TEACHING TEACHERS—National Melton staff member Dana Baruch, left, teaches Portland Melton teachers Linda Maizels and Sylvia Frankel, right, how to use the “Heritage: Civilization and the Jews” DVD-ROM to enhance Melton’s Dramas of Jewish Living course.
Melton teachers explore new ways to reach visual learners
By Deborah Moon
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Thanks to local and national grants, Portland’s Florence Melton Adult Mini-School now has a resource to help bring history alive—especially for visual learners.
On Aug. 2, three Portland Melton teachers learned how they can use the “Heritage: Civilization and the Jews” DVD-ROM to supplement Melton’s curriculum in its Dramas of Jewish Living course. Students in Melton—a two-year program designed to provide Jewish literacy for adults—take the 30-week Dramas course in the second year of their studies.
“It’s going to be a challenge to incorporate it into the existing material in the 60-minutes we have, but the DVD has a wealth of information and material,” said Sylvia Frankel, who has taught the Dramas course at Melton since the mini-school’s inception in Portland seven years ago. “It’s a wonderful tool to have.”
Melton Director Bonni Goldberg agreed: “For visual learners and people for whom technology and multi-media presentations are more the norm of how they learn information, it is the next generation of Melton.”
Based on (and including) the 1984 nine-hour PBS series of the same name narrated by Abba Eban, the DVD-ROM includes an interactive timeline; interactive atlas enabling users to toggle between ancient and modern maps; more than 100 multimedia presentations that include historical images, works of art and music; primary text documents including diary entries; and The Concise Judaica, a condensed version of the new Encyclopedia Judaica.
“It’s like being in a library, an art museum and a music archive, with it all at your fingertips at once,” said Goldberg.
Grants from the Oregon Jewish Community Foundation and the Oregon Jewish Community Youth Foundation enabled Melton to purchase a laptop computer, projector and other audio-visual equipment needed to take advantage of the free DVD-ROM and training program funded by the Charles H. Revson Foundation.
Melton hired Dana Baruch, a Melton teacher who began using the Heritage DVD-ROM in her own classes five years ago, to create a curriculum supplement and to train Melton faculty how to integrate the DVD into the Dramas curriculum. Two years ago, the DVD-ROM and training were offered as a pilot project in three communities.
This year Baruch is traveling the country to train Melton faculty. She came to Portland Aug. 2 to train Melton teachers Sylvia Frankel, Linda Maizels and Deborah Eisenbach-Budner.
“These teachers are phenomenal,” said Baruch after spending the day with the three women. “It’s been a pleasure working with people who are so excited about teaching history and teaching Melton and who are interested in exploring new methods.”
Goldberg and Baruch emphasized the DVD is an optional tool available for use by teachers and for at-home use by students who choose to purchase the DVD-ROM. Students are not required to purchase the DVD, but for those who do, Baruch has created “suggestions for home study” for most of the lessons.
“For me as an instructor, it’s a great way to be responsive to multiple learning styles,” said Baruch of the DVD-ROM.
Baruch said the DVD helps to quickly provide historical context for the course’s study of recurring dramas in Jewish life such as anti-Semitism and assimilation.
“The point of the course is to look at how over 3,500 years these issues have arisen and been dealt with and how similar and different they are from now,” said Baruch. “The Dramas course can be really difficult for some students who haven’t studied the history before. Heritage does a good job of setting the context so they can imagine being there.”
The DVD-ROM is available on line at www.shopthirteen.org for $39.95.
The mini-school, a project of Hebrew University, is an international network of schools for adult Jewish literacy. In Portland, the mini-school is sponsored by Morasha: Jewish Community Education Alliance.
Melton’s fall classes begin in Portland Sept. 18 meeting Tuesday mornings or evenings.
For more information on Melton’s fall classes, contact Goldberg at melton@jewishportland.org or 503-892-3015, or visit www.meltonportland.org.