Congregation’s Lay Leader, Executive Director, and Youth Director Joins Director of Lifelong Learning to Reimagine Education and Engagement
Jewish history is a story of creative adaptation, creative disruption, and creative collaboration, according to Dr. Miriam Heller Stern, Director of HUC-JIR’s Schools of Education. Dr. Heller Stern spoke at the recent URJ Biennial Extension: Creativity and Collaboration in Jewish Education workshop.
I, along with our congregation’s executive director, youth director and chair of the education committee, attended this thought-inspiring workshop.
Citing the book Lifelong Kindergarten, by Mitchel Resnick, Dr. Heller Stern reminded us that the learning environments of youngest students are places of play in which they learn to work with each other as inventors and problem solvers.
Dr. Heller Stern also explained that Jewish education and engagement should be a lab for fostering creativity to develop learners’ skills and mindsets to continue our sacred story.
During the workshop, participating teams of lay leaders and professional staff members collaboratively explored these important issues and questions around Jewish learning:
- How might the evolving demographics and landscape of the Jewish community inform our thinking about Jewish education and engagement? How can we better understand the diversity of our learners, spaces, and communities?
- Where, beyond the ‘walls’ of normative spaces, might we reach our potential learners? What will it take to attend to the whole student and the whole family, as they strengthen habits of mind to think and act creatively?
- What is the change we hope Jewish learning will bring to the world?
- How might we reset our organizational cultures to be more open-minded and rethink assumptions about the “why” of what we do... so that we can get to a better “how?”
While we were only able to begin to consider these questions, it did leave us inspired. It also reminded us that, as leaders, we have the power to collaboratively adapt and be disruptive so that we can enable our learners of all ages to continue to write the story of our evolving Jewish history.
Katherine Schwartz, EdD, RJE
Director of Lifelong Learning
Congregation Har HaShem on the Margolis Family Campus
Boulder, CO 80303
President, ARJE
