I am a professor of education and the Morton L. Mandel Director of the Seymour Fox School of Education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. My research and teaching focus on pedagogy, classroom interaction, teacher learning and educational change. In investigating these issues, I take a linguistic ethnographic approach, in which I combine the holistic interpretation that characterizes ethnography and the rigorous tools and systematic approach of linguistics. I am especially interested in the intersection between research and professional practice: how practitioners interact with research knowledge and how researchers can conduct studies that are meaningful, rigorous and helpful for educators. Between 2010-2022 I was a faculty member in the Department of Education at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. There I established the Center for the Study of Pedagogy - Research-Practice Partnerships, an interdisciplinary research center dedicated to collaborating with practitioners and policy-makers to design and conduct research and development projects that expand and strengthen Israeli educators' professional knowledge infrastructures. I was elected as a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 2023. My major research foci include:
Israeli culture and pedagogy
How do the unique circumstances of Israeli history, society, culture, and education system shape pedagogical discourse and practice? Together with Yariv Feniger, Hadar Netz, Aliza Segal, Itay Pollak, Maya Bozo, and Mirit Israeli. I investigated this question in Inside Israeli Pedagogy, a naturalistic study that used participant observation, video recordings and focus groups to explore primary practice in secular schools in Israel.
Dialogic pedagogy
My research advances a multi-dimensional approach to dialogic pedagogy that is informed by actual practice, is grounded in existing classroom conditions, and acknowledges the complexities and problems inherent in dialogue. One particular focus is on student voice in classroom discourse and the conditions necessary for its realization. I also investigate the difficulties of enacting dialogic pedagogy, especially on a wide scale, and ways of addressing them. I am currently engaged in two related studies: a study of gender equity in classroom dialogue and a study of genres of classroom discussion. Key partners in this work include Julia Snell, Aliza Segal, Itay Pollak, Hadar Netz, Christa Asterhan, Matan Barak, and Aviv Orner.
Teacher collaborative discourse and learning
How do teachers talk about their practice? What are the implications of our talk and collaboration for how we think and learn about our practice? I’ve investigated these questions with Dana Vedder-Weiss, Aliza Segal, Yael Pulvermacher, Christa Asterhan, Livat Eshchar-Netz, Rotem Trachtenberg-Maslaton, Islam Abu-Asaad, Mirit Israeli, Miriam Babichenko, Ayelet Becher, and many others, producing studies about, among other topics, teacher professional vision, pedagogically productive talk in teacher team meetings, face-work in teacher investigations of video, the use of conversational protocols, transcending dichotomous discourse, the management of disagreements, the implications for teacher learning of “novice” and “veteran” teacher statuses.
Developing linguistic ethnographic methodology
Linguistic ethnography is a school in U.K. social science that integrates ethnographic openness and holism with linguistic concepts and methods. I was involved in the development and dissemination of linguistic ethnographic methods as a founding member of the teaching team on the Key Concepts and Methods in Ethnography, Language and Communication course that ran for a decade in King’s College London (together with Ben Rampton, Jeff Bezemer, Jan Blommaert, Carey Jewitt, Celia Roberts, and Julia Snell).
Current research studies include:
An ethnographic investigation of studio pedagogy in Betzalel Academy for Arts and Design (with Edith Bouton, Zvi Bekerman, and Barak Pelman).
A study of teachers’ engagement in formative feedback processes through the use of student survey tool and data (with Ayelet Becher and Moriah Omer-Attali).
A study of the affordances and constraints of classroom discussion genres and structures (I’m currently recruiting the research team for this project).