Open Your Hand

Teaching as a Jew, Teaching as an American

Ilana Blumberg

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781978800816
  9781978800823
• eBook ISBN:
  9781978800830
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Biographies

Fifteen years into a successful career as a college professor, Ilana Blumberg encounters a crisis in the classroom that sends her back to the most basic questions about education and prompts a life-changing journey that ultimately takes her from East Lansing to Tel Aviv. As she explores how civic and religious commitments shape the culture of her humanities classrooms, Blumberg argues that there is no education without ethics. When we know what sort of society we seek to build, our teaching practices follow. In vivid classroom scenes from kindergarten through middle school to the university level, Blumberg conveys the drama of intellectual discovery as she offers novice and experienced teachers a pedagogy of writing, speaking, reading, and thinking that she links clearly to the moral and personal development of her students. Writing as an observant Jew and as an American, Blumberg does not shy away from the difficult challenge of balancing identities in the twenty-first century: how to remain true to a community of origin while being a national and global citizen. As she negotiates questions of faith and citizenship in the wide range of classrooms she traverses, Blumberg reminds us that teaching - and learning - are nothing short of a moral art, and that the future of our society depends on it.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Note on the Text
• Introduction
• 1. Learning to Teach, Teaching to Learn: Kindergarten to College—Beit Rabban and Michigan State University
• 2. Choosing to Learn, Learning to Choose: “Smith” Middle School
• 3. “It’s the Land”: “Smith” School and Jerusalem
• Postscript: Shadow Schools—Kindergarten to College, America and Israel
• Discussion Questions
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• About the Author