האלף בית של חינוך לישראל
THE ALEPH BET
OF ISRAEL EDUCATION®
A set of core principles, approaches to content, and essential pedagogies that
together consitute the building blocks for the field.
WELCOME TO ISRAEL EDUCATION: A NEW CENTURY
The iCenter credo has been rooted in the beliefs of the centrality of the learner, trusting the educational process, and a commitment to both a loving and transparent Israel education. We believe that the subject of Israel is an important priority of American Jewish life and shouldn’t be left to social media. Moreover, we shouldn’t wait until the young adult years to engage with this subject.
Educating the heart and mind about Israel begins the day a child is born, and must be part of lifelong learning and experience. Israel education is as much about shaping character, personality, mind, and social connectedness as it is about “furnishing an empty room with facts.” It’s actually a part of what our tradition, thousands of years ago, asked us to love “with all your heart, soul, and might!”
Our work in Israel education is motivated by dreams, but dreams also imply great responsibilities. The Aleph Bet of Israel Education® 2nd Edition is an updated version of our core principles. We encourage you to embrace these pages, to read them with your staff, board, and colleagues and dream about what they will mean when implemented.
Parker J. Palmer
I am a Christian of the Quaker variety whose life work has focused on education in secular settings. But the root system of my approach to teaching and learning—which I’ve been writing and speaking about for the past forty years—reaches deep into the Jewish tradition. That’s one reason, among many, that I was grateful for the invitation to write a foreword to this superb collection of chapters on Israel education.
At first glance, Israel education would seem to have little, if any, relevance to the broad sweep of educational issues under debate these days;...
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Parker J. Palmer
I am a Christian of the Quaker variety whose life work has focused on education in secular settings. But the root system of my approach to teaching and learning—which I’ve been writing and speaking about for the past forty years—reaches deep into the Jewish tradition. That’s one reason, among many, that I was grateful for the invitation to write a foreword to this superb collection of chapters on Israel education.
At first glance, Israel education would seem to have little, if any, relevance to the broad sweep of educational issues under debate these days; e.g., the rise of the common core in our public schools or the decline of the liberal arts in higher education. But because the chapters in this anthology are largely concerned with foundational questions of pedagogy—questions about how we teach as well as what we teach—they have an important contribution to make to the larger, long-term conversation about education reform.
What Anne Lanski, Executive Director of the iCenter, says about Israel education in “Welcome to Israel Education: A New Century,” I believe, is true of all education rightly understood:
Israel education is as much about shaping character, personality, mind, and social connectedness as it is about ‘furnishing an empty room with information.’ It’s actually a part of what our tradition, thousands of years ago, asked us to love ‘with all your heart, soul, and might!’
An I-Thou Education
In 1983, I published To Know As We Are Known: A Spirituality of Education.[1] That book—part of my long-time effort to challenge the dominant objectivist model of contemporary education, an effort shaped in part by the early influence of Martin Buber in my life—included these words:
In the words of Abraham Joshua Heschel… ‘It is impossible to find Truth without being in love.’ … This intimate link between loving and knowing is implicit throughout the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. The Hebrew Bible uses the word ‘know’ to indicate the conjugal relation of husband and wife (as in ‘Abraham knew Sarah’), the same word it uses for our knowledge of G-d and of the created world… The images that inform the biblical understanding of what it means to know—images of personal involvement and mutuality—are neither accidental nor antiquated. They reflect the quality of knowing at its deepest reaches, the quality of a truth that draws us into community.[2]
By objectivism I mean an approach to education that:
- holds teachers, students, and subjects at arm’s length from each other for the sake of pure knowledge, uncontaminated by human hands;
- focuses on downloading objective facts into the learner’s mind;
- treats subjectivity as if it were a disease to be cured rather than an essential component of being human and of knowing;
- ultimately leads us to respond to each other and the world as a set of I-It rather than I-Thou relationships, destroying community in the process.
I do not need to remind readers of an anthology on Israel education about the immense evil that can result when people objectify each other or, worse still, the other. Objectivism is a deadly toxin for which love, rightly understood, is the only antidote. Any education that hopes to contribute to the healing of our wounded world must have love at its core.
