Jewish Creative Sensibilities: Framing a New Aspiration for Jewish Education

ABSTRACT

Proponents of building a “creative society” through educational innovation are calling for engaging learners in new modes of collaboration, problem solving, and original thinking. How might the enterprise of Jewish education contribute to this evolution in creative thinking and action? This article explores how “the Jewish sensibilities” can be adapted into a framework infusing Jewish “ways of seeing and being” into a vision of “Jewish education for a creative society.” The proposed conceptual framework aims to spark conversation, experimentation, research, and inquiry within the broader discourse of rethinking the aims of Jewish education for the future.     

The Reconstruction of Jewish Education

Some forty years ago, Milton Steinberg, in his A Partisan Guide to the Jewish Problem, presented a “Gallery of Jewish Portraits” in which he surveyed the varieties of attitudes and beliefs which characterize twentieth century American Jews.¹ In describing the memories, commitments and problems of his Jewish types, Steinberg presented graphically his contention that there is no longer one “ideal” Jew nor a normative tradition acceptable, even superficially, to all Jews.     

The Crisis in Jewish Education

What will the Jewish supplementary school be in the 1990's? A more definitive question might be what will it supplement? In the beginning “supplementary” schools brought Jewish knowled[ggrave]e to the student who was already experiencing living Judaism in the home. In the 1960's, heyday of Jewish afternoon schools, the school supplemented secular knowledge and secular living with Jewish knowledge and some Jewish life experience as the home contributed less and less.     

The Traditional Code of Jewish Education

In years past, reporting on the state of the Minneapolis Talmud Torah Schools at national or regional educational conferences, the reaction was always: “Minneapolis”, “Minneapolis is different.”     

Professional Development for Disruptive Jews: The Lippman Kanfer Sensibilities Project as a Learning Agenda for Jewish Professional Education

ABSTRACT

Jewish learning in the context of professional development for Jews working in the “disruptive”, or engagement sector has emerged as a domain into which millions of dollars are invested annually, with very little hard data on how those investments correlate to educational growth. This article considers the Sensibilities Framework, promoted by the Lippman Kanfer Foundation as an initial attempt to theorize this domain, and suggests further avenues for research by theorists of American Jewish education.     

Ideas and Ideals of Jewish Education: Initiating a Conversation on Visions of Jewish Education

Barry Holtz' (2003) presentation of a map of orientations for the teaching of Bible provides a certain kind of focus for research, enabling us to ask deeper and richer question about those orientations. This article investigates the teaching of one teacher, in two different settings— more specifically, how that teacher introduces Bible in those settings— as a way of generating insight into the particular features of what Holtz calls the “contextual orientation.” Building on the sketch that Holtz offers, it explores the internal variation within that orientation, and hence begins to reveal some of the pedagogic possibilities.     

The Teacher Education Development Program: New Challenges

The article reviews the general context of the situation that has arisen in Russian education after the new provisions of the Federal Law of 29 December 2012 “On Education in the Russian Federation” went into effect. The law has been enacted in response to the need to develop a new concept of teacher education. Currently, about 270 institutions of higher education, about 30 percent of Russian universities, are implementing programs in the field of teacher education, and the proportion is growing. The author presents the main results of monitoring the activities of teacher training institutions in Russia and notes the new content and organizational challenges facing the project of modernizing teacher education.     

Teaching for a Sustainable World: the Environmental and Development Education Project for Teacher Education

The social, economic, political and ecological imperatives of sustainable development outlined in ’Our Common Future, Agenda 21’ and ’Caring for the Earth’ have established a renewed agenda for environmental education which links it very closely with development education. Teacher educators in Australia have responded to the need to link environmental and development education and to raise the level of attention usually devoted to them in teacher education programmes. The ’Environmental and Development Education Project for Teacher Education’ has been the result. The project has involved 20 educators, drawn from 11 universities, government departments and NGOs across Australia, in writing and trialing a set of 18 3‐hour workshop modules on environmental and development education for use in pre‐service teacher education courses. These modules, published in the project manual, ’Teaching for a Sustainable World’, illustrate how environmental education and development education are related and provide practical assistance for teacher educators who wish to include these important fields in their programmes. An intensive dissemination programme in 1993‐94 involves workshops for all Faculties of Education in Australia.     

三位一体之犹太教育探究

犹太民族被认为是世界上最聪明,神秘而富有的民族之一。其民族智慧被认为是最优秀的智慧。在犹太民族的教育智慧方面,有家庭、社团、国家三种组织作出了巨大的贡献。形态迥异而教育取向一致,三种组织推进了教育的不断发展。它们的教育智慧鲜明而有独特的风格特色,具有其他民族学习的价值。文章试从家庭、社团及国家这三种组织的具体教育智慧分析,揭示三种组织和谐发展教育的价值。