Section archive - Informal Education

A qualitative practitioner research study was conducted with 31 high school students studying religion contemporary Israeli society. The purpose of the study was to understand how using cartoons written and illustrated by the religious Jewish-Israeli settler Shay Charka challenged students to think about religion in Israeli society in new ways and whether introducing perspectives that were foreign to their North American Jewish education led to new ways of relating to and understanding Jewish-Israeli communities. Results of this small-scale study yielded that the comics were successful in introducing new ways of thinking about religion and in introducing a more complex portrait of Israeli society. As a pedagogical device, comics proved to be of salience and interest to the learners, which also led students to be motivated to study them. Students were particularly interested in the ways that Charka subverted their assumptions of gender in religious-Israeli communities and this specifically led to increased awareness of religious diversity in Israeli society.

7. What seems at first like a haphazard jumble in the kindergarten yard at this kibbutz, and in hundreds of similar yards across Israel, is in fact the expression of a theory about how children should learn and a sharp critique of the way they’re usually taught. The kindergarten junkyard is countercultural at a moment preoccupied with safety and litigation—but may have something to teach parents who’ve just been through a yearlong education on the limits of education itself. The junkyard is one answer to a pressing question: When we teach kids, should we prepare them to climb an orderly ladder of tests that lead to other tests, grades, and degrees—or should we prepare them for chaos?

Last July, I visited the Biblical Museum of Natural History at its new state-of-the-art site on the outskirts of Beit Shemesh. At the time, Israel was still deep in coronavirus lockdown, so I had the museum all to myself as I embarked on a private tour led by the museum’s founder and devoted director, the indefatigable Rabbi Dr. Natan Slifkin — who, besides being a rabbi, is also a zoologist and an authority on all living things, particularly from the perspective of traditional Judaism and Jewish history.

I would like to invite you to see some of these fantastic discoveries with me, on a virtual tour that will take you, not only to the locations themselves - Shushan, and other cities in ancient Persia - but also to some of the world's great museums, where the palace artifacts are displayed. This tour is called “In the Days of Achashverosh," and there are several public and private tours scheduled until Purim. Each Zoom virtual tour is one-hour long, with Q&A following. Hebrew and English editions are scheduled.