The Mandel Scholars in Education Program is under way. After an intensive admissions process, four doctoral students from various Schools of Education in Israel were accepted: Oren Ergas, Galit Caduri, Einat Heyd-Metzuyanim, and Aliza Segal.
The Mandel Scholars in Education Program is a unique program headed by Prof. Mordecai Nisan, designed to help doctoral students finish writing their dissertations, deepen their familiarity with various aspects of education in Israel, and consolidate their professional identities as educators.
Six candidates made it to the final stage of the admissions process. In this stage there was a “lecture marathon” in which the candidates presented their research plans to the admissions committee and an audience of invited guests. The doctoral students who took part in the lecture marathon at the Mandel Leadership Institute are all in the process of writing their dissertations and have finished gathering their research materials and/or data.
The doctoral students accepted to the Mandel program come from a variety of academic institutions and are engaged in diverse educational activity:
Oren Ergas, a doctoral student in philosophy of education at the Hebrew University, under the supervision of Prof. Philip Wexler, earned a B.A. from the Hebrew University in geography and general studies, while also studying jazz performance at the Rimon School of Jazz and Contemporary Music. He then went on to Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he completed the requirements to turn his music diploma into another bachelor’s degree, summa cum laude. Since 2003 he has been engaged in educational work as a teacher and principal.
Einat Heyd-Metzuyanim embarked on her doctoral work under the supervision of Prof. Anna Sfard of the University of Haifa, with the aim of studying in depth the emotional blocks experienced by students in math classes. She has a bachelor’s degree in computer science and psychology from Tel Aviv University and a master’s degree, summa cum laude, in educational counseling from the Hebrew University. She is currently the coordinator of individual therapy, a member of the administration, and a guidance counselor at the Israel Arts and Science Academy in Jerusalem.
Galit Caduri is writing her doctoral dissertation, under the supervision of Prof. Hanan Alexander, on the philosophical foundations of innovative research in education. Galit has a bachelor’s degree in economics, political science, and sociology from Bar-Ilan University and a master’s degree, magna cum laude, from the Faculty of Education.
Aliza Segal is a doctoral student in the Melton Centre for Jewish Education at the Hebrew University under the supervision of Prof. Marc Hirshman and Dr. Zvi Bekerman. She has a bachelor’s degree in Jewish studies and philosophy and a master’s degree in Bible from Yeshiva University in New York, as well as certification as a yoetzet halacha (halakhic consultant). Aliza won an Emerging Scholars Award from the Network for Research in Jewish Education (2009) and an expanded merit fellowship from the Melton Centre for Jewish Education for 2009-10.
The recipients of the Mandel fellowships will enjoy a living stipend of NIS 84,000 for one year, as well as a budget for books and participation in conferences in Israel and abroad. They will devote one day a week to a special program that includes meetings with theoreticians, researchers, and practitioners whose work is relevant to the field of education and field trips to educational institutions and organizations.
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Description of the lectures by the six candidates who reached the final stage of the admissions process (the “lecture marathon”):
Oren Ergas: Incorporating the science of yoga in Western education—a way of working towards “non-dualistic” education for happiness. The first part of the lecture is a logical argument (incomplete due to time limitations) based on the “holistic education” discourse. Its point is that the goal of education is happiness and that this goal cannot be achieved by Western education, which is Cartesian and guided exclusively by intellect. In contrast to this Western ethos, education is proposed for the idea of “human experience of various sorts,” as described by Buddha, as a psychophysical mechanism known in India as avidya—a state that people are in unconsciously. Here Buddhism represents an example of the ethos of yoga in the broad sense, in light of which education will be aimed at the mitigation of suffering/happiness. The second part of the lecture is on research as an attempt to awaken Western education from its dualistic slumber.
Pascale Benoliel: Threshold leadership in management teams—an investigation into forecasters and the consequences of internal and external activities of school principals on the individual, staff, and organizational levels. Traditional approaches to school administration have proposed that the role of the school principal focuses mainly on internal processes within the school. But according to the systemic approach that maintains that organizations can exist only by interacting with the external environment, management of school boundaries has become an important function of the principal. The present study deals with the threshold leadership of school principals. It focuses on principals’ boundary activities, which have to do with internal activities, defined as behaviors aimed at management of the internal processes that take place within the organization (e.g., examining the needs of the organization); and external activities, defined as behaviors aimed at management of the external environment. In addition to functioning as the head of the organization, the principal heads the management team, which makes his or her job more complex.
Einat Heyd-Metzuyanim: Interrelations between thought, emotion, and interpersonal interactions in math class—the learning process as an integrated activity of building mathematical entities and building the participants’ identities. What hinders the learning of mathematics in school and what promotes it? Three factors—thought, emotion, and social processes—have been recognized as important, but the research trends that have studied them so far are anchored in certain epistemological and ontological assumptions and have been carried out by radically different techniques. The aim of the study is to base the three types of research on one conceptual system and to create a uniform set of tools for them.
Galit Kaduri: A philosophy of narrative research in education.This is a philosophical study aimed at examining an innovative research approach in education known as “narrative research.” Narrative research differs from other qualitative forms of inquiry in that it emphasizes the uniqueness and particularism of human existence. For proponents of the narrative approach, analysis of educators’ life stories makes it possible to learn about educational practice in depth, while enabling the voice of those engaged in educational work to be heard. Because stories are subjective, a question arises: how can we create knowledge out of life stories? And how can we justify accepting knowledge that comes from narrative research as significant and valid? What truth do educational researchers in the narrative tradition strive to discover and what is its significance? And what are the conditions for the creation of narrative research in education that will be considered “true” and “good”?
Aliza Segal: Multiple voices and multiple methods of dialogue in Talmud classes in yeshiva high schools—an ethnographic case study. The Talmud is a polyphonic text to which traditional scholars attach the commentaries of their predecessors and their own. In school Talmud classes, students participate in a process in which they are socialized into a particular community and in the structuring of their identity as students of Talmud, while also structuring their identity as pupils in the class context. This lecture investigates the interaction of two seemingly opposed methods of dialogue: that of the Talmud and that of the class. This study of Talmud classes in yeshiva high schools uses ethnographic research methods, as well as tools from discourse analysis. It uses social theories of learning and starts from the assumption that language plays a major role in structuring reality.
Afnan Masarwah Srour: Citizenship, Women, and Knowledge—women from Umm Tuba take part in enrichment programs. This study looks at the nexus of knowledge, gender, and Islam from a new angle. The topic was examined by investigating the relationship between practices and knowledge referred to as Islamic on the one hand, and “new age” practices and knowledge on the other hand, as embodied in programs designed to educate traditional Muslim women. Women in the village of Umm Tuba—a poor village in East Jerusalem with sparse resources—are exposed to programs exported to the village by various people (Israeli Jews, Palestinians, etc.).
Members of the admissions committee
Prof. Avi Berman, head of the Department of Education in Technology and Science, the Technion
Dr. Eli Gottlieb, director of the Mandel Leadership Institute
Ms. Annette Hochstein, president of the Mandel Foundation–Israel
Dr. Iris Tabak, Department of Education, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Prof. Mordecai Nisan (chair of the admissions committee), head of Academic Staff, Mandel Leadership Institute
Prof. Anna Sfard, Department of Mathematics Education, University of Haifa
Dr. Zvi Zameret, chair of the Pedagogical Secretariat, Ministry of Education
Prof. Lee Shulman, Stanford University
