Biblical Hebrew Forum

["J.E.Harding" <BSP97JEH AT sheffield.ac.uk>]

I have recently been involved in a very interesting discussion 
off-list about new methods of teaching biblical languages. Although I
teach Hebrew, I have been using an educative strategy which may well
be of use to those teaching Greek, Latin, Syriac, Arabic and Ethiopic. I have 
been
working with problem-based learning (PBL), and I offer below a few
reflections which I hope will be of interest to teachers on the list.

 PBL is a teaching method which was developed in the health sciences,
and has been developed further in professional education, mainly. In
 some ways it is similar to the 'inquiry method' advocated by Neil
 Postman 
and Charles Weingartner (Teaching as a Subversive Activity, 1971). The
method works by giving students tasks which are of directly practical
benefit. Students then work in groups (usually), bringing their
background knowledge and expertise to bear on the task at hand.
Knowledge is developed on a need-to-know basis, and learning takes
place on a 'deep' level, because students are motivated and have to
use their ability to think critically to solve the problem at hand. 

This method was suggested to me by a marine biologist who is doing
research into PBL. His article (Tony Harland, 'Moving Towards
Problem-based Learning', Teaching in Higher Education 3.2 [1998]
219-230) is extremely useful, not least because it includes a good
bibliography. The course I had to teach was a Hebrew text course for
students who had studied lessons 1-20 of Kelley's grammar. I therefore
set up a kind of teaching experiment, asking students to work together
for 50 minutes, using whatever grammars and lexica they had, to solve
the problem: 'Translate and analyse the Hebrew of Jonah 1:1-4'. I
assessed this formatively, by giving a sheet of responses to their
attempt to solve the problem. I found they worked very slowly, but
with very little input from me managed to work successfully through
Jonah 1:1-2. Similar problems were set, including Exodus 20:1-3,
Esther 3:1ff and Amos 7:10ff. Invariably, students made outstanding
progress with the language, and were able to learn from each other and
introduce creative interpretations of the texts.

 The problem has been that the whole process is not time-efficient and
 
does not fit in well with an examination system because it does not
work within a rigid curriculum. It is an inductive approach, but faces
the problem that one reviewer noted with respect to Kittel's Hebrew
grammar-it is not a graded introduction to the language, and thus
creates problems for those who need to learn by using paradigms and
vocab. lists. The main advantages are that students are highly
motivated, think deeply and critically, have the opportunity to relate
their work to other courses, work in a 'research atmosphere and
acquire interpersonal skills which are of use in 'real life'.

I am writing a paper on this at the moment, which I intend to give in
the Academic Teaching and Biblical Studies group at SBL in November.
The most significant volume dealing with this educative strategy is D.
Boud and G.I. Feletti (eds.), 'The Challenge of Problem-based
Learning' (2nd ed.; London and Stirling [USA]: Kogan Page, 1997; 1st
ed. 1991; ISBN 0-7494-2291-2). This is a collection of papers by those
concerned with this method.

It would be interesting if several people could develop this method in
Biblical Studies. There is the whole issue of how this method *could*
work in this field, and what the implications are for assessment
procedures and the definition of the roles 'teacher' and 'learner'.

I hope this is useful.
With very best wishes,

James Edward Harding
University of Sheffield
>bsp97jeh AT sheffield.ac.uk<