Research on Jewish day schools has long focused on the challenges they face in managing the tension between the "Jewish" and "general" components of their "dual curriculum." Interviews with 34 graduating seniors of a private, community Jewish high school found that students experienced another dual curriculum within…

Bibliotherapy is an educational approach that attempts to engage learners in meaningful discussions about relevant, compelling, and complex issues that they confront in their lives. Bibliotherapy begins with reading and reflecting on stories that can draw participants into a process of reflection, in ways that are user friendly and…

This paper intends to demonstrate how within the current contentious environment for teacher education in the U.S., two small teacher preparation programs conducted a voluntary coordinated long-term self-evaluation study, that partially responded to external accountability pressures by the Federal administration, state agencies and various private…

What do Jewish day school students believe constitutes good understanding and worthwhile learning in the context of their encounter with rabbinic texts in the classroom? This article shares findings from an interview study of Jewish day school students in grades 9 through 12 regarding their attitudes toward the study of Talmud. I argue that high…

Abram S. Isaacs (1852-1920), editor, intellectual, university professor, and rabbi, was a moral educator dedicated to making American Jews more knowledgeable and more virtuous. His role model was his father, who founded and taught in the Jewish day school that young Abram attended. While embracing the blessings of American life, Isaacs was deeply…

Purpose: This paper aims to illustrate how graphic novel adaptations can engage adolescents in conversations about gender and society, particularly when adaptations are weighed against messaging found in a student's everyday life such as religiously motivated gender normativity. Design/methodology/approach: This paper is based on quantitative and…

This study considers whether and in what ways graphic novel adaptations of traditional Jewish Hebrew texts can encourage adolescent Modern Orthodox girls to adopt autonomous critical responses when encountering narratives that present women in unequal roles vis a vis men. According to scholars, Jewish literacy should teach students to read…

This article offers a detailed study of one child's relationships to Israel from kindergarten (2012-2013 academic year) through 7th grade (2019-2020 academic year). By tracing Avigail over the course of eight years, I argue that children do not develop "a relationship" with Israel but rather many different relationships over time. Using…

This study examines a Pre-K-first grade full-time synchronous remote track in a Jewish day school. In the fall of 2020, Hassenfeld (Fifth Author) remotely taught biblical literature to Pre-K-first grade students. Through our analysis of two months of classroom transcripts, we sought to understand, first, the nature of student-to-student text…

The development of non-Orthodox Jewish day schools in Los Angeles in the 1970s to 1990s can be attributed to a combination of factors, including the city's geography, the deterioration of public education, court-ordered busing that began in the 1970s, and strong rabbinic personalities. Yet, as elementary day schools proliferated throughout the…

This article examines the ways that Jewish studies teachers think about their teaching. It analyzes data from a three month teacher study group in which teachers read educational research articles as a framework for reflecting on their own teaching. The data suggest that Jewish studies teachers take one of two approaches in talking about their…

The purpose of this study is to focus on the influence that children's perceptions of their parents' attitudes about bullying has on their own attitudes about bullying and defending victims, as well as their actual defending behavior and general pro-social behavior. This study utilizes data collected for a previous study of the BRAVE bully…

Students in "community" (nondenominational) Jewish high schools represent a diversity of denominational affiliations, including those who affiliate with more than one denomination and those that affiliate with none. These schools strive to create communities in which students with varying Jewish beliefs and practices are, at the very…

Inquiry-oriented pedagogy is a difficult pedagogy to enact in the classroom. By placing students' questions and textual ideas at the center, the teacher opens the door to unanticipated and sometimes off-the-wall comments in text discussion. And yet, research has shown that it is exactly this type of pedagogy that leads to increased engagement and…

This qualitative study, examining seven communities in the globalized Asia Pacific area, aimed to investigate Jewish community attitudes toward Hebrew, their heritage language (HL), as influenced by the social environment. The main finding was that the "complex ecology" of context influences attitudes to Hebrew. The article delineates…