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Insights on student-centred and knowledge-centred teaching: Jewish studies teachers, pedagogy and community

Author(s): Stern, Julian; Kohn, Eli

Date: 2023

Topics: Interviews, Main Topic: Education, Jewish Teachers, Jewish Schools, Orthodox Judaism

Abstract: The contrast between student-centred and knowledge-centred teaching is explored through a qualitative case study exploration of the pedagogies (Bruner’s ‘folk pedagogies’) of six teachers of Jewish studies. These teachers, based in orthodox Jewish schools in the UK and Australia, discussed their roles as teachers in the context of their responsibility for inducting students into the Jewish community. They appear to overcome (or at least mitigate) the tensions between being student-centred and knowledge-centred through understanding both students and knowledge in communal terms. This communally-focused approach, drawing on the philosophers of ‘personal’ knowledge such as Polanyi, and of personalist approaches to schooling such as those of Macmurray and Noddings, is then proposed as of value in debates on schooling and the curriculum in general, well beyond the religious context of this particular research.

Curricular Choices of Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Communities: Translating International Human Rights Law to Education Policy

Author(s): Perry-Hazan, Lotem

Date: 2015

Topics: Main Topic: Education, Jewish Schools, Haredi / Strictly Orthodox Jews

Abstract: This paper employs the provisions of international human rights law in order to analyse whether and how liberal states should regulate Haredi educational practices, which sanctify the exclusive focus on religious studies in schools for boys. It conceptualises the conflict between the right to acceptable education and the right to adaptable education in international human rights law, and analyses four case studies of Haredi education that exemplify different socio-legal approaches towards this conflict. The case studies show how education laws are transformed along the cogwheels of education policy, in which there are plural normative orders and many agents who implement them. Based on the case studies, I suggest that policies providing financial incentives for implementing educational standards may facilitate the realisation of the right to acceptable education in Haredi schools more than policies devised to enforce this right. I also suggest stipulations for effective conditional-funding policies.

Meeting the Challenge: The Jewish schooling phenomenon in the UK

Author(s): Miller, Helena

Date: 2001

Topics: Jewish Schools, Jewish Education, Main Topic: Education

Abstract: The development of a Jewish schooling system in the UK has reflected sociological, political and historical situations spanning four centuries. In recent years there has been a dramatic increase in the proportions of Jewish children receiving full time Jewish education. The causes of this change, and its impact on both the Jewish and wider community will be considered in this article, which seeks, within a historical framework, to understand the factors which have led to a resurgence of commitment to Jewish schooling in the past 25 years. The unique relationship of Jewish schooling to the State as it exists in the UK will also be explored as a means of contextualising the Jewish school system within a state denominational system.