Which are the stations on what has been your educational journey so far? In answering this question, do you include those spaces that lie outside of formal frameworks - for example, soccer classes, drama classes, art classes, driving lessons, professional refresher courses, museum tours you've participated in? Usually, when answering this question, we tend to include only the institutions of formal education (such as primary school, high school, college or university) in which we received professional instruction, leaving out the non-formal frameworks that have sometimes been central to our training as individuals and as professionals.
Many of us whose journey as educators started out within the Jewish community in the diaspora, have experience with play-centered non-formal education in the context of youth movements, as participants and often also as counselors. But the reality is that everyone has learning experiences that are not framed in formal education. There are elements that characterize non-formal education (NFE) and that can be incorporated in our practice as educators with a view to to enhancing teaching and learning experiences. They open up different ways of understanding and seeing learning spaces, proposals, projects and methodologies, making it possible to explore our creativity in other ways.
With reference to NFE, Jaume Trilla (1993) explains that there is a need to create, “parallel to the school, other educational media and environments. Media and environments that, of course, should not necessarily be considered as opposed or alternative to the school, but rather as functionally complementary to it.”
Image created by the students of the course Non-Formal and Creative Education: Uses of Visual Language
This year, a course dedicated to learning about and experiencing non-formal education has been incorporated into the Master’s curriculum, with the understanding that it is a fundamental element in the professional training of educators, beyond their specific discipline. The course is called Non-formal and Creative Education: Uses of Visual Language and, as its name indicates, it focuses on creativity, particularly on the aesthetic gaze. This does not mean to imply an artistic education, but rather an understanding and exploration of aesthetic education as a tool that may be applied in NFE. The emphasis placed on visual language offers the possibility of coming to know it as another language that can be used as an alternative and educational resource to everyday language.
The course is taught by Aiala Wengrowicz Feller. Feller started her career at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem where she studied Art History and worked in the Department of Archeology, specializing in ancient and Jewish art. She continud her professional specialization in the fields of Holocaust History and Social History, and devoted her doctoral thesis to an investigation of photography as a platform for memory. She teaches at the Beit Berl College of Education in academic frameworks for non-formal Education and Oral History. At the same time, she has developed a long career in management positions in NFE in central organizations in Israel, such as the Sochnut (Jewish Agency for Israel) and the Machon le Madrichim (Institute for youth counselor training). .
A few weeks ago the month-long course was given for the first time. We asked Aiala to share with us what the experience was like.
Aiala: “This is a course with a very particular dynamic within the university context, but at the same time, it is part of my everyday experience as a teacher. What makes it unique is the playful approach running through the course, showing the different ways of experiencing learning and studying through other ways of thinking. It is a useful and practical course in which, via personal experience, students acquire tools that they can apply. It proposes activities and encounters in which to work collectively and individually in parallel, with these two simultaneous routes meeting at different times of the process.
The course is an opportunity to connect academic practice with creative education. In our educational reality, NFE rarely plays a leading role, but it is increasing its presence in formal education and breaking into more traditional educational environments. Hence the importance of going through educational experiences such as that offered by this course.”
One of the tasks carried out by the students, both collectively and visually, was to set up a virtual museum where their visual and analytical productions are shared, reflecting the process and the content addressed in the course. The Museum is dedicated to the theme of Life Stories. Memory and Identity is an example of an incursion into the reading of primary sources and theoretical texts through study and presentation methodology adapted to the NFE perspective and creative language. We invite you to view it (in Spanish) by clicking here .
To see the complete program of the Master’s degree, along with accompanying information, and to make inquiries, click here.[1]
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