The Second Conversation

Auteur

Ziva R. Hassenfeld is the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Assistant Professor in Jewish Education at Brandeis University and assistant director of research for the Mandel Center.

Texte du rabat

A teacher reflects on her teaching practice, bringing literacy scholarship into the arena of Jewish education. In The Second Conversation, Ziva R. Hassenfeld examines how students develop interpretations of the Hebrew Bible, applying lessons from qualitative literacy studies to Jewish education. Teachers, she argues, have a responsibility to develop a shared literacy practice within Tanakh classrooms and explain a sacred text's interpretive rules. Hassenfeld looks at specific case studies to understand how teachers can encourage dynamic and informed scriptural readings among their students. She highlights the importance of two conversations about interpretive rules within the classroom, the first about the text's meaning, and the second about competing conventions for determining its meaning. Instructors of any type of literature will benefit from Hassenfeld's study, which offers rich ideas about when and how teachers enforce a classroom's way of reading or follow a student's line of inquiry toward more flexible interpretation.