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IntroducIng the contextual orIentatIon to BIBle: a comparatIve Study

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Contextual orientation to bible (Bridging Initiative Working Paper No. 3) • 1The Initiative on Bridging Scholarship and Pedagogy in Jewish StudiesWorking Paper No. 3May 2006IntroducIng the contextual orIentatIon to BIBle: a comparatIve StudyJon a. levISohnBrandeis University Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education MS 049P.O. Box 549110Waltham, MA 02454-9110www.brandeis.edu/mandelThis is a preprint of an article whose final and definitive form has been published in the Journal of Jewish Education © 2009 Taylor and Francis, and is available online at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15244110701873177Contextual orientation to bible (Bridging Initiative Working Paper No. 3) • 1IntroducIng the contextual orIentatIon to BIBle: a comparatIve StudyJon A. Levisohna. IntroductIonMuch of what we know about the teaching of Bible is anecdotal, based on our experiences or limited impressions of the experiences of others. What is important to teachers of Bible in different settings and for different kinds of students? What decisions do teachers make, and on what basis? What does teaching Bible actually look like? Those who teach Bible themselves, and especially those who are involved with the education of teachers, surely have ideas about these questions, but we have almost no research literature on the subject.1 The recent publication of Textual Knowledge: Teaching the Bible in Theory and Practice, by Barry Holtz,2 is an important step forward. Among other aspects of his study of the subject, Holtz establishes an organizational scheme for the variety of approaches or “orientations” to the teaching of Bible.3 But aBStract In what Barry Holtz has called the “contextual orientation” to the teaching of Bible, the teacher strives to present the Bible in its original context and to promote the students’ understanding of its meaning in that context. But what does teaching within this orientation actually look like? What are its central features, its pedagogical objec-tives? What choices do teachers make within this orientation? This paper pursues these questions via a compara-tive study of how one teacher introduces the Bible in two settings: a university Bible course and an adult Jewish education setting.Jon A. Levisohn is assistant professor of Jewish education at Brandeis University, where he is also assistant academic director of the Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education and directs the Initiative on Bridging Pedagogy and Scholar-ship in Jewish Education.1 The kind of research literature that I have in mind can be rigorous and systematic without being large-scale and gen-eralizable. But beyond rigor and systematicity, the key quality of research literature, either empirical or conceptual, is that it is public property: the ideas are presented formally in a venue that is accessible to others, which then allows others to critique those ideas and to build on them. In the case of the present paper, I do not claim that the features of the con-textual orientation that I will present are either necessary or sufficient for its implementation. I do hope, however, that a careful presentation and discussion of these features is a step towards greater understanding of the orientation, which will then allow others to develop further work on that basis.2 JTS Press, 2003. I have written on the book elsewhere; see “How to Do Philosophy of Religious Education,” Religious Education 100:1 (2005).3 Holtz deals exclusively with the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh, as will I. It is of course true that “Bible” means different things to different people, itself an important pedagogical topic. But for the purpose of this paper, I will simply use “Bible” to refer to the Hebrew Bible.Contextual orientation to bible (Bridging Initiative Working Paper No. 3) • 2the book is not the last word on the topic. In fact, in light of what I have written above, one might say that a primary virtue of the book – especially the chapter on orientations – is that it’s the first word on the topic, which is meant as a compliment. In the short time since its publication, Holtz’ language of orientations has become standard for those who think, read, write, and teach about teaching Bible.But beyond providing vocabulary, Holtz’ presentation of a map of orientations provides a certain kind of focus for research. The identification of different forms of or approaches to teaching enables us to ask deeper and richer questions about those different orientations. Note that this kind of re-search can proceed regardless of whether one believes that orientations are fundamental, mutually exclusive, and immutable categories (let us call this the ‘strong’ view of orientations) or whether one believes that an orientation is a rough approximation of a collection of ideas about teaching Bible that typically and contingently, but not necessarily, hangs together (the ‘weak’ view). According to the strong view, each orientation should have some essential quality that is conceptually distinct from every other; each orientation offers significantly different answers to certain basic questions of methodology and purpose.4 According to the weak view, on the other hand, there may be no such essential quality, and it may not be possible to identify those questions of methodology and purpose on which the orientations differ. In fact, it may be the case that distinct orientations are frequently combined in actual teaching with no contradiction and no loss of coherence.5 But in either case – that is, certainly according to the strong view but even according to the weak view – the articulation of the different orientations to the teaching of Bible generates new questions, to understand what hap-pens within each one more deeply and with attention to the internal variation within each one. This paper is an effort to do that kind of exploratory work within one orientation, the Contextual Orientation. In this approach to the teaching of Bible, the teacher strives to present the texts of the Bible in their original context, and to promote the students’ understanding of their original mean-ing in that context. As Holtz writes, “It views the Bible as a record of an ancient civilization, and it hopes to make that world intelligible to students of today” (Holtz, 92). Holtz goes on to note that this orientation is prominent in university settings, and notes further that


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