Alex Pomson

Loosening chronology’s collar: reframing teacher career narratives as stories of life and work without end

This paper affirms the power and potential in the turn to narrative for research into teachers’ careers but explores a methodological limitation within this move that may have narrowed the repertoire of plot structures used to construct teachers’ career stories. It considers a variant methodological orientation for the representation of career narratives. This orientation is grounded in an assumption that teacher career stories do not necessarily pursue a narrative chronology, where stories possess an obvious beginning, middle and end. The paper presents a ‘career portrait’—an ethnographic sketch of a teacher’s career—so as to indicate something of the data that might be generated when a less teleological narrative research frame is used for the study of teachers’ careers.

The "Rebbe" Reworked: An Inquiry into the Persistence of Inherited Traditions of Teaching.

Abstract Although research has consistently shown that culturally embedded archetypes of teaching powerfully shape the ways teachers conceive of their work and lives, it remains unclear why or how these archetypes continue to exert such influence. This paper argues that the strength of teaching archetypes might usefully be attributed to their continuing potential for translation as what MacIntyre calls not-yet-completed narratives. This claim is supported by drawing on accounts from Jewish day school teachers about their lives and work. A portrait is offered of a teacher whose image of teaching is not only grounded in an influential patriarchal archetype, it also contributes to a significant transformation of the archetype in terms of its gender and its construction of the teachers role. The case suggests that traditions of teaching remain vital by generating new literatures of practice.

“Why Israel?” Re-Viewing Israel Education Through the Lenses of Civic and Political Engagement

This article takes up categories from literature on political and civic engagement to help make sense of data collected from interviews with 40 American Jewish day high school students about what they think and feel about Israel. Viewed through a set of lenses that distinguish between the manifestations and motivations of political and civic engagement, the article helps clarify why young Jews, even when actively and positively engaged with Israel, are uncomfortable labeling themselves as Zionists. The analysis points to an important distinction between the concepts of Israel as “home” and “homeland.” The article also raises important questions about what is presumed to be an increasing distance or alienation from Israel among young American Jews.

Context, Context, Context—The Special Challenges and Opportunities in Congregational Education for Practitioners and Researchers

The publication of this special issue of the Journal of Jewish Education could hardly be more timely. In the summer of 2008, when a call for papers was published, the focus on “challenges and opportunities in congregational education” was explained as follows: “The organized Jewish community has begun to recognize that congregational schools still enroll the majority of Jewish students, and are likely to continue doing so for the foreseeable future despite the tremendous growth of day schools.” Developments over the intervening period have made it even more appropriate to devote a special issue to congregational education. The sharp financial challenges of the last 2 years have stimulated renewed interest in the capacities of an educational framework that is much less costly than that of day school education. The emergence of Hebrew charter schools—seen by some as competitors to congregational schools and by others as potential allies—has made it more urgent to determine what supplementary Jewish education can provide and what it can’t. Finally, with the publication of Jack Wertheimer’s (2008) A Census of Jewish Supplementary Schools in the United States 2006–2007 for the AVI CHAI Foundation, and the associated studies and publications produced by Wertheimer’s research team, a bedrock of current data exists on which to build a well-grounded and wide-ranging exploration of the field’s challenges and opportunities. This Journal issue constitutes, then, a landmark publication. First, it provides scholars and practitioners with a timely sense of the state of an important field. It makes explicit the core questions that engage both researchers and practitioners, and it provides significant insights in how to improve the field’s educational quality. Second, this issue has afforded an opportunity to turn to scholars who over the last three decades have written some of the most influential studies in the field and invites them to update

Franz Rosenzweig and the Elementary School Teacher: A Midrashic Re-Viewing of an Experiment in Adult Education

This article proposes to read events of the educational past not as history but as midrash. It juxtaposes an historical account of a watershed experiment in adult education (Franz Rosenzweigs Freie Judisches Lehrhaus) with an ethnographic account of a presently practicing elementary school teacher. These accounts are generically different and historically distant from one other, but, through association and conversation, there emerges from them some challenging suggestions about how knowledge is born of speech, how learning includes teaching, and how teaching is predicated on desire. Viewing the Lehrhaus project from a “midrashic” stance, invites an enlarged reading of it as an educational experiment and poses questions about the interpretative potential in the intersections between narrative research genres.

