Search results for: Research

This article offers a detailed study of one child’s relationships to Israel from kindergarten (2012–2013 academic year) through 7th grade (2019–2020 academic year). By tracing Avigail over the course of eight years, I argue that children do not develop “a relationship” with Israel but rather many different relationships over time. Using a combination of qualitative methods including semi-structured interviews, image and music elicitation, storytelling exercises, and parental communications, this case study uses one child’s many different conceptions of and relationships to Israel over the course of her childhood and adolescence to shed light on key questions in Israel education.

What does it mean for teachers to “know their subject matter” and what are—or might be—the sources of teachers’ knowledge? The article contends that there is an underutilized potential resource for Jewish teachers that Judaica scholarship about classic texts may offer to pedagogy. The article examines, as a model, the Rabbinic tale—stories found in Rabbinic literature about the Rabbis themselves—homing in on the ways that this literature is viewed by scholars today. It then explores the pedagogic implications of this scholarship and suggests both the advantages and complexities in using Judaica scholarship in this fashion.

A qualitative practitioner research study was conducted with 31 high school students studying religion contemporary Israeli society. The purpose of the study was to understand how using cartoons written and illustrated by the religious Jewish-Israeli settler Shay Charka challenged students to think about religion in Israeli society in new ways and whether introducing perspectives that were foreign to their North American Jewish education led to new ways of relating to and understanding Jewish-Israeli communities. Results of this small-scale study yielded that the comics were successful in introducing new ways of thinking about religion and in introducing a more complex portrait of Israeli society. As a pedagogical device, comics proved to be of salience and interest to the learners, which also led students to be motivated to study them. Students were particularly interested in the ways that Charka subverted their assumptions of gender in religious-Israeli communities and this specifically led to increased awareness of religious diversity in Israeli society.

There were more than 72,000 Jewish educators working in the United States in 2019, according to a new study from the Collaborative for Applied Studies in Jewish Education (CASJE) that aims to better understand and support the Jewish educational workforce.