How relevant is it? Public Elementary School Teachers Encounter Ancient Jewish Texts

Abstract

This study deals with a learning encounter in a havruta (pair) setting of teachers of public elementary schools in Israel with an ancient legend (Aggadah) drawn from sixth-century Jewish culture. The objective of this study is to examine the teacher’s attitude to the text through a study of the dialogue created in the encounter with the text in the havruta setting. Participants in the study included two groups of mostly women teachers of Hebrew language (L-1): 15 teachers in Group 1, and 14 teachers in Group 2. The groups came from two large and demographically different cities in Israel. The teachers were asked to study the story in pairs and to consider its suitability for teaching in their class. After the legend was studied, semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with the teachers. The study corpus included 12 recordings of havruta learning, nine semi-structured interviews and ten lesson plans for teaching the legend in the class. The findings of the study point to different attitudes to the teaching of the text in the class between the groups and to differences in the perception of the relevance of the text for the teachers themselves and for their students. The discussion is based on the definition of relevance (Sperber & Wilson, 1995; Dascal, 1977) as a relative function of efficiency: the maximum contexts and meaning that the listener can extract with minimum effort. This definition explains the sense of relevance or irrelevance of the text as perceived by the participants in the study.

“Above all, there’s our humanity”: Teachers’ intertextual responses to reading an ancient Hebrew text

“…In a previous study, we found that teachers in secular schools had four main difficulties with processing the ancient text: (a) linguistic difficulties-many unfamiliar words that are differ from modern in terms of grammar, syntax as well as lexical items and meanings; (b) structural difficulties-the structure does not always mention the personal pronoun, the subject of the verb, saying for example "said to them," or "said to him" without telling us who talked to whom; (c) lack of prior knowledge needed to understand the text, such as historical and biblical or geographic knowledge; and (d) lack of identification with the characters (Teomim-Ben Menachem & Elkad-Lehman, 2022). Due to its considerable complexity, significant effort must be invested to understand all the meanings and nuances of the text's language, structure, content and logic, and learning in a havruta can help cope with those challenges.…”