Sefaria’s Partnership Initiative - 2017-18
The Application Process is Now Closed
We look forward to pursuing more partnerships in the future. The program information is below. For more information, contact Sara Wolkenfeld sara@sefaria.org.
For the 2017-2018 school year, Sefaria seeks creative educators who are ready to innovate and are open to new ways of thinking about teaching and learning. Sefaria provides consultation and mentorship as you discover the possibilities that arise when students have access to thousands of years of Jewish texts at the tips of their fingers. We plan to include 12 new partners in this Initiative. Each partner institution should have one or two lead educators who are committed to working closely with Sefaria over the course of the year. We invite you to read more and consider applying!
Goals: This initiative will enable educators to experiment with Sefaria in a school setting, to think through best practices of teaching with Sefaria, to change and improve pedagogy around Jewish texts, and to foster a more innovative spirit in the community of Jewish learners. We will explore the following questions:
- What does Sefaria afford us in our teaching and learning that might be difficult or impossible without these tools?
- What would it look like to create new forms of pedagogy for teaching Jewish texts in conjunction with the new medium we have for exploring these texts?
- How can the teachers and learners of Jewish texts drive technological innovation that benefits our community? How can we nurture students who are creative in their learning, both inside and outside the classroom?
- How can we leverage Sefaria’s open source and open access platform to create a stronger culture of sharing in the world of Jewish education?
Partner educators are required to:
- Participate in a 1.5 hour training session, which will take place online, prior to the start of the school year (these will be offered on July 20th, 12-1:30pm Eastern Time, July 30th, 7pm-8:30pm Eastern Time, and August 6, 8-9:30pm Eastern Time).
- Be open to and excited about exploring the above questions, and ready to try new things in service of this exploration.
- Commit to using Sefaria in some sustained way throughout the school year. Free trainings will be provided to any interested educators and or/students at the partner institutions.
- Communicate twice a month with the Sefaria team. This will allow Sefaria to receive rich feedback and will also mean that educators can benefit collectively from shared wisdom and experience.
- Produce at least one lesson plan, curriculum, or course activity that uses Sefaria to drive a piece of the class or curriculum. This piece will be shared by the end of the school year- first with other educators in the cohort, and eventually with the larger Sefaria community.
Partnership benefits:
- On-demand tech and curricular support. Sefaria’s Education Department will be available to train faculty and students in the use of Sefaria, help plan and craft course materials, and to connect educators with our engineer or content teams whenever necessary.
- Bi-monthly meetings with experienced text teachers for guidance and mentoring.
- Connections to the growing community of Sefaria educators. Partners connect through the Sefaria Educators Facebook group and the Partner group on our site. Members can share source sheets, ask questions and get input from our talented group of partner educators.
- $360 professional development budget (per partner). The budget is intended to support the use of Sefaria in the learning environment.
- Opportunity to influence the direction of product and feature developments on Sefaria.
- Translation services, provided by Sefaria’s professional translator, for excerpts of texts that are currently not translated in Sefaria’s library.
- Special access to new features on Sefaria.
Click here to apply! Applications are due by May 16th, 2017. Finalists will be contacted by May 23rd for follow-up, and our partners will be announced early June.
Questions? Please contact education@sefaria.org