A Grammar of Jewish Educational Research

In a seminal article, Tyack and Tobin (1994) characterize the “grammar of schooling” as a phenomenon that has frustrated generations of educational reformers. By “grammar” they mean the “regular structures and rules that organize the work of instruction [such as] standardized organizational practices in dividing time and space and [that splinter] knowledge into ‘subjects’” (p. 454). These continuities, they demonstrate, have been highly resistant to change despite repeated challenges to them. Of course, grammar need not only be seen as an obstructive force; it can provide the building blocks that enable highly developed practices to occur. In this sense, grammar provides what the Oxford English Dictionary (1973) calls, “the fundamental principles or rules of an art or science.” These principles enable human activities to occur in a systematic and sophisticated fashion. There is a grammar of educational research, too. It is observed in the consistent patterns around which almost all graduate programs of education are designed: core courses in quantitative research, in qualitative research, and in humanities-based educational research. Graduate students might bewail the subjectivity of qualitative research, the dryness of quantitative research, and the irrelevance of historical research; but no matter how distinctive the educational vision of the programs in which they enroll, graduate-level students are almost always required to take foundational courses in these same broad disciplines. These different modes of research, and the interplay between them, are the grammatical elements from which our professional practices are composed. I draw attention to these understandings of grammar because, I think, the articles in this issue of the Journal of Jewish Education exemplify the positive contribution that can be made by these foundational practices. Unlike those articles gathered together in a themed issue of this journal, these three articles were not specifically solicited to address a common concern or topic. By chance these articles successfully reached the conclusion of the peerreview and revision process at a similar moment in time. That’s how they came to be grouped together for publication in the same issue.

David S. Mendelsson, Jewish Education in England, 1944–1988: Between Integration and Separation (Oxford, England: Peter Lang, 2011)

David Mendelsson’s Jewish Education in England, 1944–1988: Between Integration and Separation untangles a puzzling historical phenomenon. In his careful study, Mendelsson explores how it is that in 1944 only 1 in 16 Jewish children in the United Kingdom attended a Jewish day school, but by 1987 1 in 2 young Jews were enrolled in such schools. The number of Jewish day schools increased from 23 in the early 1950s, of which virtually all were small, to 70 in 1989, many with hundreds of pupils. As Mendelsson notes, these developments occurred during a period of demographic decline. In the 1940s, it was claimed that there were 450,000 Jews in the United Kingdom; by the late 1980s, there were 320,000. Mendelsson’s account will be enlightening for those with a special interest in Jewish education in the United Kingdom. But more profoundly, this study should serve as a model for a particular form of sociologically oriented research in Jewish education that ought to be more widely replicated, and about which I will say more below. I came to this book with several special interests. Mendelsson is a colleague of mine at the Hebrew University; I have long been an admirer of his scholarship and of his teaching. Like him, I received my Jewish education in the United Kingdom during the latter half of the period under investigation. Indeed, no small number of the cast of characters who loom large in this volume were people with whom my parents and grandparents interacted. I had plenty of reasons to be curious about this book.

THE MATURATION OF RESEARCH IN JEWISH EDUCATION

The Network for Research in Jewish Education has come to occupy a special place in the professional lives of its members. For professors and scholars, the Network provides a venue for presenting research to colleagues and receiving the feedback from peers that is so vital in advancing and sophisticating ones work. For practitioners and policy makers, the Network provides opportunities to learn about recent research and deliberate thoughtfully about issues facing Jewish education. For graduate students, the Network provides a chance to enter the field of research in a supportive and welcoming ambience. The Research Network also provides an annual barometer of the state of research in Jewish education. The papers in this volume were presented in their original form at the conference held in June, 2000, and were subsequently revised and reviewed for publication in this journal. They represent an indication of the level of maturity of the field of Jewish education research. They reflect the balance between research conducted on topics of concern to Jewish education with research from other settings applied to Jewish education. This volume also represents the breadth of concerns and issues currently being addressed by Jewish educational research, and the wide range of researchers who currently work in Jewish education.