Ziva Hassenfeld adapts a theory promoted by Lev Vygotsky to Jewish text learning as she suggests a way to bring the whole child into that learning.

Schools spend enormous time training students to read, write, and interpret texts. This activity is particularly important in religious schools where texts represent a major source of religious knowledge. How religious schools train students to read texts has implications for the kinds of religious adults students will become and the kinds of religious children they can be.

Teachers and administrators in every context understand that they must transmit certain static pieces of information, what the letter “a” looks like, for example, and also must train students to develop ideas about what texts mean. They hope that once children leave school, they will be able to make sense of the texts they encounter outside of school. But traditionally, literacy education has emphasized transmission over cultivating interpretive autonomy. Teachers focus on the mechanical aspects of reading and writing: tracing letters, pronouncing sounds, and memorizing vocabulary words. For the most part they treat the ability to make sense of texts as something that will take care of itself.

Lev Vygotsky (1978) argued that transmission is not enough. Students must be taught how to make sense of texts. Although he focused on the teaching of writing, it’s easy to see how his critique extends to the teaching of reading as well. Discussing rudimentary literacy instruction, he argued that the way schools teach writing harms children’s development.

He wrote:

The teaching of writing has been conceived in narrowly practical terms. Children are taught to trace out letters and make words out of them, but they are not taught written language. Instead of being founded on the needs of children as they naturally develop and on their own activity, writing is given to them from without, from the teacher’s hands (p. 105).

Vygotsky (1978) explains that as second order symbolism, writing signifies spoken word, which in turn signifies an object. Though writing is a scientific concept and, therefore, requires direct instruction to master (Vygotsky, 2012), it must be taught in a way that reveals to students that it is the continued development of their natural activity of sense making through signification. Just as mastering gesture and then language helped the children in their own drive to communicate, so too will writing. To properly teach writing is to support students in understanding writing as second order symbolism.

Though reading may seem passive when compared to writing, it is, according to Hans Gadamer (1989), as active as writing: “Reading with understanding is always a kind of reproduction, performance and interpretation. Emphasis, rhythmic ordering, and the like are part of wholly silent reading too…understanding always involves an inner speaking” (p. 153). It follows, therefore, that reading, like writing, must be taught in such a way that reveals to students that it too is part of the natural activity of sense making.

When writing and reading are taught only as transmission of mechanical skills, Vygotsky argued, they shift from a tool in the larger activity of sense making to their own self-contained activity with its own objectives and goals. The objective of writing and reading becomes to complete the assignment and meet the teacher’s demands. According to Vygotsky, even though students come out of school “knowing how to write and read,” i.e., knowing how to recode speech from print and print from speech, many don’t know how to use writing and reading to make sense of the world.

Over the last two decades, education researchers have extended Vygotsky’s critique, arguing that all literacy instruction, at every level, should focus on the cultivation of students’ interpretive autonomy. Reading and interpreting texts, they argue, must be taught as acts of meaning making. Maren Aukerman (2007) explained, “When reading instruction principally focuses on a teacher’s interpretation and interpretive techniques, we misrepresent to children what reading actually is” (p. 91). In other words, when teachers conclude text discussions by telling students the “right” answer concerning the meaning of the text, they send the message that reading means memorizing authoritative interpretations. When schools transform literary interpretation into a solely mechanical process of memorization and repetition, without cultivating students’ interpretive autonomy, the reading and interpreting of texts becomes cut off from the larger activity of sense making and self-expression (Aukerman, 2008; Beck & McKeown, 2001; Christoph & Nystrand, 2001; Dyson, 1999; Gutierrez, et al., 1997; Hall, 2009; Mercer & Howe, 2012; Paley, 2010; Rosenblatt, 1995). Learning to read and interpret texts must be taught in such a way that situates textual interpretation in the larger project of developing students’ natural activity of sense making and self-expression. Otherwise, the child is left behind, and the activity of interpreting texts, so fertile an educational ground for encouraging children’s interests and ideas, becomes a conformist activity of recitation.

But Aukerman (2007), Vygotsky, and Gadamer all seem to assume that teachers are preparing their students for the adult reading activity of independent meaning making. Motivated by intrinsic need, adults develop interpretations of texts from diverse genres such as books, e-mails, legal contracts, and movies. As Aukerman argued, memorizing authoritative interpretations will not prepare students to participate in this activity. For this reason, she eschews the pedagogy of transmission, which emphasizes transmitting static, authoritative interpretations in favor of a pedagogy I call interpretative facilitation, which gives support to the development of students’ interpretative autonomy.

The pedagogy of interpretative facilitation is, without a doubt, the most appropriate text pedagogy for teaching towards the whole child. The pedagogy of interpretative facilitation starts from the axiom that students’ experiences and ideas are important and can add a great deal to textual understanding. It asks student to be active instead of passive and confers onto students interpretive agency. But is it appropriate for Jewish education? Certainly Jewish studies teachers should not hold as their main goal in teaching to prepare students for the adult reading activity of independent meaning making of all texts. Jewish studies teachers should hold as their main goal preparing their students for the adult reading activity of Jewish reading. What then is Jewish reading?