Of course, love is a word that needs to be used with care when it comes to teaching and learning. In popular parlance, the word suggests a kind of attachment, even enchantment, that undermines the capacity for critical thinking that is the fruit of authentic education. The romantic love that gives rise to the old saw, “Love is blind”—and to the conviction that the beloved can do no wrong—has no place in an education that aims at helping us see ourselves and our world more clearly.
Love Rightly Understood
But there is another kind of love without which there can be no education worthy of the name, a love that is both the origin and the outcome of authentic education. It is best illustrated by a story from the heart of science about the Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Barbara McClintock.
Obviously, McClintock’s scientific work met the rigorous standards of logic and empiricism, without which one does not win a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. She was no slouch when it came to objective facts! But her work was also animated by a way of knowing that can only be called intuitive, relational, even mystical, one that is foundational to all great science. When McClintock died at age ninety, she was eulogized by a colleague as “someone who understands where the mysteries lie” rather than “someone who mystifies.”[3]
McClintock’s work was chronicled in a book by Evelyn Fox Keller, professor of history and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Keller asked McClintock, in effect, “What’s the key to doing great science?”, then summarized her answer in these words:
Over and over again [McClintock] tells us one must have the time to look, the patience to ‘hear what the material has to say to you,’ the openness to ‘let it come to you.’ Above all, one must have ‘a feeling for the organism.’[4]
When pressed for her scientific secret, this Nobel Prize-winner speaks not of data and logic, though she was a master of both. Instead, she speaks of embodied relationships and feelings. As one writer says, McClintock “gained valuable knowledge by empathizing with [the] corn plants [she studied], submerging herself in their world and dissolving the boundary between object and observer.” [5] She regarded these plants not as objects to be held at arm’s length but as subjects, as beings. Violating the “arm’s length” approach of the objectivist quest for purity, she entered into a live encounter with her subject, brought her own subjectivity or selfhood into the equation, and emerged with knowledge of how genes do their work that broke new ground on which geneticists still stand.
Biographer Keller sums up McClintock’s genius in a single luminous sentence that defines the kind of love that both animates authentic education and is its outcome. In her relation to corn plants, Keller writes, McClintock achieved “the highest form of love, love that allows for intimacy without the annihilation of difference.”[6]
Love and Critical Distance
This, it seems to me, is what we want for every learner in every field of study: a capacity to draw close to the subject at hand, to feel one’s self personally related to it, all the while allowing that subject to be what it is, to speak its own voice on its own terms, never projecting one’s preferences, prejudices, or personal needs upon it. Knowing animated by this kind of love forges an I-Thou relationship in which we never blur the boundaries between each other—or, worse yet, try to remake each other—the way we often do in romantic love.
I-Thou knowing not only allows us to know a subject intimately and well; it also helps us maintain critical distance, which is the essential difference between education and indoctrination. Because it is rooted in respect for the integrity of both the knower and the known, I-Thou knowing allows us to have what theologian William Sloane Coffin called a “lover’s quarrel” with the subjects we study. Writing about American notions of patriotism, Coffin made some distinctions that have relevance for an Israel education: “There are three kinds of patriots, two bad, one good. The bad are the uncritical lovers and the loveless critics. Good patriots carry on a lover’s quarrel with their country.”[7]
Love, rightly understood, forges the kind of communal relationships in which we can have creative conflicts with one another—conflicts over the nature and meaning of things we care about too much to allow them to suffer from faulty observation or flawed interpretation. Of course, every observation and every interpretation is likely to be partial or penultimate and needs to be checked and corrected. Conflict over what we are seeing and what it means is the engine that advances our knowledge, if we hold conflict creatively in a community of inquiry bound together by love of the subject and of each other.
“Truth,” as I have written elsewhere, “is an eternal conversation about things that matter, conducted with passion and discipline.”[8] Truth is often thought to reside in the conclusions we reach in conversations. But surely that cannot be right: in every field I know anything about, from theology to astrophysics, the conclusions keep changing as new observations, new interpretations, and new conflicts arise among us. If we want to live in the truth, we must have the habits of heart and mind to live in the great conversation.
