Some Fundamental Questions in our Scholarly Field of Jewish Education
What constitutes a field of scholarship? Is it sufficient that different scholars share a common concern for a single phenomenon, regardless of their disciplinary or methodological differences? Should they share common research methods or theories? Should they engage a shared body of literature? What about intellectual lineage or conventions of style, form, or audience? Is a scholarly field the sum-total of research on a given topic, or can it be understood to be something larger than the sum of its scholarly papers?
So begins the first article in this issue, authored by Ari Y. Kelman, Marva Shalev Marom, and Benjamin Keep. I am reproducing the paragraph in full here because it is the fundamental group of questions for all of us who are not only scholars of Jewish education, but are also engaged in the process of publishing scholarly articles about Jewish education.
One of the first questions I have to answer when manuscripts arrive in my in-box is the extent to which the work contributes to the scholarly field known as Jewish education. The Journal of Jewish Education regularly returns work to authors, not because the work is of a low standard – on the contrary, often authors have submitted excellent manuscripts – but because articles do not relate closely enough to the field of Jewish education.
The papers in this issue are all very diverse, in content and approach, and do all add to our understanding about Jewish education. That is, in a sense, as Kelman, Marom, and Keep reflect on, the point of all research: to produce a clearer and deeper understanding of the phenomenon (whatever it is) in question. Taken together, different research projects constitute a field, and that field captures both the diversity and convergence of scholarly interest.
“What We Talk about When We Talk about Research in Jewish Education: How References Produce a Field,” the first article, studies the citational practices of articles published in the Journal of Jewish Education over a 10-year period to discover how scholars have constituted the field of research in Jewish education. Using social network analysis and qualitative examination, this article presents a portrait of the field of knowledge including its strengths and new directions for scholarly endeavour. The authors show some of the hidden dynamics of how researchers in the field have produced the field itself. They acknowledge that this cannot possibly be an analysis of the entire breadth of research in Jewish education; this reference network, however, has revealed some important patterns in the production of scholarly knowledge and thus, in the field, itself. By exploring citations for their connections to one another, the authors discover that scholarship in Jewish education has revolved around an implicit definition of Jewish education as primarily focused on the relationship between teaching and text, as influenced by the vision of Seymour Fox. The result is a robust network of citational relationships that define the field of Jewish education in particular ways, and a much weaker set of relationships that might have demonstrated other ways of apprehending and locating Jewish education when and where it happens.
In the UK, unlike in North America, all the Jewish secondary (high) schools were, until 2010, under the auspices of the Orthodox communities. In 2010, JCoSS (the Jewish Community Secondary School) the first, and only, pluralist, community secondary school opened. Nine years later, it had 1,300 students between Grades 6 to 12. As the originator of the project to create JCoSS and as a key person involved in its development from idea to reality, our second article, by Maxim Samson, “Marching at the Speed of the Slowest Man’: The Facilitation and Regulation of Student Autonomy in a Pluralist Jewish Day School” is of particular interest to me. Samson shows how faith schools are often perceived as restricting students’ autonomy through inculcating a single religious ideology and compelling participation in collective worship. Based on interviews and focus groups with parents, students, and senior staff, he investigates how the educational leadership at JCoSS, in contrast, attempts to accommodate various forms of Jewish practice and facilitate students’ explorations to determine their Jewish identities as desired. It reveals that students enjoy opportunities to actively negotiate Judaism, but that their autonomy is not without limits, and issues inherent to pluralism exist in executing an ethos which is able to accommodate diverse, personalized expressions of Jewish attitudes and behaviours. Samson suggests that comparative studies between the UK and the USA and their respective funding mechanism, student cohorts, and leadership styles may help shed further light on these dynamics Samson observes that no two pluralist schools are the same, as different schools may offer students diverse levels of freedom to determine their own practices. Crucially, any school that attempts to welcome families with varying ethnoreligious practices and that endeavours to present these practices as equally valid is likely to face challenges in ensuring that all are perceived as equal and equally heard. In this light, his final line, “How far should a school be pluralistic?” invites the reader to contemplate the extent to which Jewish day schools should accommodate Jewish difference.
The next paper, “Pursuing Fluency: A Curricular Intervention in Tanakh Education,” by Ziva R. Hassenfeld, describes her efforts to design and implement an approach to Tanakh education that would help students become expert decoders of the Biblical Hebrew text as they became expert interpreters of it. The goal, following existing, research-based best instructional practices from literacy, was to create a Tanakh curriculum in which language skills and meaning making were intimately connected. Hassenfeld’s instructional program focused on the five major components of teaching literacy: fluency, vocabulary, background knowledge, reading strategies, and engagement in discussion. What she found most remarkable about this literacy model is that it does not compare the importance of fluency and decoding with the importance of meaning making. Rather, the two reinforce one another. Making personal meaning of the text, creating and debating interpretations that matter to the students, exists in a dialectic relationship with improved reading and understanding of Biblical Hebrew. When done well, the two become indisputably intertwined and mutually reinforcing.
The final paper in this issue challenges traditional views of scholarly works in Jewish Education. Its’ focus is the graphic novel, a genre not usually related to academic or scholarly fields.
In “Graphic Novels as Tools for Teaching Complexity about Israel,” Matt Reingold explores this contemporary phenomenon. Building on the established idea that to provide students with a full portrait of Israeli society and history, educators must introduce greater complexity into their Israel curriculum, Reingold explores three recently published graphic novels about Israel and considers how each offers an opportunity for considering Israel in more nuanced ways. His paper is grounded in recent research about Israel education and empirical studies about graphic novels in education. Each of the three texts highlights aspects of Israeli society that are less frequently addressed in curriculum about Israel and therefore provide opportunities for presenting students with primary sources that directly grapple with the complexities of Israeli society. Reingold concludes that his type of pedagogical model reinforces the importance of devising Israel curricula that challenge students to think about Israel in new ways and to actively wrestle with texts, concepts, ideas, and even their own connection to Israel. By integrating graphic novels as tools that introduce alternative ways of thinking, students can see the complexity of Israeli society while ensuring that their love of Israel is retained, even if it looks different from where it began.
To return to Kelman, Marom, and Keep’s question about the form and nature of a field of scholarship, taken together, different research projects constitute a field, and that field captures both the diversity and convergence of scholarly interest. Collectively, the articles in this issue together constitute different perspectives of the field of scholarly interest that is known as Jewish education. From Samson’s realisation of vision and ethos in practice within a particular setting, to Hassenfeld’s curricular intervention in Tanakh education, to Reingold’s exploration of the graphic novel, we can certainly see a common concern for the single phenomenon of Jewish education. Yet the question of how we define the field of Jewish education, and the types of educational research it entails and produces, remains open and one that should underpin our thinking as we read and consider the content in this, issue 85(3) of the Journal of Jewish Education.