Reading Sacred Texts in the Classroom: The Alignment Between Students and Their Teacher’s Interpretive Stances When Reading the Hebrew Bible

ABSTRACT

This study investigated the voices of students interpreting Hebrew Bible texts in one fourth-grade classroom. Through think-alouds on the Biblical text with each student, exit interviews, teacher interviews, and classroom observations, this study found that those students whose interpretive stances were more aligned with the teacher’s were given greater voice in classroom text discussions than students whose interpretive stances were misaligned. Drawing on neo-Vygotskian education theory, I argue that Jewish educators need to take students’ interpretive stances seriously; attempting to force students into an interpretive framework that is set by the teacher will only undermine student learning and engagement.

Notes

¹ All proper names are pseudonyms.

² All teacher and student names are pseudonyms. While I picked the teacher’s psudoynm, I let the students pick their own pseudonyms.

³ Throughout the unit Eitan elicited questions from the students. For example, in one class he said, “Okay, now we’re going to go quick questions. Try to think of questions in your mind and when I point to you, say it. We’re going to collect many.” In another class Eitan explained, “We’re going to have readers and you get stamps for asking questions.”

⁴ This is teacher Eitan’s translation from the Hebrew that he used in class and was used in the think‒alouds.

⁵ Because each unit could have multiple codes the reliability was calculated in two steps. First, the percent of agreement for each individual unit (for example, agreed on all codes, agreed on two-thirds of the codes, etc.) was calculated. Second, the average percentage agreement was calculated for all of the coded units.

⁶ “I thought that the story of Moshe is from the perspective of Moshe. I didn’t think it was from the perspective of Miriam and Aharon too.”

⁷ “Why would they repeat that he married a Cushite woman twice?”

⁸ “Why would they say come out if they are out already? Why would they say that?”

⁹ “I’m not sure, maybe I didn’t understand it, but I think it kind of switched subjects a little because first it did, ‘concerning the Cushite woman that he had married, for he married a Cushite woman,’ and then they switch to, ‘They said, ‘Is it only to Moshe that God has spoken? Did God not also speak with us?’ And God heard.’ It’s kind of, why would they switch like that, so suddenly?”

¹⁰ It is important to mention that the mode of engagement with the text, asking questions, was aligned between Eitan and all of the students. Eitan privileged questions in the classroom and the students privileged questions in their think-alouds.

¹¹ Compare Aaron and Miriam’s discussion of Moses in verses 1–2: “Miriam and Aharon spoke about Moshe concerning the Cushite woman that he had married, for he married a Cushite woman. 2 They said, ‘Is it only to Moshe that God has spoken? Did God not also speak with us?’ …” to the narrator’s description of Moses in verse 3: “The man Moshe was most humble, more so than any other person on the face of the earth.”

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Notes on contributors

Ziva R. Hassenfeld

Ziva R. Hassenfeld is a doctoral candidate in curriculum and teacher education at Stanford University whose research explores the tools and reading strategies young children employ when reading Biblical texts, as well as the pedagogies necessary to create classrooms that privilege student textual interpretation. E-mail: [email protected]