Some days I feel like a dinosaur. This is especially true when I talk technology with my children. Living in an on-demand, digitally-delivered world, my kids just raise quizzical eyebrows at descriptions of quaint technologies from my own school days, such as computer punch cards and “corrasable bond,” the glazed, erasable paper that helped a generation of fumble-fingered non-typists turn in readable school essays in those dark days before the invention of the delete key. “What is she talking about?” It’s all ancient history to my kids, and it doesn’t really connect.
So if it is a challenge connecting today’s kids to aspects of life a single generation ago, how much greater is the challenge we as educators face when we want to help them make meaning of biblical times? How do we create authentic ways to help students discover the relevance in the study of Tanakh and connect to the moral lessons it offers?
William Damon, Professor of Education at Stanford University and Director of the Stanford Center on Adolescence, has done some compelling research in the area of educating toward a moral sensibility—helping develop and refine what research psychologists say is the moral sense children naturally possess into what Damon calls a “path to purpose.”
Writing earlier this year in Educational Leadership,* Damon discussed ways we can work with students to help them develop their own natural moral inclinations into strong character traits that will guide them as they seek solutions to life’s challenges. And a key to making real connection, his work suggests, is to avoid language that is overly abstract and removed from students’ own experiences. Instead, Damon urges using situations from students’ own lives, showing them examples of ethical values enacted in the lives of other real people, and providing them with opportunities to engage in activities that build the habit of virtuous behavior.
Damon’s article happened across my desk at the same time that my latest editorial project, The Prophets: Speaking Out for Justice, was leaving it on its way to the printer. The timing gave his writing particular resonance for me, because in this book author Gila Gevirtz took pains to provide exactly the connections Damon says are crucial.
Her dilemma? Finding ways to portray biblical prophets and the values they exemplify that are concrete enough, compelling enough, and modern enough to grab the attention of today’s 5th-7th graders.
Her methods? Giving each prophet a profile, much like the ones our students develop for themselves in their online social spaces; using biblical text as source and inspiration to bring each prophet to life through compelling personal stories; and, perhaps most importantly, bringing the messages of each prophet directly into focus for students by translating abstract moral language into examples of and direct questions about situations drawn directly from lives these students do understand: their own.
To further supplement Gevirtz’s work, and also (it turns out) in direct agreement with Damon’s educational research, another BH colleague of mine, Aaron Schachter, turned material from the book and from our companion organization, Babaganewz, into a new online resource, www.thejewishprophets.com. Here students can not only review each prophet’s profile, they can also link to articles highlighting other teens as well as public figures and celebrities who are taking ethical action in the world. They can also connect to and use the Babaganewz Mitzvah Machine to get ideas for service projects of their own.
Together, Gevirtz and Schachter have created compelling companion resources you can use right now to help put your students on their own paths to purpose.
*Damon, William, “The Bridge to Character,” Educational Leadership, February 2010, pp 36-39.
