Multimedia Cases of Jewish Teaching and Learning
Leader: Sharon Feiman-Nemser
Staff: Rachel Kulick
To improve the core practices of Jewish education, educators and professional developers need access to vivid images of what engaging, content-rich teaching and learning can be like. This project aims to create a "virtual library" of such cases by enabling talented teachers of Torah and other Jewish subjects to produce multimedia cases of their work. Such cases combine video clips of teaching and samples of student work with teacher reflections on the goals and dilemmas of teaching and learning.
Professor Sharon Feiman-Nemser, director of the Multimedia Cases of Jewish Teaching and Learning project and of the Mandel Center, learned more about this work as a Goldman-Carnegie Quest Fellow in the Carnegie Quest Project of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. As part of her fellowship, she developed a case, titled Beginning the Journey from Student to Teacher, about her own teaching of prospective teachers in a Brandeis undergraduate course. Click here to visit her case, and click here to see the collection of other cases available on the Carnegie Foundation website.
These materials are available for use for professional development purposes. Please let us know how you use them. Click here to share your experience.
Cases of Jewish teaching and learning produced by the Mandel Center:
• Teaching Torah to Young Children: Creating a Community of Torah Learners, by Shira Horowitz (DRAFT)
Horowitz's case, about her teaching at South Area Solomon Schechter Day School in Stoughton, MA, explores the question, "How can I teach Torah to young children in a way that respects the integrity of the text and thedevelopmental and individual needs of my students?" Please note: this case is in draft form.• Coming in 2007: A Beit Midrash for Teachers (working title), by Elie Holzer, Orit Kent, and Sharon Feiman-Nemser
Other selected cases of Jewish teaching and learning:
• Challenging Jewish Identity: Integrating Jewish Studies into the Humanities Classroom," by Judy Shulman and Elizabeth Sharkey
This case, which documents a unit of a seventh grade humanities teacher at a community day school in Palo Alto, CA, explores how the teacher encourages her students to question and shape their Jewish identity within the context of her general studies curriculum.
To read the article "Expanding Horizons through Virtual Cases of Teaching" by Sharon Feiman-Nemser and Jon A. Levisohn, published online in Shmoozing About Education, from the Lookstein Center for Jewish Education in the Diaspora, click here.
To explore related research on the pedagogy of Jewish studies at the Mandel Center, please visit the project pages of the Bridging Initiative and the Beit Midrash Research Project. For more information about the Multimedia Cases project, contact Marcie Quaroni (mquaroni@brandeis.edu).