In truth, there exists in Jewish tradition two imagined reading activities. One conceives of reading as the memorization of authoritative interpretations. The other conceives of reading as working towards interpretive innovation. The first conception, reading as the transmission and recitation of religious knowledge, finds expression in various stories in the Talmud. For example, the Talmud praises Rabbi Eliezer reporting that he “never said anything he didn’t hear from his teacher” (Tractate Sukkah 28a). In other words, Rabbi Eliezer portrays the good student as a perfect receiver of authoritative interpretation. Rabbi Eliezer later pronounced the following notion of teaching, “Much Torah have I learned, but I did not take from my teachers even as much as a dog lapping from the sea. Much Torah have I taught, but my students took from me only as much as an applicator that is dipped in a tube of eye-powder” (Tractate Sanhedrin 68a). Even though Rabbi Eliezer knows a tremendous amount of Torah, he only knows a fraction of what his teachers knew. Similarly, even though he transmitted a tremendous amount of Torah to his students, they were only able to retain a small fraction. The critical terms in Rabbi Eliezer’s two statements are “take” and “took.” His understanding of learning and teaching revolves around transmission.

But alongside reading as transmission and recitation of religious knowledge, the Jewish tradition also envisions a reading activity rooted in interpretive autonomy. A verse in Psalms asserts, “One thing God has spoke; two things I have heard” (Psalms 62:12, JPS translation). This verse captures the idea that the biblical text is fundamentally ambiguous, in need of interpretation, and able to accommodate more than one “right” answer. The Talmud explains this verse to mean, “One biblical verse may convey several teachings…In R. Ishmael’s school it was taught: ‘And like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces (Jer. 23:29)’, so also may one biblical verse convey many teachings” (Tractate Sanhedrin 34a). Multiple interpretations of a biblical verse may be correct even when they conflict. Another famous rabbinic dictum asserts, “There are 70 faces to the Torah” (Bamidbar Rabba 13:15- 16). Throughout traditional Jewish sources, the multiplicity of interpretations is celebrated, and the activity of interpreting the text becomes a religious duty.

Nechama Leibowitz, one of the leading Orthodox scholars of Hebrew Bible, discussed the relationship between an individual and her interpretation of a biblical text in her essay (1990), How to Read a Chapter of Tanakh. Leibowitz writes:

Shouldn’t each individual attempt to establish his/her own reading, a reading suitable to his/her spirit and soul? Just as it comprises a unique and one-time phenomenon in this world, shouldn’t his/her reading of Tanakh, his/her understanding of the text, be a onetime phenomenon- uniquely his/her- and not an imitation of something else which one was? (p. 36)

In this remarkable essay, Leibowitz boldly declares that the Jewish text teacher’s primary responsibility is to create space for students to bring their whole selves to the text and find interpretations that speak to them, not the teacher.

If we want text classrooms that address the whole child we must create text classrooms that encourage students’ own interpretive work. Students’ readings of texts are important and legitimate as expressions of their “spirits(s) and soul(s).” Even more significantly, allowing students to engage in their own textual interpretation affirms for the child that who they, in all their individuality, is relevant. As part of the larger mission of schools, where instruction is meant to help children develop their capacity for meaning making in the world and not stunt it, the pedagogy of interpretive facilitation is critical. Beautifully, this pedagogical imperative fits with our Jewish imperative: la’asok bedivrei Torah, to engage with, and not simply receive, the words of Torah.

References

Aukerman, M. S. (2007). When reading it wrong is getting it right: Shared evaluation pedagogy among struggling fifth grade readers. Research in the Teaching of English, 42(1), 56–103.

Beck, I. & McKeown, M. (2001). Text talk: Capturing the benefits of read-aloud experiences for young children. Reading Teacher, 55(1), 10-20.

Christoph, J. N., & Nystrand, M. (2001). Taking risks, Negotiating relationships: One teacher’s transition toward a dialogic classroom. Research in the Teaching of English, 36(2), 249–286.

Dyson, A. H. (1999). Transforming transfer: Unruly children, contrary texts, and the persistence of the pedagogical order. Review of research in education, 24, 141-171.

Gadamer, H. G. (1989). Truth and method, W. Glen-Dopel (trans.). London: Sheed and Ward.

Gutierrez, K., Gutierrez, K.D., Baquedano- Lopez, P., & Turner, M.G. (1997). Putting language back into language arts: When the radical middle meets the third space. Language Arts, 74(5), 368-378. Hall, L. A. (2009). Struggling reader, struggling teacher: An examination of student-teacher transactions with reading instruction and text in social studies. Research in the Teaching of English, 43(3), 286-309.

Leibowitz, N. (1990). How to read a chapter of Tanakh. Studies in Jewish Education 5, 35-47.

Paley, V. G. (2010). On listening to what the children say. Harvard Educational Review, 56(2), 1–11.

Rosenblatt, L.M. (1995). Literature as exploration. New York: The Modern Language Association of America.

Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Vygotsky, L. (2012). Thought and language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Ziva R. Hassenfeld is a post-doctoral fellow at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education at Brandeis University. Her research explores the tools and reading strategies young children employ when reading Biblical texts as well as the pedagogies necessary to create classrooms that privilege student textual interpretation