How People Learn in Jewish Education

Jewish education has taken shape around two primary questions:

1. What do people need to know in order to live Jewish lives?
2. What is the best way to deliver the answer to Question #1?

Jewish communities have differed greatly in their responses to both with some favoring knowledge that emerges from Jewish textual traditions, while others prefer to emphasize other dimensions of Jewish life, from the embodied to the expressive. Despite the creativity and diversity of responses to these questions, the focus on these two questions has left a decidedly one-sided Jewish educational landscape informed primarily by concerns about the provision of knowledge: what to teach and how to teach it. The result has been a profoundly lopsided landscape populated by countless pedagogies and curricula, but utterly devoid of any insight or understanding of how people learn in Jewish education.

Although the phrase “Jewish learning” is fairly common, it refers most often either to studying (usually text), or, ironically, to teaching (often text). This report is an attempt to shift the conversation about learning in Jewish education away from these uses and toward a more systematic, research-and-theory-grounded understanding of learning as a distinct Jewish educational phenomenon. It is also an attempt to advance a third question to join the first two: How do people learn in Jewish education?

If, as Hebrew etymology indicates, teaching and learning share a common root, what can Jewish education gain by accounting more explicitly for learning as a unique but somewhat independent practice? What are its mechanisms? Its contours? How do people do it? How might a better understanding of how people learn improve Jewish education?

This report extends and deepens Jon Woocher’s proposal for a “learner centered Jewish education” by shifting the focus from an approach to Jewish education that caters to learners to one guided by an understanding of learning. It offers a challenge, a charge, and a provocation to Jewish educators and supporters of Jewish education to imagine what might happen to the field if we shift its focus from what Jewish education teaches and instead explore how people learn.

What follows is not a theory of learning in Jewish education; for that, we will need a good deal more research. Instead, the report begins with an overview of some basic approaches to general theories of learning to establish a framework for exploring their implications for the field of Jewish education. Hopefully, it will serve as an invitation and an instigation to consider what Jewish education might look like if it places the ways that people learn at the center.

Read the research: How People Learn in Jewish Education, Ari Y Kelman, Ph.D., November 2024

Read more insights in eJewish Philanthropy from the Foundation’s Stacie Cherner and Yonah Schiller