So, to quote Anne Lanski again, the goal of education is not to furnish “an empty room with facts”—though learning the relevant facts as they are currently understood is clearly an important step along the way. The ultimate goal of all education, from pre-school through higher and adult education, is to equip students to participate in an unending process of agreeing and disagreeing, then doing it all over again, hanging in with each other for the long haul. This is not only the process that advances our knowledge—it is the process by which we keep weaving and reweaving the tattered fabric of the human community.
Teaching is Risky Business
This anthology offers a set of deeply insightful explorations into a pedagogy that creates live encounters with a subject—encounters conducted in and for community, animated by conflict, bounded by discipline, and grounded in love. Those are the marks of an authentic education. But none of them will show up in the classroom, or any other educational setting, until a real teacher shows up—a teacher who can hold the uncertainty and complexity of the ever-changing force-field that genuine learning requires.
Despite a century of reasoned, research-based pleading for a pedagogy that prepares students for real-life engagement—with themselves, other people, and the needs of the larger world—filling people’s heads with facts remains the dominant mode of teaching. There’s a simple reason for that sad fact: lecturing at people while protected by a podium and expertise leaves teachers invulnerable by giving them total control over the process.
But creating space for a live encounter between teacher, learner, and subject is risky business. It can take us in unexpected directions, leaving teachers vulnerable when they don’t know the answer to a question, or when it becomes clear that they must abandon their agenda and improvise, or when conflicts arise that are difficult to negotiate.
In I-Thou teaching and learning, much depends on what goes on inside teachers at moments of this sort. Are they filled with the ego-driven fear that comes from not wanting to look bad in front of students? Or are they filled with the kind of soulful love of learning and of learners that can normalize such moments as part of the educational adventure, making them easier to handle?
A fearful teacher will fake it or get flustered, defensive, or even angry when confronted with a question he or she cannot answer. But a teacher who works from a more grounded, soulful place—who understands that teaching and learning are communal activities—can more easily say, “Great question! I have no idea what the answer is. Let’s find out together.” Such a teacher models what it means to be a life-long learner, freeing students from the tyranny of having to get it right every time and sending them into the world as people who know how little they know and aren’t afraid to learn.
When we take risks, we will fail from time to time, and the very prospect of failure pushes many of us out of our comfort zones. But once again, love rightly understood can take us where the ego fears to go. The kind of love I have in mind is one I have heard defined as “the willingness to extend yourself for the sake of another person’s growth,” which is exactly what good teachers do for their students.
This anthology is filled with wise and useful chapters on pedagogical techniques that will make Israel education a live encounter between teachers, learners, and subjects. But, as all these writers know, good teaching can never be reduced to technique. Ultimately, good teaching comes from the selfhood of a teacher who can skillfully navigate the twists and turns of the inner landscape of his or her life.
So as you read these chapters, reflect not only on what and how you teach. Reflect also on who it is that teaches—which is to say, yourself—and the religious tradition in which you stand. That tradition offers all you need to know about the kind of love—love of G-d, world, others, and self in all their confounding complexity and unsurpassed glory—that underlies authentic teaching and learning.
Endnotes
[1] Palmer, Parker J. To Know As We Are Known: A Spirituality of Education. San Francisco: Harper, 1983. Print.
[2] Heschel, Abraham Joshua. A Passion for Truth. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973. 45, 57-58. Print.
[3] Dr. James Shapiro, University of Chicago, quoted in Kolata, Gina. “Dr. Barbara McClintock, 90, Gene Research Pioneer Dies.” New York Times. 4 September 1992: C16. Print.
[4] Keller, Evelyn Fox. A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock . New York: Freeman, 1983. 198. Print.
[5] Rosser, Sue V. “The Gender Equation.” The Sciences. September/ October (1992): 46. Print.
[6] Keller, Evelyn Fox. Reflections on Gender and Science. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. 164. Print.
[7] Coffin, William Sloane. Credo. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2005. 84. Print.
[8] Palmer, Parker J. The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007.106. Print.
