Recreation

I have written previously here, and here, about earlier professional development sessions with the Hebrew School teachers. Our third session took place yesterday and we focused on the foundational elements of experiential Jewish education: recreation and socialization. To briefly recap, our ultimate goal in experiential Jewish education is “challenge,” to create educational experiences that push participants to gain new perspectives, expand their comfort zones, and ask new questions, to name a few of the desired outcomes. In order to create the possibility for the comfort and the atmosphere necessary to be open to challenge, the educational setting must first include elements of recreation and socialization. Recreation is a sense of feeling at ease and having fun. Ideally there should also be an element of choice; of participants choosing of their own volition to participate (already one can grasp one of the fundamental challenges of Hebrew School education particularly with an experiential approach. How many participants, i.e. children, actively choose Hebrew School as an option?). Recreation creates the feeling of a “safe space” for the participants and creates a sense of social connection between them as well. Socialization provides participants with those elements of Judaism and Jewish culture – knowledge, skills, and attitudes -which help them identify as Jews. It also gives participants a common “language,” (sometimes the literal language of Hebrew) which also happens to be a Jewish one.

In yesterday’s session, teachers thought about their past experiences, looking for examples of recreation and socialization in order to share with each other. From there we reflected on the Hebrew School looking for examples of these elements here. There are many, but we highlighted two. Our kitah bet teacher, Annelise Ocanto opens each Sunday class by having her students share something they are thankful for. They use the language of the Hebrew prayer (which is also modern colloquial Hebrew) “Modeh ani” – literally “I am thankful for . . .” On the recreational level they share of themselves and of their lives outside of school. On the socialization level, they frame this conversation in Jewish terms with Hebrew language and with values of appreciation and gratitude. We also discussed the poster which our head teacher, Dori Zabari has put on the wall in her classroom. She writes a question on a piece of poster board and hangs a marker for the students to respond. Questions have included: “Where are you from? Tell something about that place.” “Who is someone you admire and why?” “What are you most looking forward to on the overnight?” “What is your favorite flavor of ice cream?” This allows the students to “talk” to each other, even connecting Sun-Wed students with Tues-Thurs students as they react together, separately and also learn something about each other even without spending time together. This conversation was an opportunity to share best practices and energize the teachers with ideas that came from their colleagues.

We moved on from this conversation to imagining our “ideal” school from the dual perspectives of recreation and socialization. In two separate groups we thought about space – what would a space ideally suited to supporting these elements include – and time – what kind of activities would be done at various points during the day to encourage recreation and socialization. We ended the session by sharing these idea and discussing which ideas for the “ideal” could be applied to the “real” of our Hebrew School. It was encouraging to discover that some of our imagined ideas are actually implemented in the real school. In addition, there were some easily implemented ideas which arose that we plan on incorporating in the upcoming weeks. Ultimately, it was important to start this conversation which we will continue throughout the remainder of the year with an eye towards next year. We are fortunate to have dedicated and creative teachers to engage in the process!