For the second year in a row, RAVSAK is the recipient of the highly prestigious Signature Grant from the Covenant Foundation. This year’s award comes for the program JCAT: Jewish Court of All Times, a web-based educational project for students in RAVSAK middle schools.
“We are particularly interested in acknowledging creativity in Jewish education and traversing unknown territory where risk and innovation are married,” said Harlene Winnick Appelman, Executive Director of the Covenant Foundation. “Our new crop of grantees are generators of ideas and approaches of great promise for success, effect and transformative replication elsewhere.”
JCAT uses interactive media to engage students in Jewish history and to teach them about significant moral, social and cultural issues. RAVSAK is partnering with The Interactive Communications and Simulations Group at the University of Michigan, where professors and graduate students will participate in managing the program and its website, and with the University of Cincinnati’s School of Education for teacher support and reflection.
Originally piloted in three RAVSAK schools in 2007-08, JCAT found tremendous enthusiasm among students and teachers alike. Students adopt a person from Jewish history and interact with others in that character. In the words of Tzivia Garfinkel, Head of Jewish Studies at Bernard Zell Anshe Emet Day School in Chicago, the program invited students “to take on a different perspective and to see the world through a different set of eyes.” JCAT will be scaled up over the course of the three-year grant, starting with 8 schools in 2010-11, 12 schools in 2011-12, and 16 in 2012-13.
For more information, contact Elliott Rabin at erabin@ravsak.org.
CAT, RAVSAK’s online, highly participatory middle school program in Jewish history, will have four new schools taking part in the fall:
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