Parker J. Palmer, Founder and Senior Partner of the Center for Courage & Renewal, is a well-known writer, speaker and activist. He has reached millions worldwide through his nine books—which have been translated into ten languages—including the bestselling To Know As We Are Known, Let Your Life Speak, The Courage to Teach, A Hidden Wholeness, and Healing the Heart of Democracy. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California at Berkeley, along with ten honorary doctorates, two Distinguished Achievement Awards from the National Educational Press Association, and an Award of Excellence from the Associated Church Press. In 2010, Palmer was given the William Rainey Harper Award whose previous recipients include Margaret Mead, Elie Wiesel, and Paolo Freire. In 2011, he was named an Utne Reader Visionary, one of “25 people who are changing your world.”
Read LessLee S. Shulman
It is both a delight and a privilege to write the afterword to this thoughtful and scholarly, as well as practical and realistic, collection of chapters on Israel education. It is an equally exciting and delightful privilege to be writing as a closing bookend to the “Prelude” written by my esteemed colleague Parker Palmer. Parker and I have known each other for many years. In a very friendly and mutually supportive manner, we represent complementary perspectives on education, in particular higher education. It is never a surprise when Parker Palmer writes about teaching...
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Lee S. Shulman
It is both a delight and a privilege to write the afterword to this thoughtful and scholarly, as well as practical and realistic, collection of chapters on Israel education. It is an equally exciting and delightful privilege to be writing as a closing bookend to the “Prelude” written by my esteemed colleague Parker Palmer. Parker and I have known each other for many years. In a very friendly and mutually supportive manner, we represent complementary perspectives on education, in particular higher education. It is never a surprise when Parker Palmer writes about teaching in the language of love and passion, while I am likely to be describing the same phenomena with accounts of thought and judgment. If there is a core to the Jewish tradition, it certainly has the multiplicity of interpretations at its heart.
Parker Palmer has always been the most inspiring and eloquent of the scholarly champions of a humanistic and emotionally rich approach to the challenges of teaching. His perspective has lovely relevance and resonance to the world of Israel education. I have always taken a more cognitive approach with an emphasis that is much more embedded in the social sciences and the challenges of professional practice.
I think it is fair to assert (and I believe that Parker would agree) that each of these perspectives is both valid and incomplete. Taken together, they are much richer, yet even the sum of our parts will necessarily be insufficient for a truly comprehensive understanding of education. And if education in general is a challenge, Israel education is among the most daunting of those challenges.
Permit me to begin with a surprising claim. In this chapter, I examine Israel education as an exemplar of professional education, a field in which I have worked for nearly fifty years. This claim should elicit some shock, alarm and understandable skepticism among my readers. But be patient with me for just a moment.
I treat professional education as education for professing. I consider liberal education to be professional in this same sense. Paradoxically, religious education is professional as well (I do not confound Israel education with religious education, although in some contexts the two are closely connected). That is, they are professional in the sense that a goal of both liberal education and religious education (properly understood) is to prepare students to develop the kinds of understandings, skills, and values that are necessary for them to function fully, flexibly, and meaningfully as citizens, leaders, parents, teachers, and trusted friends. To profess is to combine knowledge with commitment, to combine practical skill with moral values, and to link understanding with action.
Learning to profess is a process of habit formation and identity development. There are three kinds of habit integral to professional learning—habits of mind, habits of practice, and habits of the heart. The lawyer, for example, must learn to think like a lawyer, must develop a large set of lawyerly skills and practices from drafting contracts to mediating disputes, and needs to develop an ethical and moral compass that can guide her efforts as she walks the line between serving as the zealous advocate for a client and also serving as an officer of the court, protecting the integrity of the justice system. All professions entail the need to negotiate the interactions and the tensions among these three habits.
The student of Israel education is asked to develop extensive cognitive understanding of Israel—its history, geography, religious and cultural significance, literature, poetry, music, and a host of other varieties of intellectual and aesthetic learning. She may also be expected to develop Israel-connected skills such as fluency with the Hebrew language, talent and experience for engaging in debates and disputations about Israel, competence in making one’s way within Israel, or participating in Israeli dancing. Perhaps most important, and calling for the most integration, we ask the learner to develop habits of the heart. These are values, commitments, feelings, and a sense of belonging. The integrative function is captured in the process of identity formation, the development of a sense of self and of group membership where Israel plays a central role.
