Building a Field Without Straying Afield: A Decade Training Experiential Jewish Educators at the Davidson School

In 2003, the first cohort of students graduated from what was then called the concentration in Informal and Communal Education (ICE) at the William Davidson Graduate School of Jewish Education. Through the years, dozens have followed in their footsteps. The program attracts a diverse group of students, spanning denominational or non-denominational or multi-denominational affiliation (the Davidson School, though part of JTS, is non-denominational). Some are returning to school after working for many years, either within or outside of Jewish education. Others have worked for a few years in a Jewish organization and want to hone their skills. Still others are recent college graduates who have held part-time positions (such as camp counselor or youth group leader) and want to become familiar with the workings of Jewish non-profit educational organizations. The students are united in their strongly positive associations with their past experiences in informal Jewish educational settings, and often point to these experiences as major influences in their lives. They go on on to fill almost any position imaginable within the Jewish educational world: director, programmer, teacher, principal, etc.

In this essay, I use my work with the ICE program and its current evolution into the Experiential Learning Initiative (ELI), funded by the Jim Joseph Foundation (JJF), as a springboard to discuss the field of informal/experiential education as I have seen it develop over the past decade. While I will provide a brief program overview, my key focus will be on what can be gleaned from our efforts, in order to shed light on major issues in the field. While it would generally be appropriate in a paper such as this to begin with definitions, the meaning of the terms informal and experiential are themselves a focus of this paper and therefore will be discussed throughout. To provide at least a starting point, I offer a quotation from Barry Chazan (italics in original):

Informal Jewish education is aimed at the personal growth of Jews of all ages. It happens through the individual’s actively experiencing a diversity of Jewish moments and values that are regarded as worthwhile. … It is based on a curriculum of Jewish values and experiences that is presented in a dynamic and flexible manner.¹

Reimer and Bryfman distinguish “informal” from “experiential” education, using the former term to denote education in settings other than schools and the latter to describe an approach to education that includes recreation, socialization (in the “becoming part of a society” sense of the word), and challenge.²

It was not until coming to work at JTS that I learned about what was then commonly referred to as informal Jewish education. Ironically, very shortly thereafter I was tasked with creating what would become known as ICE. I have been involved in this program ever since. The acronym originally stood for “Informal and Communal Education.” Reflecting changing nomenclature in the field, the “E” evolved, at least in some iterations, to stand for “Experiential.”³ In 2011 we were able to introduce significant enhancements to the program, thanks to the Jim Joseph Foundation’s funding for our Experiential Learning Initiative (ELI). There are many individuals who helped to shape this work—notably Dr. Aryeh Davidson in its earliest incarnations and Mark Young in its latest. In particular, Cheryl Magen was a driving force in the program’s development and in my thinking.⁴

My entrance into the field of experiential Jewish education, and the emergence of our MA program over the past decade, have coincided with increased interest in this field by practitioners, funders, and researchers. Of course, while experiential education has generated considerable “buzz” recently, its core ideas are not new. They can be traced at least as far back as Dewey, whose work includes the classic Experience and Education,⁵ and to the broad-reaching educational philosophies of Kaplan and Benderley.⁶

Program Overview

While the program has changed throughout the years, the basic formula has remained more or less constant and mirrors fundamental aspects of experiential learning. This involves students...