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In 2011 we started following a cohort of 1,000 Jewish 11-year-olds as they entered Jewish and non-Jewish secondary schools in Britain. We were interested in finding out about their Jewish behaviors...

This paper is a first effort to systematically document programmatic interventions in five of the ten communities participating in The Jewish Teen Education & Engagement Funder Collaborative, a joi...

The world’s understanding of adolescence has come a long way since Stanley G. Hall first characterized this stage of development as one of “storm and stress” (Hall, 1904) and the term teenager was ...

Jewish overnight summer camp has been touted as an especially well-suited venue for Israel education. This article brings an institutional lens to test this proposition. Data come from the survey responses of 1,382 campers, CITs, and staff at 12 overnight and day camps. We find that Israel education does indeed occur almost anywhere at camp. At the same time, across a variety of camp settings, the outcomes produced by these features are variegated. Relative to other immersive experiences where young people encounter Israel, camp has much less additional impact on Israel engagement.

Research into school choice has generally explored both the processes by which choices are made and the considerations that parents explore when making this important decision on behalf of their children. This article examines the secondary school choices of Jewish parents in the United Kingdom. It explores parents’ reasons for choosing to select Jewish faith secondary schools. We frame our arguments against the back- drop of the wider faith-school phenomenon in the UK, and as with the Christian communities, we find a disconnect between the small number of Jewish adults attending places of worship regularly and the growing number of Jewish children attend- ing Jewish faith schools. We show that for many parents, schooling is synonymous with Jewish socialization, or encul- turation; developing networks of Jewish friends, providing sufficient cultural resources to enable participation in Jewish life, and nurturing distinctive values. We show how Jewish schools have become more than places for academic advance- ment for these families; they have become the primary locus of Jewish community.

This chapter calls into question two commonplace assumptions that undergird the work of those who study and develop ‘school–community connections’. The first assumption is that there is a generally unidirectional sequence of cause and effect (from home to school) in the relationships between communities/parents and schools. The second is that the primary outcomes of these relationships have greater significance for children than for parents. At the same time, the chapter suggests that these outcomes confirm an emerging strand of thought within the study of contemporary Jewry. This emphasizes the fluidity of adult Jewish identities, even — if not especially — among those who may not have previously been deeply engaged with aspects of Jewish life.

In 2005 the Network for Research in Jewish Education (NRJE) assumed ownership of and full editorial responsibilities for the Journal of Jewish Education. For 9 years until then, the Journal—under t...

This article takes up categories from literature on political and civic engagement to help make sense of data collected from interviews with 40 American Jewish day high school students about what they think and feel about Israel. Viewed through a set of lenses that distinguish between the manifestations and motivations of political and civic engagement, the article helps clarify why young Jews, even when actively and positively engaged with Israel, are uncomfortable labeling themselves as Zionists. The analysis points to an important distinction between the concepts of Israel as “home” and “homeland.” The article also raises important questions about what is presumed to be an increasing distance or alienation from Israel among young American Jews.

Set in a private parochial high school, this case invites consideration of the costs and benefits in a range of tactics that schools use for teacher recruitment. The case calls attention to the technical solutions that make one particular school an adept recruiter of teachers and to the extensive human and social capital at its disposal. At the same time, below the surface of the case lurk questions about how the tactics of teacher recruitment are complicated or undermined by an unspoken set of understandings about what makes successful teaching possible, and about the school’s role in nurturing such success.

The paper argues that the practices of schools—frequently seen by sociologists as accurate mirrors of society—confirm many of the claims made by Cohen and Kelman. The widespread uptake by day schools of an advocacy approach to Israel education, and the shift to a pedagogy of enculturation from one of instruction, testify to a decline in attachment and a loss of self-confidence among families and communities. The cultivation of attachment to Israel has been subcontracted to schools where often it is focused on a singular limited performance: advocacy for Israel during the few years that students spend on university campuses.

What are North American Jewish day schools doing when they engage in Israel education, what shapes their practices, and to what ends? In this article, we report on a multi-method study inspired by these questions. Our account is organized around an analytical model that helps distinguish between what we call the vehicles, intensifiers, and conditions of day school Israel education. Our discussion explores the possibility that when it comes to Israel education, schools have shifted from a paradigm of instruction to one of enculturation. This shift, we suggest, is indicative of a generalized anxiety about students' commitments to Israel and about their capacity to advocate for Israel when they “come of age” at university.

More than 2,100 people subscribe to LookJed, an online discussion forum for individuals interested in Jewish education. The conversation of active forum participants—most of whom are modern Orthodox Jewish educators—has been preserved in a format readily available for analysis and interpretation. This article explores whether the discussion among listserv participants reflects widely assumed “haredi dominance” over modern Orthodox day schools and the sociological stresses thereby produced.

This issue of the Journal of Jewish Education models what it will take to develop a stable field of research in Jewish education: building on the work of predecessors, refining their ideas and meth...