To profess also entails living and working in contexts that are replete with unavoidable uncertainty and unpredictability, thus requiring the profess-or to exercise judgment, reasoning, faith, and hope in the face of ambiguities. Indeed, the successful students of professional education must frequently inhabit multiple identities, plural senses of self, to accommodate the varied circumstances under which their professional judgment and action are tested. I find this conception of learning deeply Jewish as well as profoundly relevant to Israel education.
When we speak about education for professing, we are not describing processes of learning and identity formation that lead to unquestioned faith or belief in one set of principles, institutions, or leaders. What I have found in my studies of education across many professions is that learning to profess involves the development of a concordance of opposites. That is, someone who has developed an understanding of profession is someone who can combine the deepest commitment with the necessary levels of questioning, skepticism, and doubt needed to keep those commitments sharp and useful as events unfold and as unforeseen circumstances arise.
To learn medicine is both to develop deep understanding of the research findings, technical skills, and medical ethics that one learns during training whilst being in a position to question and challenge them as the need to adapt, refine, and even replace them emerges. It was no accident that the sociologist Rose Coser named her book on the psychiatric residency Training in Ambiguity.[1] Moreover, even as the physician or nurse undertakes the most complex intellectual and technical analyses, she must enter into a trusting, caring, and even loving relationship with the patient under her care. Analysis and empathy must work together for the sake of the patient.
In that regard, I remember a conversation I had with a young man who had just graduated from a Mennonite Christian college that is, in denominational terms, in the same extended family of Christian Learning denominations as the Quaker tradition akin to those which Parker Palmer identifies himself in the first sentence of his prologue. The young man that I met informed me that he had majored in theology in college and had been accepted to the Yale Divinity School as a graduate student. When my facial expression communicated a certain modicum of surprise at the juxtaposition of an undergraduate Christian college that I correctly assumed was committed to traditional liturgical and devotional practices and Yale Divinity School, which I saw as a liberal home to critical studies of holy texts, I saw a smile cross his face. He smiled and said to me:
You seem surprised by my choice. I guess you don’t understand that the kind of education I have received has taught me that there is more than one way to read the Holy Scriptures. In my youth, I could only read them one way; I read them devotionally. I have now learned that I can read the Scriptures, both analytically or critically as well as devotionally, without losing the capacity todo either.
In my language, this young man was learning to profess in a very deep sense. He was also developing a sense of epistemic empathy—the ability to hold on to one’s values while appreciatively comprehending the views of others whose values and perceptions are not aligned with one’s own. Indeed, at this same small Christian college, much of the first-year freshman curriculum was designed, as described by both the students and the faculty, to test their faith. Only by engaging that faith within a crucible of skepticism, doubt, and critical questioning could that commitment be appropriately examined.
And that is the fundamental paradox of learning to profess and the inherent challenge of Israel education. It is both learning to understand deeply, to practice in often routine and predictable ways and to absorb and exemplify a religious, national, familial, or cultural identity quite deeply without losing the capacity to be analytic and even critical. That juxtaposition is far easier to write about than to accomplish in practice. And yet, I would contend, what we learned from the chapters included in this anthology as well as from the continuing experiences with Israel education and other forms of professional learning, is this: development of the capacity for informed, mindful, and responsible uncertainty leads to intelligent and responsible action and not to paralysis. That is the essential character of Israel education.
When so many kinds of learning and developing wind about one another in a kind of pedagogical triple helix, the processes of teaching are not simple. The wise and varied chapters in this anthology exemplify that pedagogical diversity. While the chapters are all directed at the teaching of Israel education, they appropriately traverse the landscape of teaching and learning in which most fields of study must engage.
