Re/Presenting the Jewish Past, a joint project of RAVSAK and NYU, gives day school teachers an opportunity to share their expertise with one another as they chart new directions for the teaching of Jewish history. Here Re/Pre alumni and staff share their own insights and approaches to teaching Jewish history at the high school level.
Jonathan Golden, Director of Academic Operations, Gann Academy, Waltham, MA
The Gann history department uses a case study approach to teach Jewish history in the context of general history. Gann students explore essential questions of Jewish peoplehood through experiential modes of education and close examination of “texts” (broadly defined).
Tenth grade Gann students engage in a Labor Zionist-Revisionist-Brit Shalom debate set in the 1930s about the future of the Jewish homeland and the relationship between Jews and their Arab neighbors. Other case studies include the historical background of Chanukah and the founding of the New Amsterdam Jewish community.
These exercises not only give students a deep encounter with the past but also provide them with access to the essential questions and issues still being debated in our own time. Crucially, case studies restore the range of choices that Jews have had throughout history, thereby adding nuance to the Jewish historical narrative and modeling ways to navigate the pluralism of Gann Academy and the wider Jewish world.
This integrated approach works in partnership with Jewish studies courses and the school’s informal Jewish education program to foster student commitment to Jewish civic participation and invites students to be co-creators of the future Jewish narrative.
Barbara Ellison Rosenblit, Humanities and Judaics Teacher and Director of Mentoring, The Weber School, Atlanta, GA
When I ask my upperclassmen what in the world made them sign up for an elective class titled “Jewish Women in Modern America,” a predictable, albeit tongue-in-cheek reply goes something like, “Hey, we’ve been studying Jewish men until now! Were there any women around?” So begins the re-balancing of the historical scale. There were women, it turns out, and I have begun to measure success in this course by daily counting the audible gasps of, “I didn’t know that!”
Once we share a hundred gasps of historical surprise, we move beyond history found in books, anthologies, and our most savvy Internet source, www.jwa.org. We move into the world of chronicling and celebrating the lives of community women whose lives span most of the 20th century. We have many reasons for turning toward chronicling personal narratives. One is the work of Emory University’s MARIAL (Myth and Ritual in American Life) Center whose research suggests that resilience itself is a byproduct of the transmission of personal narratives. Students interview a Jewish woman 75 or older, and then we move yet a step further. Guided by art educator Sheila Miller, the class translates that narrative into the emotionally weighted language of conceptual art, distilling the life of the woman they’ve interviewed into visual metaphor.
The gallery exhibition of their artwork acknowledges and publicly celebrates the lives of women whose stories, if we listen, can begin to fill in the silence left by history’s purposeful devaluing of women’s experiences. These days, none of my students leaves my class still thinking that history was lived by only half of those alive at the time.
For a glimpse at some of our work, see http://www.covenantfn.org/news-and-press/covenant-in-action/silent-role-models-no-more.
Arielle Levites, Director of Education and Outreach, Re/Presenting the Jewish Past
We all like critical thinking. The problem with teaching critical thinking is that most of it goes on inside our own heads. This issue is exacerbated in the high school history classroom because much of what students have read on this subject thus far have been textbooks, which do a very poor job of explicating how historians think.
As teachers we have ample opportunity to uncover how our students think when we ask them to write papers or essays. We also get a lot of airtime in the classroom to share what we think, yet the processes that led us to our conclusions are often obscure. How can our students know how we think unless we tell them?
Modeling is one way of shedding light on something that may seem mysterious to our students, particularly those who are not reading popular history in their spare time. Consider sharing a primary source with your students and talking aloud as you, the teacher, work through the questions, answers, and associations the source elicits. What do you look for? What other knowledge do you bring to bear? How do you check your own understanding?
By talking students through our own process of historical thinking, we can strengthen theirs. ♦
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