2022 International Awards: Yore Kedem MSU Award for Outstanding Service to Education Abroad

Yore Kedem • Assistant Professor of Hebrew, Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures; Core Faculty, Michael & Elaine Serling Institute for Jewish Studies & Modern Israel; Affiliated Faculty, Global Studies in the Arts of Humanities, College of Arts & Letters

With nearly 15 years in service to education abroad programs, Yore Kedem is driven to set the stage for new perspectives and personal growth—for his students and in their respective communities. Kedem leads the Jewish Studies Summer Program at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where students are exposed to the full complexity of modern Israel. His commitment to and facilitation of these experiences make him a model recipient of the MSU Award for Outstanding Service to Education Abroad.

With support from the Serling Institute for Jewish Studies and Modern Israel, Kedem’s education abroad experiences concentrate on students’ inquiry projects, in which they pick their own research topics, conduct their own interviews, and write research papers. He has designed an innovative new program to create stronger ties between education abroad experiences and students' learning career. The collaboration between the Honors College and the Serling Institute will launch in fall 2022, and includes pre-departure and post-return classes on campus and a winter research trip to Israel. 

He works as assistant professor of Hebrew in the Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures at MSU. In this role, Kedem teaches all Hebrew classes and a course on immigration, with a focus on highlighting diversity and inclusion. Kedem currently chairs the College of Arts and Letters Inclusive Practices Committee, and serves as a member of the College of Arts and Letters Inclusive Pedagogy Initiative and the College Advisory Committee.

A native of Israel, Kedem completed his bachelor’s at Tel Aviv University, with a double major in music performance and education. He earned a Ph.D. in Aesthetic Education from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Kedem is also an accomplished viola player, who performed and taught internationally.

—An interview with Yore Kedem —

What long term impacts do you hope the study abroad program to Israel has on your students?

Between my time at the University of Illinois and MSU, I've been doing this for about 14 years, so I have some indication of the long term impact on students. The main idea of my programs is that students will have an experience that will change their perspective on something that they know or they think they know before arriving in Israel. From my own experience doing this and hearing from faculty who get my students afterwards, I see that they talk about these experiences in class after they've been abroad. So there is something that they're carrying with them that becomes theirs, that they can own— that knowledge and new understanding of something and use it to shed light on issues that they talk about or they're discussing in classes. That’s the kind of impact I’d expect within a year or two of our education abroad experience

In the longer term, I want to help create meaningful experiences that students don’t generally have opportunities to learn from on campus. And so, I plan these classes around students’ experience and facilitate opportunities to learn from them and share this learning in an academic setting. The impact I hope it has is to signal to students that this is important, this is significant, that their personal growth and understanding of something is not only worthwhile for them to understand, but also for classmates and even for me to understand. It’s an experience that is ever-evolving. 

The idea is to reinforce for students that this kind of learning is good, significant and important learning. Learning is not only something that you draw from books, or from doing an experiment in the lab, or from a lecture—learning is what you do when you encounter something that causes you to understand things from a different perspective. A person who has an experience that changes their understanding, becomes a person who is willing to look at things to understand them and to grow in that process. 

What are some of the ways students bring their experiences back to the states?

The research project at the end of the course is an opportunity for students to integrate all of their experiences. They respond to two central questions: First, what is something that surprised them—what was their most meaningful, unexpected learning experience. Second, what are they bringing home with them?

Many times the thing they bring home is a newly found idea: I thought I was sure about what I knew, and now I need to rethink it. That's all we can really hope for when we educate people—for them to seek education for a lifetime, for them to understand that it’s good to have your foundations shaken up every now and then.

What is unique about the education abroad experience you create?

When I teach study abroad, even though the plans look similar year to year, what students do and what students end up getting from this is different every year. I have absolutely no idea what projects my students are going to do. I go into the classes with a basic format and schedule, but I don't know who the students are going to meet, who they’ll interview—I don’t know who my students are or what perspective they’re bringing to understand these experiences. So every year there's something very creative that happens because I need to make space for what they bring. In my study abroad, I see myself as a creator of experiences.

What opportunities will your new education abroad program in Israel offer?

This is the approved collaboration between the Serling Institute for Jewish Studies and Modern Israel and the Honors College. It is a fall-winter-spring program to Israel, with coursework in immigration and cultural diversity in Israel. It’s the fourth year we’ve tried to run the program, due to administrative barriers and of course, COVID.

The program is different in two aspects: First, when I do these programs in the summer, the learning of the content and the experiential learning component  happen at the same time—sometimes we are in the classroom and sometimes we go on excursions. It’s interspersed throughout the three-and-a-half week trip.

On the new program, we’ll take the last eight weeks of the fall semester for students to engage in a seminar on campus. We'll do the readings, preparation and writing research proposals before departure. Students have an opportunity to root their understanding of what they're going to study before we leave over the winter break, so they’re more prepared for the actual research experience abroad.

Our 16 days in Israel will concentrate on the experiences—field trips, reflection sessions, because again, most programs focus on being out and about and students don't have time to stop, think and reflect.

I don't know that anybody else is doing this type of education abroad program—definitely not here on campus and I haven’t been able to find programs like this in other places. The eight weeks after the winter break trip will be a period for students to take their experiences in Israel and contrast them to other research and findings on their topic. It is a 7-credit course, so we go much more in depth, allowing students to be more well prepared for the trip—making it more effective and the results more significant.

This is also the first time in many years that the Honors College has an actual education abroad program, which I’m really excited about. Working with honors students will be a new experience for me because I anticipate they will have a different orientation about what they are expecting of this program and what they study.

How do you help your education abroad students understand their role in solving the world’s most pressing problems in an international context?

I actually believe it is difficult to ask students how they will solve world problems—it’s a big question for anyone. Instead, I think that the impact is first on the people who are around us—for most of us, our impact is much more immediate. We hope for a ripple effect from students helping people see things in a different context, because then, the people around them shift their own perspective to understand people that are very different from them. It is not about solving world problems, let’s solve our local problems first.

What should the MSU community know about the impact of these experiences?

The idea is that students in my classes not only can say they went and studied abroad, but they studied abroad, did a research project and this is what they learned. Essentially it’s an education as academic researchers, in the sense that when you do something significant, you don't keep it to yourself, you share it with your community. Their community isn’t just here at MSU—it’s friends, communities, family, etc. I have had students tell me years after that they still have conversations with their family about what they experienced and how it changed their perspective.

It’s also significant in the classroom and to professors, because when you have a student who had a meaningful experience, and they’re  enthusiastic about it, wants to share it and talks about it in class—they become an asset in the class. I want to reinforce that sense in students—they're not here just to absorb knowledge and develop skills—they are an asset to the educational and research processes at MSU.

What motivates your commitment to education abroad?

I’m motivated to empower students to learn from experiences, and to tell them that in the same way I value their perspective, they should value other perspectives to learn, adapt and grow. 

So if you meet somebody, in this polarized political world who believes and thinks differently than you, you can still disagree with this person, but ask yourself, what can you learn from them? 

Nominated by: Yael Aronoff, Director, Serling Institute for Jewish Studies and Modern Israel, Serling Chair in Israel Studies, College of Arts & Letters

The MSU Award for Outstanding Service to Education Abroad recognizes MSU faculty members and academic staff who give their time, energy, and creativity to the development and implementation of education abroad programs that support MSU's commitment to providing students with high quality international education opportunities.