Bridging Scholarship and Pedagogy in Jewish Studies
About the Bridging Initiative
The Initiative on Bridging Scholarship and Pedagogy in Jewish Studies was launched in 2003-2004 with a faculty research seminar on Teaching Bible, with the participation of 10 scholars and educators, who engaged in bi-weekly discussions of the purposes and practices of teaching Bible at all levels and settings. In addition, each participant developed a research project with the support of the seminar.
The initiative continued in 2004-2005 with the development of these research projects, and the presentation of many of them at our first public conference in January 2005.
Many working papers from the Teaching Bible conference are currently available, and work continues on editing and revising for publication conference papers and presentations, and editing additional video footage from the conference for presentation on this website.
As part of the Initiative, a plenary session was developed for the annual conference of the Network for Research in Jewish Education in June 2005. Presenters at this session, entitled "A Missing Paradigm? Strengthening Research on the Pedagogy of Jewish Studies," included Jon A. Levisohn, director of the Bridging Initiative; Susie Tanchel, Gann Academy; Alex Sinclair, JTS; Marc Brettler, Brandeis; and Sharon Feiman-Nemser, Brandeis.
Read "A Plea for Purposes," by Jon A. Levisohn (in Jewish Educational Leadership 4:1, 2005), which expresses some of the intellectual background to the Bridging Initiative. For more background, read Levisohn's "What is Bridging Scholarship and Pedaoggy?," the first in the Bridging Initiative's series of working papers.
For 2006-2007, the Bridging Initiative expanded its focus from Bible to rabbinic literature. Once again, a group of scholars and educators met bi-weekly throughout the year to discussion the teaching of rabbinic literature and to develop individual research projects on various aspects of the topic. Click here to read some of the participants' thoughts about the seminar.
The next step of the Bridging Initiative was a major conference on Teaching Rabbinic Literature, held January 27-28, 2008. Click here to learn more about this conference, or to view video footage of conference sessions. Papers from the conference will be available on the working papers page, as they complete the editorial process.
Also noteworthy: a suite of articles from the Bridging Initiative -- developed from working papers nos. 3, 5 and 6, together with an introduction by project director Jon A. Levisohn -- was published in early 2008 in the Journal of Jewish Education. Read more about those papers here.
• Click here to be notified when new papers and videos are available, and to receive updates about the Bridging Initiative and the Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education.
• Return to the Bridging Initiative main page or go directly to the working paper, "What is Bridging Scholarship and Pedagogy?" [PDF], by Jon A. Levisohn.