This paper – part reflection, part confession – emerges from a researcher/teacher's experience of assigning to students some of his own published work as course reading. Reflecting on the approaches taken by students when writing their responses to weekly readings, the researcher‐as‐teacher takes satisfaction in the students' capacity to employ the assigned texts either to make sense of their own pasts or to use their personal biographies as a lens through which to view the readings. For the teacher‐as‐researcher, however, these responses prove more uncomfortable when the voices of students (as highly qualified informants) reveal a great deal of pain that was absent from the generally upbeat research paper they were assigned to read. From the intersection of research and teaching comes a more nuanced understanding of parents' roles in their children's schooling.

This paper reports findings from a study of LookJed, the oldest and largest on-line forum for Computer Mediated Discussion among individuals interested in Jewish education. The study adopted a "cyber-ethnographic" approach, with postings to the forum seen as "acts of communication" that reveal what is important to their authors. An interest in exploring similarities between forum conversations and those in teachers' lounges led to an investigation of Herring's claim that most listservs do not include discussion at all, only the trading of information. This investigation found that active forum participants generally use the forum for discrete purposes, most commonly to exchange information about "subject matter" or "teaching material", less commonly to exchange opinions and ideas, and rarely to do both. Integrating an analysis of patterns of contribution with an examination of their discursive content reveals six preeminent "types" among the population of contributors, each of whom participates in the forum in different ways and acts with different purposes. Although this typology is at best suggestive and needs to be tested against other listserv cases, its easy identification suggests that in order to better understand the cultures of virtual forums, it is important to pursue a more variegated characterization of listserv participants and their motivations than has typically been the case in CMD research where users are most frequently identified as either lurkers or fanatics, or as active or passive participants.

This article proposes to read events of the educational past not as history but as midrash. It juxtaposes an historical account of a watershed experiment in adult education (Franz Rosenzweig's Freie Judisches Lehrhaus) with an ethnographic account of a presently practicing elementary school teacher. These accounts are generically different and historically distant from one other, but, through association and conversation, there emerges from them some challenging suggestions about how knowledge is born of speech, how learning includes teaching, and how teaching is predicated on desire. Viewing the Lehrhaus project from a “midrashic” stance, invites an enlarged reading of it as an educational experiment and poses questions about the interpretative potential in the intersections between narrative research genres.

This paper sheds light on previously unresearched dimensions in the private-parochial school environment, which help account for the willingness of private school teachers to accept salaries inferior to those offered in public (state) schools. In-depth biographical interviews with a group of 18 Canadian university graduates, qualified to teach in both public schools and private Jewish schools, reveal four aspects of parochial school life whose special influence on teachers' satisfactions and dissatisfactions have not previously been described. These aspects relate to the collegiality, culture and language of schools, as well as the schools' special position at the intersection of teachers' personal and professional commitments.

This paper affirms the power and potential in the turn to narrative for research into teachers’ careers but explores a methodological limitation within this move that may have narrowed the repertoire of plot structures used to construct teachers’ career stories. It considers a variant methodological orientation for the representation of career narratives. This orientation is grounded in an assumption that teacher career stories do not necessarily pursue a narrative chronology, where stories possess an obvious beginning, middle and end. The paper presents a ‘career portrait’—an ethnographic sketch of a teacher’s career—so as to indicate something of the data that might be generated when a less teleological narrative research frame is used for the study of teachers’ careers.

Background For good reason, most research literature on schooling focuses on the experiences of students or teachers. Schools originally were devised to prepare children for life within particular religious, social or occupational communities, and, in more recent times, to ready them as productive citizens in the broader, industrialized society.1 Understandably, educational research largely has been concerned with the triangle of the child, the teacher and the curriculum—those core elements in the educational process that socialize young people to the values and wisdom of earlier generations and that help youths fulfill their potential.2 When parents have been the focus of educational research, they invariably have been viewed as factors within a larger milieu that influences what occurs inside schools.3 Educational researchers have studied parents insofar as their presence or absence has shaped the quality of children's education. Thus, in the most recent edition of the Handbook of Research on Teaching, parents are recognized as an important "out-of-school factor that affects school performance."4 Over the last decade, however, as charter schools, education vouchers and public debate about school choice have become an increasingly visible part of the educational landscape, there has been a move toward a more dialectical recognition of the relationships between parents and their children's education. At the very least, parents' school choice has been researched not only for how it affects children's education, but for how it serves as a marker or facet of parents' own identities.

Although research has consistently shown that culturally embedded archetypes of teaching powerfully shape the ways teachers conceive of their work and lives, it remains unclear why or how these archetypes continue to exert such influence. This paper argues that the strength of teaching archetypes might usefully be attributed to their continuing potential for translation as what MacIntyre calls not-yet-completed narratives. This claim is supported by drawing on accounts from Jewish day school teachers about their lives and work. A portrait is offered of a teacher whose image of teaching is not only grounded in an influential patriarchal archetype, it also contributes to a significant transformation of the archetype in terms of its gender and its construction of the teacher's role. The case suggests that traditions of teaching remain vital by generating new literatures of practice.