Investigating Prospective Jewish Teachers' Knowledge and Beliefs About Torah: Implications for Teacher Education

Abstract

Teaching the Torah in liberal settings demands a set of skills and a sophisticated knowledge of the Bible. It presupposes an open approach to the text that posits multiple interpretations, and demands close reading and explication of the text as in a literary-critical approach. In this article, the author describes the knowledge and beliefs of six different cohort groups of prospective Jewish educators regarding the authorship of the Torah and their understandings of two central narratives in the book of Genesis. She explores the tenacity of their early beliefs in the face of a variety of pedagogic interventions question and speculates about the nature of that tenacity.

Gail Dorph is director of the Mandel Foundation's Teacher Educator Institute—a professional development program for senior Jewish educators. She lives in Tiburon, CA. E-mail: [email protected]

Notes

¹Earlier versions of this article were presented at the seminar on Bridging Scholarship and Pedagogy in the Teaching of Bible in 2004, and at the Mandel Center conference in 2005. The author thanks Susan P. Fendrick for her careful and thoughtful suggestions, which greatly improved the clarity of this article, and Jon A. Levisohn and Sharon Feiman-Nemser for their help in the development of this work.

∗No response to this question from one Hornstein