The center has initiated and launched a range of projects combining academic study with field experience in collaboration with our long-term academic partner, the Seymour Fox School of Education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. This partnership generates scientific knowledge that supports the center’s activities, enabling a deep understanding of the challenge we are addressing and measuring the effectiveness of our programs and pedagogical practices. Through this collaboration, both organizations enjoy mutual enrichment, as research creates new knowledge from the field, which in turn contributes to the development of academic knowledge.
Education, Gender, and Inequality: Pedagogical and Social Perspectives - an Academic Course
The institute’s partnership with the Hebrew University has led to the development of a unique course that combines theory and practice, under the guidance of Dr. Tania Zion-Waldoks and Yael Boim-Fein, our Executive Director. The course addresses the connection between education, society, and inequality, focusing on the intersections of gender, ethnicity, social status, and nationality, as well as the connections between knowledge and power relations. The course seeks to raise questions, provide tools to deepen socio-cultural understanding and analysis in the educational context through gender-oriented critical thinking, and lay the groundwork for creating more just and equitable solutions. Students can experience a type of laboratory offering the opportunity to translate theory into practice and vice-versa, acquire new skills, and design educational interventions aimed at addressing identified challenges through creative, localized, and practical solutions. The course broadens the skills and intentions of students preparing to work in the educational field through the practical application of feminist pedagogical practices, ethics of care, and relational learning. For two years, the course has received special recognition from the Planning and Budgeting Committee, as a result of its support for courses integrating practical experience.
The Gender Studies Pathway: MA in Jewish Education at the Melton Centre
In 2023, the institute opened a unique pathway integrating gender studies in the Melton Centre’s MA in Jewish Education. Outstanding students are offered the opportunity to deepen their understanding and enhance their research and practical skills by exploring the intersection of gender, education, society, and culture within the Jewish and Israeli contexts.
In this program, the personal meets the political, and theory meets practice. The program explores the contribution of critical gender theory to understandings of the educational field, the ways in which the field generates new knowledge, methods of researching educational practices, promoting research-based educational activities, and the various intersections of gender, ethnicity, social status, sexuality, and nationality with the Jewish and/or Israeli educational field. Through a combination of meetings with education professionals, exposure to a diverse range of programs and models, and an analysis of the field of Jewish education, the program offers a complex collection of diverse voices and opposing powers.