Sometimes it seems like my whole life has been about collecting experiences to prepare me for studying comparative education. I have been a student and a teacher in different countries and settings, and a reader and writer throughout.
Born and raised in northern Israel on a small kibbutz (a socialist agricultural commune), my earliest education was collective and labor-oriented. I lived, ate, played, and slept in a "bet yeladim" (a children's house) where all children born in the same year were raised together in the same space by a handful of caretakers. My parents are American -- my father from Brooklyn and my mother from Detroit -- so I grew up speaking Hebrew and English.
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| Feeding rabbits - a daily chore for four-year-olds on kibbutz |
At ten years I moved to California and attended public schools, private schools, Jewish schools. I studied political science at UC Berkeley, and spent my junior year in India learning about people's movements and popular uprisings.
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| Hindi language school in Himalayas |
During that time, I began working with children in after-school programs, mentoring organizations, case-working for a homeless health clinic, designing religious programming -- and I quickly fell in love with teaching. After obtaining a teaching credential at San Francisco State University, I taught kindergarten and first grade in San Francisco. In those early years of teaching I was young and overeager. I couldn't get enough: I wrote books for my students, built individual mailboxes out of cardboard, spent hundreds of my own dollars on materials, arrived to work early and left late. My love of teaching and respect for the profession are at the core of everything I do in education. I consider myself a lifelong teacher as well as a lifelong learner.
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| Illustrated storytime every Friday afternoon |
In 2004, I moved to Japan to work as an Assistant Language Teacher in the southern island of Kyushu and then as a freelance English and creative writing teacher in Tokyo. Although the children themselves were relatively similar to my young students in California, their experience of schooling was fundamentally different. The structures of school – the buildings and physical spaces, the daily routines, the relationships between children and adults, the teaching and the learning – were all culturally embedded in strong Japanese values. I became fascinated by cultural interpretations of education, schooling and childhood.
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| Lunchtime in second grade, Japan |
More surprises came when I returned to teach in the United States and started testing out some of the Japanese methods in my own classroom. I found that some methods did not work at all (independent small group work without teacher intervention), some methods had to be adapted to my resources (moving desks into different configurations depending on the activity), and some were so effective that they became integral to my classroom management (waiting for every child to be seated and ready to eat during lunch, and beginning our meal with appreciation for our food). I taught the children Japanese phrases that had no equivalent in English (gambarre for “You can do it!” or “Keep at it!”; nani nani for “Fill in the blank” or “And so on”).
Storytime in fourth grade, Japan
Storytime in first grade, U.S.
While borrowing, modifying, and experimenting with Japanese pedagogy in my American classroom, I became frustrated by the lack of information available to teachers (i.e. me!) regarding international teaching methods. This frustration -- or this gap in available teacher materials-- is the catalyst for my current project. I came to Columbia University's Teachers College in 2009 to study Comparative and International Education in the hopes of contributing to scholarship in the fields of comparative education, teacher education, and pedagogy.