Section archive - Formal Education

Bible teachers in contemporary society confront serious problems related to the nature of the biblical text and the socio-cultural context of their teaching. This study, based on semi-structured interviews, examines the problems that five expert religious Israeli elementary school teachers encounter in their teaching and the solutions they employ. Our findings show two major domains of pedagogic issues: unfamiliar biblical linguistics and problematic content. Teachers reported student difficulties in understanding biblical Hebrew. Problematic content includes irrelevant topics, emotionally laden material, and age inappropriate issues.

Gleanings is the ejournal of the William Davidson Graduate School of Jewish Education of The Jewish Theological Seminary. Ever since the 1992 National Jewish Population Study, many of us—educators, clergy, philanthropists—have been engaged in heroic efforts to revitalize congregational education. While we have had made notable progress for which we should be rightly proud, this field has remained stubbornly resistant to deep transformation. This past October, The Davidson School of JTS brought together a group of scholars, rabbis, educators, and change practitioners from across denominations and North America to learn together and begin to design an innovative path forward. Out of this gathering came a renewed sense of hope, a desire for collaboration among diverse institutions, and a revitalized sense of transformative purpose. In this issue of Gleanings, we present a selection of the papers that participants wrote for our deliberation which stimulated rich dialogue. Included first in this issue is a nascent, overarching vision of education toward covenantal community, which emerged during the gathering.

This design experiment in prayer education for Jewish students was motivated by a current educational concern: educating for spirituality and religious practice. Educators are tasked with formally nurturing spirituality (Wright 2001). It is known that attitude to religious observance may change during adolescence (Hyde 1963), thus attitude to prayer needs attention. The effects/consequences of prayer understanding reach beyond religious practice itself, to encompass issues of faith, identity, spiritual development and well-being (Sigel 2009). Here quantitative and qualitative analysis is used to measure the effects of a tefillah (prayer and its understanding) course on student attitudes to prayer.

The National Mentoring Program was created in 2009 by the Division for Gifted and Outstanding Students in the Ministry of Education and is implemented by the Szold Institute. The program aims to cultivate future leaders in Israel. Highly gifted 10th and 11th graders are matched with top rate professionals in students’ areas of interest. They work for a year on a project of mutual interest. Forty-four per cent of students live in geographical or social periphery.