Digital J Learning: Inviting North American Day Schools to Explore Online Learning

This new collaborative website from The Jewish Education Project, JESNA, and the Avi Chai Foundation presents the world of online learning opportunities to North American Jewish Day Schools. The site answers basic Q&A about online learning, presents a series of opportunities for Day Schools to expand their course offerings through online learning, and showcases existing success stories.

Driving Congregational School Change to Enhance 21st Century Jewish Learning

ABSTRACT:

For millions of American Jews, the words “Jewish education” most likely conjure images of days spent in synagogue classrooms decoding Hebrew, reciting prayers, learning holiday customs, and reading about biblical figures. This is the past, but (we hope) not the future of congregational education. This form of part-time, mostly afterschool and/or weekend Jewish learning has been the most popular single setting for the Jewish education of Jewish children for many decades. More than 2,000 supplementary schools (most, though not all, of which are part of synagogues) are the main source of Jewish education for more than 230,000 Jewish children in North America (Wertheimer, 2008), making them “the largest ‘network’ operating in the arena of Jewish education” (Wertheimer, 2009a).  Despite its popularity, supp ...

eJewish Philanthropy

A listing of resources from eJewish Philanthropy.org.

eJewish Philanthropy was developed as a Web 2.0 resource providing e-tools and resources directed primarily to and about grassroots and small Jewish organizations. Our goal is to teach new skills and assist organizations progress as they adopt to the changes and challenges of the 21st Century. We will focus on education and call on the expertise of the countless and dedicated academics, activists, lay leaders, professionals and students in our Jewish world to help tailor information and address issues of concern and interest to us all. We will become an instant publishing channel of Jewish Philanthropy news and fundraising content resources. eJewish Philanthropy will incorporate blogs, pod-casts, video, webinars and more; our audience will be able to interact with us and each other.

Engaging and Retaining Jewish Youth Beyond the Bar/Bat Mitzvah: An Action Research Study

recommendations.  

Download the report here:
Engaging and Retaining Jewish Youth (126.82 kB)

Forecasting the Future: Seeking to Cope or Seizing the Moment

An article by Jonathan Woocher proposing three challenges to sustainability and growth that will guide day schools and the Jewish community over the next two decades.
 Forecasting the Future: Seeking to Cope or Seizing the Moment (398.41 kB)

Growing Jewish Education in Challenging Times: A Roundtable Series with JESNA's Lippman Kanfer Institute & eJewishPhilanthropy

Quality Jewish education is our most powerful tool for ensuring a vibrant Jewish future. But, it can't have an impact on those who don't participate.

What can we do to make Jewish education more attractive, accessible and affordable, even under current conditions of economic pressure on both "providers" and "consumers"? How do the challenges of expanding educational participation play out today in specific arenas - day school, "complementary" education, camp, Israel education - and for specific critical populations - families with young children, teens, young adults, etc.? What new approaches are being tried and where are there signs of success? What has yet to be tried, but ought to be? Leaders from a wide range of settings and representing a variety of perspectives were invited to address these questions in a Roundtable series of essays that appeared over several weeks on ...

International Journal of Jewish Education Research

An initiative of the School of Education and the Lookstein Center of Bar-Ilan University.

IJJER aims to portray and explore Jewish education as a multifaceted, heuristic and dynamic phenomenon from a variety of disciplinary, geographical, cultural, religious and historical perspectives and contexts.

IJJER aims to provide an interdisciplinary, international and multi-language platform where past and present forms and aspects of Jewish education are examined through research.

JE3 Wiki - The Work Space for the Jewish Education 3.0 Project

The Jewish Education 3.0 (JEd3.0) project brings together professionals working in Jewish education, media, and technology to discuss the deeper implications of what it means to “do” Jewish education in a 21st century digital world.

JEd3.0 is a project of JESNA's Lippman Kanfer Institute. The Lippman Kanfer Institute believes that for Jewish education to be successful in the 21st century it needs to embrace new modes of engaging learners, create rich and diverse experiences of study and action, and forge stronger connections among its many actors and settings. The Institute's projects seek to guide the field as it generates and adopts innovative ideas and develops new ways of thinking about and doing Jewish education.

JEWISH EDUCATION AND THE ARTS: CURRENT REALITIES, FUTURE POSSIBILITIES

These working papers were prepared for the Lippman Kanfer Institute's Arts in Jewish Education Convening in March 2010. The Convening was co-sponsored by AVODAH Arts and The Foundation for Jewish Culture. 

Arts in Jewish Education: Mapping the Landscape gives an overview of Arts & Jewish Education today, including:

-- Utilization of Existing Cultural Resources

Jewish Education and the Arts: Realizing the Potential

The arts are a powerful vehicle for engaging learners, for deepening their educational experience, and for developing important skills and dispositions that extend well beyond the realm of the arts themselves. Integrating the arts fully into education builds enthusiasm for learning, provokes wonder and reflection, unleashes creativity, broadens perspectives, draws new meaning from familiar experiences, and forges connections among students as they create and critique collaboratively. This proposition is now widely accepted in the general educational world. But, in Jewish education, the arts are utilized to their full potential only sporadically, and the infrastructure and financial support needed to expand the role and impact of the arts are by and large missing.

Linking the Silos: How to Accelerate the Momentum of Jewish Education Today

The field of Jewish education is currently based on a loose, barely connected network of autonomous educating institutions. Each operates as a silo-a term employed by the information technology industry to characterize the uni-dimensional manner in which institutions and fields of knowledge operate in isolation, as vertically organized operations, divorced from constructive, horizontal interaction with others. The current challenge in the field of Jewish education is to link the silos, to build cooperation across institutional lines and thereby enable learners to benefit from mutually reinforcing educational experiences and to help families negotiate their way through the rich array of educational options created over the past decade and longer.

Publication Date2005

Resource Type

• Research Reports and Studies