Section archive - Formal Education

This article investigates the use of the contextual orientation to the Bible - which seeks to understand the Bible as a product of its time, and in the context of historical-critical biblical scholarship - as a deliberate, significant aspect of a teacher's overall approach to reaching Jewish adults in their 20s and 30s. Through classroom observation and qualitative interviews, the authors (one of whom is the teacher in the article) explore how this approach affects student learning and engagement and facilitates a meaningful attachment to and understanding of the Bible. This article also reflects one teacher's examination of his own teaching orientation and its expressions, serving as a possible model for other such investigations

Barry Holtz' (2003) presentation of a map of orientations for the teaching of Bible provides a certain kind of focus for research, enabling us to ask deeper and richer question about those orientations. This article investigates the teaching of one teacher, in two different settings - more specifically, how that teacher introduces Bible in those settings - as a way of generating insight into the particular features of what Holtz calls the 'contextual orientation.' Building on the sketch that Holtz offers, it explores the internal variation within that orientation, and hence begins to reveal some of the pedagogic possibilities

Rona Hart, previous head of the Board of Deputies of British Jews Community Research Unit presented recent data on Jewish demography and renewal trends in Jewish education in the UK at a Seminar in Honor of Professor Naamah Tsabar-Ben Yehoshua at Tel Aviv University School of Education.