The Use of the Self in the Class Room

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Abstract

This roundtable addresses some of the ways in which teachers of Jewish Studies consciously choose to use or camouflage their own identities in the classroom. In recent decades, academics have increasingly understood that all knowledge is communicated from a "subject position," and Feminist Studies, in particular, taught us the value of self-identifying in our scholarship, and in calculated ways, in our teaching. An extension of the insight that "the personal is political," locating one's so-called subject position was a critical tool to allow students to assess from where information was coming, how it is informed or colored by experience and point of view. Professors of Jewish Studies are challenged to teach with academic objectivity materials that have classically been studied in pedagogical contexts embedded in Judaism and the Jewish experience: Yeshivas, Hebrew Schools, the pulpit, and adult Jewish learning. Jewish Studies worked hard to reframe these materials for the academy. That said, the professor's life-story and learning history is often relevant to the material being taught: Does the daughter of a Holocaust survivor who is teaching the Holocaust—even as one unit in a Jewish history class—share the powerful experiences of her parents and what it meant to grow up with those stories? Do we talk about our own ritual practices and their meanings in courses on Jewish Religion and Culture? How do you protect students from the creation of an insider/outsider dynamic in classrooms with sizeable Jewish and non-Jewish participants? The creative use of self is an important teaching strategy, and good teachers are often strategic in their use of self. How are Jewish Studies classes a special case? How do we avoid teaching Jewish Studies as Heritage Studies while honoring the fact of heritage? And, while other disciplines can consciously play with individual research agendas, this is far less accepted in Jewish Studies. The panel includes a practical ethicist (Elliot Ratzman), a modern historian (Natalia Aleksiun), a rabbinics and medieval studies scholar (Phillip Ackerman-Lieberman), a specialist in Catholic-Jewish relations (Devorah Schoenfeld) and is moderated by a historian of religions (Katja Vehlow).

Sub Unit

• Pedagogy

Moderator

• Katja Vehlow, University of South Carolina

Discussants

• Elliot Ashley Ratzman, Temple University

• Natalia Aleksiun, Touro College

• Devorah Schoenfeld, Loyola University Chicago

• Phillip Ackerman-Lieberman, Vanderbilt University