14 - The Impact of Community on Curriculum Decision-Making in a North American Jewish Day School

Summary

THIS CHAPTER presents the first tentative results of a qualitative study of a curriculum development process undertaken with the Herzliah High School in Montreal. This is the largest community Jewish day school in that city, with two campuses in different locations. The results are tentative because the project is continuing, allowing for further refinement and enhancement of the curriculum and materials produced. The research focuses on the ‘partnership model’ of curriculum development in which administrators, teachers, parents, students, and curriculum experts create curriculum in a collaborative forum. This chapter examines how decisions are reached in this process, focusing on the following two central questions:

1. Who ultimately makes the curriculum decisions among those involved in the kind of partnership model described here?

2. What is the impact of ‘the community’ in the curriculum decisionmaking process?

Defining who and what we mean by ‘the community’ in the context of a Jewish community day school lies at the centre of my purpose in this chapter. I will show that although the curriculum development process described here began with a narrow view of the term ‘community’ as applying to the particular school where the project was situated, the research reveals the impact of the wider Jewish community on the process of decision-making. By ‘the wider Jewish community’ I refer to the influence of interest groups in the Jewish community that do not at present have any official connection to the school but exert influence over its educational direction.

Background and Context: Herzliah School

In October 2002, together with a colleague from Bar-Ilan University's Lookstein Centre for Jewish Education in the Diaspora, I visited the Herzliah School for a period of four days. The main goal of the visit was to review the school's Judaic studies programme, with particular attention to the high school, for the purpose of identifying possible changes in the syllabus.

In advance of our visit we received written information about the structure of the school, the make-up of the student population in each campus, the content of the Judaic studies programme at each grade level, the number of hours devoted to Judaic studies for each grade group, and details of the training and experience of Judaic studies teachers.