had originally designed. The results of our meetings with TALIT students convinced us that the teens were starting to learn the values we thought were core values for our program. We realized that these weren’t values we had chosen ourselves (although some of the emphasis may have been ours), but concepts which were embedded in the culture of our programs. We were not willing to risk losing them. Therefore, we took the list of 13 and chose five that would serve as our core values. It was an interesting process, especially since while I approached moral development through the lens of principle, Jay viewed it through the lens of caring. We eliminated one value because we felt it had become one of those “Americanized” values of which Ingall spoke. Another was deleted because we knew we were currently doing everything we could with it and, for a variety of reasons, could not provide the kind of authentic experience that would take it to the next level. A third wasn’t chosen because we saw it as something the teens needed as part of their experience, rather than as an essential Jewish value. And so we went through the list, arguing, convincing, and being convinced in return. The five values we ultimately chose were: Hesed, Klal Yisrael, Hakhnasat Orhim, Talmud Torah, and Kavod.
Stakeholder initiation
With the core values determined, the roles of each of the stakeholders had become clearer. Instead of separating the process into visioning and actualization, we would ask each group to do a little of both. Our original plan was flawed in that we hadn’t realized the power of working with the value concepts themselves in concrete terms. Our board couldn’t write curriculum, but they could discuss how each of the values plays itself out within their area of responsibility: for example, what might this set of values have to say about interactions between the board and the staff, the way board members represent the Bureau in the community, their manner toward new board members? It seemed to us that by studying each value and then talking about its practical implications for their work, we would be making the board members a part of the culture in a meaningful way. Ideally,
the lessons learned would go beyond the Bureau and into their personal and professional lives.
The specific process for the board was to introduce the subject with a learning session on Jewish values at the final meeting of the year. Each of the five board meetings the following year was devoted to one of the five values, with the first hour of each meeting set aside for study of the value from Jewish texts followed by a discussion of its application. This process, with appropriate modifications, was repeated for each of the stakeholder groups. Our office staff talked about the application of these values to their work, with the focus on how we treat, and talk about, the people with whom we come into contact on a daily basis. Study and application of the values formed the core curriculum for the annual camp staff retreat at the end of August; their focus was on the unspoken curriculum and how they can model and help to instill the values.
The local religious school principals’ council became so excited by the idea that they adapted it as the core of both their own study and the communal teacher education programs for the following year. The teachers would study the values with a guest scholar, explore their meaning within the unspoken curriculum, and meet with other teachers to develop specific classroom materials for teaching at least one of the values. Three years later, Tarbut V’Torah, our large community day school, applied for and received a two-year grant to engage the BJE in designing and implementing a similar values process with their board, faculty and student body.
Looking back over the several years in which I was engaged with this project, the most exciting aspect for me was studying the values with dozens of groups of students, teachers, staff, and lay leaders in the BJE and other communal educational institutions and watching the growing awareness of how traditional Jewish values really could and did have an impact on the daily lives of all of us.
References
Gilligan, C. (1982). In a Different Voice. Cambridge, Harvard University Press.
Ingall, C.G. (1999). Transmission and Transformation. New York, Jewish Theological Seminary of America.