Foundation News - Jim Joseph Foundation

Foundation News
—Chip Edelsberg, Executive Director

January 2012

The Jim Joseph Foundation is now two and one-half years into the implementation of its Education Initiative: major grants awarded to Hebrew Union College (HUC), Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) and Yeshiva University (YU). The Foundation has engaged for this Education Initiative the American Institutes for Research (A.I.R.) to conduct both formative and summative evaluation. A.I.R. will submit its first report in June of this year. In the interim there are some exciting developments to report.

First of all, it is important to remind the field that funding pre-service credentialing and training of professional Jewish educators is core to Jim Joseph Foundation’s philanthropic strategy. Thus, the fact that HUC now offers a new Executive Master’s program and has enrolled 16 students in the first cohort is notable. Similarly, it is promising that JTS has 14 professionals enrolled in its new executive Ph.D. program, with the expectation that it will confer 20 Executive Doctorates in Education during the period of this grant. And it is significant that YU anticipates awarding 270 certificates in such diverse skill areas as Differential Instruction, Education Technology, On-line Instruction and Design, and Experiential Education by 2016 – with 50 professionals already participating in these programs.

In addition to providing resources for annual tuition assistance and for the development and implementation of new educator training programs, Jim Joseph Foundation funding provides opportunities for HUC, JTS and YU to develop and pilot special pilot programs for their students and for the field.

For example, JTS’s Visions and Voices educational trip to Israel enables all full time first year Davidson School students to spend 10 days in an Israel experience as part of their academic program. Funding was also allocated to develop Kesher Hadash (“A New Connection”) JTS’s first Semester in Israel program for students in the Jewish education MA program. The Semester in Israel program has been structured as a series of academic courses coordinated with the students’ MA requirements; in addition, its participants will receive a Certificate in Israel Education upon completion.

Another example is the Innovator’s Circle at YU, which is a track of the Experiential Jewish Education Certificate program offering seed-funding, support and mentoring for four individuals for one year in order to help them develop a project in experiential education. These young innovators design new experiential education programs. One of the four programs currently in development is Amanda Gelb’s exploration of the use of hands-on museum exhibits as a mode for experiential Jewish education. (See the attached article in the current issue of RAVSAK’s Hayidion by Amanda Gelb to learn more about her enterprising work.)

Central to this Jim Joseph Foundation Education Initiative is an interest in fostering purposeful inter-institutional cooperation, collaboration and shared learning. In this regard, the Initiative has prompted the creation of a new Jewish Early Childhood Education/Jewish Early Childhood Leadership Institute. HUC and JTS will launch a joint program this summer for early childhood education directors and aspiring heads.

JTS, HUC and YU have all developed programs with Jim Joseph Foundation funding to address the expanding sub-sector of Jewish Experiential Education. Each of the institutions recognizes that training Jewish educators will be valuable in order to prepare them for work in the informal learning environments in which increasing numbers of young Jews are spending more of their time.

From the onset of the Initiative, HUC, JTS and YU have worked in partnership in the area of educational technology and online learning. During the past two years, the three institutions have held a series of ongoing meetings and forums to learn from one other and experts in the field. At this point, the institutions have created a proposal for collaboration in technology and online learning which would involve collegial learning as well as generating the potential for future shared faculty professional development.

Early work on the evaluation of the Education Initiative has included site visits, extensive interviews, document review, and surveys. In November of 2011, more than 75% of students surveyed across the three institutions responded to an on-line survey. We look forward to review A.I.R.’s initial reports and to sharing its key observations, findings and analysis with you.

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