Conceptualizing Israel education as a form of education for professing also has the advantage of removing the question of whether we are talking about an education that is primarily cognitive and intellectual or emotional and spiritual, a form of deep learning or of identity formation. Learning to profess integrates and connects all of these. More accurately, learning to profess is an experience in which emotions, thoughts, identity, and technical skills are developed concurrently and seamlessly. They can be unpacked for analytic purposes, but in practice they are facets of a common experience of identity formation.
Learning does not occur in a vacuum. Israel education makes substantial demands on teachers and their pedagogical skill. Because the goals of Israel education are so multi-dimensional, teachers must be competent to teach for the understanding of subtle and challenging ideas. They must also be engaging role models and masters of narrative if the emotional and personal aspects of Israel education are to be addressed successfully. The pedagogies of Israel education cannot be didactic and frontal. The teachers must be skilled at group discussion, engaging reluctant learners, and guiding students into exciting debates and discussions. Increasingly, they will need to be adept at the uses of technology for long distance communication, simulations and games, and the development of learning and experiential portfolios. The preparation and continued professional development of the teachers in this field must be a critical priority.
Equally important, excellent teaching requires constant redesign and reformulation of formal and informal experiences based on more than personal taste or pedagogical intuitions. The field of Israel education needs to continue to develop bodies of evidence regarding what kinds of experience have what kinds of influence on which kinds of learners and in what sorts of contexts. The chapters in this anthology draw upon many kinds of evidence. But Israel education is not a field where a single study, a powerful experiment, or a well-crafted evaluation will answer questions of educational quality once and for all. Those of us in the field of Israel education and indeed in the world of Jewish education more broadly are continuously called upon to make practical judgments. These judgments will be better grounded if we continue to gather evidence of learning and its challenges in an ongoing manner.
What is needed is not research that will provide clear answers to the how-to, when, and where questions of Israel education. Those kinds of answers do not emerge from the kinds of research, however applied and practical, that I advocate. What does evidence-based practice mean? The word evidence derives from the Latin root (shoresh in the language of Israel education) vid that refers to acts of seeing. Thus visual, vision, and similar words share etymological patrimony with evidence. Caesar intoned “Veni, Vidi, Vici”—I came, I saw, I conquered—and the vid of evidence is the same allusion to seeing. The more evidence that has been collected, organized, and displayed, the better the guidance for those who teach and learn in this field.
We need to create a field informed by good research; we need to plant landscapes of evidence about the world of Israel education. They will entail large-scale evaluations like those deployed to study the impact of Birthright Israel. They will call for well-designed experiments that examine the teaching and learning of Hebrew language under different conditions. They will include many careful case studies of classrooms, field experiences, Shabbatons, and study trips. They will invite studies by teachers themselves who record and analyze variations in their own practices. When we can draw upon richer landscapes of evidence, we can do a better job of crafting more powerful educational experiences.
There is something inherently Jewish about the title of this anthology. Even though it presents a comprehensive, rich, and extensive overview of the field of Israel education, the editors resist the temptation to call it the alpha to omega or aleph-tav guide to Israel education. In all fields of Jewish studies, we treat our current state of understanding as preliminary, evolving, and subject to revision. Every text demands an interpretation. Every source cries out for a midrash. So it must be with Israel education. This anthology, however comprehensive, is only the aleph bet of the field. It is a great beginning. Of this we can be certain. There will be gimel and daled and many additional letters yet to come.
Endnotes
[1] Coser, Rose Laub. Training in Ambiguity: Learning Through Doing in a Mental Hospital. New York: Free Press, 1979. Print.
Lee S. Shulman is President Emeritus of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education Emeritus at Stanford University. He was previously Professor of Educational Psychology and Medical Education at Michigan State University. Shulman is a past president of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and also of the U.S. National Academy of Education. Shulman’s book The Wisdom of Practice was honored with the Grawmeyer Award in Education. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) in 2008. Shulman’s work examines the study of teaching and teacher education; pedagogical content knowledge; the assessment of teachers; medical education; the psychology of instruction in science, mathematics, and medicine; the logic of educational research; and the quality of teaching in higher education. Shulman’s most recent work has been the conceptualizing and description of signature pedagogies in the preparation of professionals.
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