Teachers Learn and Learners Teach: Enacting Presence in Online Havruta Text Study

ABSTRACT

In the wake of COVID, the Mandel Teacher Educator Institute (MTEI) faced essential pedagogical challenges in creating learner-centered, relational, and inquiry-based Jewish text study in an online synchronous space. In fall 2020, we offered an online adaptation of a line-by-line method for text study to understand the way this pedagogy invites enactments of teaching, social, and cognitive presences. This study uses qualitative methodologies to understand the learners’ experiences. Implications from this study can help us understand how activating presence in online spaces can bring rich, connected Jewish learning experiences into spaces often perceived to be flat and disconnected.

KEYWORDS:

• Havruta text study
• professional development
• online learning
• Community of Inquiry
• educational technology

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Mindy Gold provided educational technology support in the planning and implementation of the session.

² All participants’ names are pseudonyms.

³ Many thanks to Janet Zydney for this insight.

Additional information

Funding

Funding for this article was provided by the Lippman Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah and the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education.