Goldberg Tsafrir

Biography

I was born on April 1969 in Beit Zayit, a village on the western outskirts of Jerusalem, Israel, where my wife Amit and me now raise our four daughters. Having received my B.A. degree in history from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on 1996, I went on to study for a teaching certificate in the Kerem Institute for Humanistic Jewish Education. 12 years of teaching in one of Jerusalem's underprivileged neighborhoods led me to field oriented theoretical approaches such as situated learning and communities of practice. These transformed my work and along with students' feedback and participation, facilitated the argumentative learning interventions which served as a context for my Doctoral research. The dissertation, approved September 2006, was an inquiry into adolescents' learning of historical controversies, which soon expanded to the realms of identity and collective memory. The deepening professional, empirical and theoretical involvement in learning research evolved not only into academic writing but also into my work in teacher education, textbook writing and curricular reform. In 2009 those combined fields of interest brought me to the University of Haifa where I'm currently researching issues of identity in learning and higher order thinking in the humanities.

Research Interest

My current research projects follow up on the issues of identity in learning and learning through encounter in one of the most charged realms; that of the Jewish-Arab conflict. The first research project, funded by the prestigious American National Academy of Education and Spencer fund, deals with the effects of conventional vs. multiple- perspective teaching approaches on Arab and Jewish students’ learning of a charged inter-ethnic historical topic. The second project, carried for the Steinmetz Center for Peace, studies the ways Arab and Jewish adolescents discuss historical and current problems in bi national dyads. While the data collection was carried out in Israel, I have taken a year's leave to write and advance my research interests in Brandeis University, with its renowned emphasis on multiculturalism, diversity and inter-faith collaboration. My interest in tracking history teaching as part of Israeli and Jewish identity has brought me to Brandeis' Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education.