Mandel Center News & Events -I- February 2023 | |
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MCSJE Presents at Prizmah Conference
MCSJE Doctoral Fellow Dr. Esther Friedman and MCJSE Assistant Professor Ziva Hassenfeld presented their findings from a joint research project this past month at the Prizmah Conference. Their session, titled "What I Thought I Taught, and What My Students Actually Learned," focused on how academic research can help make student thinking visible in the Jewish studies classroom. Session participants had the opportunity to experience and engage with qualitative research methods and data analysis firsthand. Read more about their presentation.
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MCSJE Welcomes New Associate Director
Jenny Small joined the MCJSE in January as the Associate Director. Jenny has taught at Salem State University and Boston College, consulted with Hillel International, and served as the Associate Director for Education and Content at Convergence on Campus. Jenny is a scholarly expert on college students' religious identities, and she developed Critical Religious Pluralism Theory to address issues of religious privilege and marginalization in higher education and American society.
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MCSJE is committed to sharing its research findings broadly with other scholars and practitioners in an effort to strengthen the field of Jewish education scholarship. To that end, please find links to past MCSJE research: | |
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Landscapes of Collective Belonging: Jewish Americans Narrate the History of Israel After an Organized Tour
Jonah Hassenfeld's article in the Journal of Jewish Education explores the experiences of a group of high school students on their class trip to Israel as a case of investigating how travel operates as a tool for learning. Over the last two decades, the Jewish community has invested heavily in supporting the travel of American Jews to Israel. But what happens on these trips? How do these trips shape the ways that young people think and feel about Israel? Dr. Hassenfeld is the Director of Teaching and Learning at Schechter Boston and completed his doctorate in History Education at Stanford in 2016. This research was conducted as part of MCSJE’s Jewish Historical Understandings project.
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Ilana Horwitz, the head of the MCSJE Doctoral Fellows Program and a MCSJE Affiliated Scholar, was recently recognized by the Association for the Social Scientific Study of Jewry (ASSJ) as the inaugural 2022 Distinguished Early Career Awardee. The award was presented to her at the 2022 Association for Jewish Studies conference in Boston.
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Sharon Feinman-Nemser has been involved in studying mentors' perceptions of mentoring practices that occur inside and outside instruction. A paper based on this work will be published in the Journal of Teacher Education. The paper is now available online.
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These MCSJE events are free and open to the public. Pre-registration is required. | | |
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Date: Tuesday, February 28
Time: 1 - 2:15 p.m. ET via Zoom
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Mahloket—that is, dispute or principled debate—has long been celebrated as a Jewish ideal. This is not only within Jewish texts (where sages debate laws, interpretations and principles) but within the practice of engagement with those texts as well (where, for example, students might engage in debate about laws, interpretations or about principles). What does Mahloket look like at its best? How does Mahloket function as a kind of signature pedagogy (or at least a signature practice) within Jewish education? What does it mean to “educate for Mahloket,” and what are the benefits and challenges of doing so? In what ways is Mahloket a model for substantive engagement across difference?
Aaron Dorfman (A More Perfect Union: The Jewish Partnership for Democracy), Robbie Gringas (educator, performer and writer/For the Sake of Argument), Orit Kent (Pedagogy of Partnership), Abi Dauber Sterne (For the Sake of Argument), and Mike Uram (Jewish Federations of North America), moderated by Jon Levisohn.
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Learning About Learning
A Conversation with Professor Ilana Horwitz:
What Girls Learn in Jewish Families
Date: Wednesday, March 15
Time: 1 - 1:30 p.m. ET via Zoom
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In the past, Jewish families, like many others, offered girls fewer educational opportunities than boys. But that has not been the case for some time now. In her recent scholarship, Ilana Horwitz has demonstrated the ways that girls raised by Jewish parents complete more years of college and attend more selective schools than girls from comparable socioeconomic backgrounds raised by non-Jewish parents. She argues that this is based on a distinctive “religious subculture” in the home. | |
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Learning About Learning
A Conversation with Dr. Anna Hartman:
Children's Theories About Judaism
Children’s ideas about the world are rich, nuanced, sometimes amusing and surprising, and for Anna Hartman, always fascinating. In this session, she shared her doctoral research in the field of early childhood Jewish education, in which she explored the theories about Judaism that are held by young children, and provided a window into their process of exploring and participating in Jewish life.
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The Mandel Center offers a robust schedule of events to convene scholars, practitioners, and policy makers to advance thinking, generate new questions and, in some cases, generate new work for future publication. See our full list of recent conferences and events, watch videos of our past events,or listen to our podcasts on Spotify, Amazon, Apple, or Google.
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