As I start working at Gan Shalom, I am learning the cycle of how Gan Shalom celebrates the different holidays and I am preparing with the teachers thinking about how to best provoke children to learning the kind of value that we extrapolate from our celebrations. This year for Peach we focused on freedom.
Adam Lowy from Jewish Research Specialist Program, to which Gan is associated for the next 4 years thanks to our teacher Inbal who became a Jewish Research Specialist, came and run a part of the workshop during our Staff Meeting. He presented the Pesach story and guided us to reflect about freedom in relation to it in a way that many teachers told me felt appropriate and interesting even despite their very different levels of knowledge and preparation around the story.
Part of Adam’s workshop involved reflecting about what freedom meant to us. Here are some ideas that emerged from it. Freedom is…
- having a family
- my bike
- being on a horse
- having a job
- imagination
- safety
- being able to chose
- having resources
- having opportunities
- having access
- it has to do with equality
- freedom of religion
- being healthy
- it’s freedom of expression
- having time
- …not having cats!
I wrote that freedom ‘requires others, a community, someone to live your freedom with. Freedom for me is relational. There are social constraints and freedom it’s the space within those constraints. It’s feeling safe, it’s being able to express myself, to be who I am’
We then started to talk about how we could relate this to our work. A discussion sparked around the fact that freedom has to do also with limits. That in order to be free, everyone needs to feel safe to express themselves, to be respected. And then we talked about freedom in relation to ‘provocations’ – which are non-directed activities that children are free to take in the direction that they want. However, we do set some limits for them about where they can take the materials that we present to them on the tables which need to stay on the tables.
We also made our own Pesach book or haggadah. Through this activity, teachers’ experienced the freedom of creating their own book, of expressing themselves creatively, teachers were provoqued to choose the object that they wanted to draw – from kitchen sponges, to tooth brushes of different sizes, paintbrushes…
We hope to continue this discussion next Staff Meeting when talking about consent and what it means to teach children about consent and making their own choices.
Pensieri di Bea 