Young minds in motion: interactive pedagogy in non-formal settings

Abstract

This is an interpretive study of two cases where a group of sixth grade Catholic students were taught about the Jewish people and the Jewish religion. The paper compares the pedagogy used by the students’ classroom teacher with that employed by a Jewish museum educator at the Spertus Museum of Judaica in Chicago, Illinois. The study aims at increasing our understanding of how children, individually and as members of a specific religious group, construct meanings of the religious other and how those schemas become altered as a result of encountering new stimuli and engaging in what Nel Noddings has called ordinary conversation.