HOW RELEVANT IS IT? Public elementary school teachers encounter ancient Jewish texts

This study deals with a learning encounter of public elementary school teachers in Israel with an ancient legend (Aggadah) drawn from sixth century Jewish culture. The objective is to examine the teachers' attitude to the text through a study of the dialogue created in the encounter with the text in a havruta (study pair) setting. Participants included two groups of teachers of Hebrew as L1: 15 teachers in Group 1, and 14 in Group 2. The groups came from two large and demographically different cities. The teachers were asked to study the legend in pairs and consider its suitability for teaching in their class. After the legend was studied, semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with the teachers. The findings point to different attitudes to the teaching of the text in class between the groups and to differences in the perception of the relevance of the text for the teachers and for their students. The discussion is based on the definition of relevance (Dascal, 1977; Sperber & Wilson, 1995) as a relative function of efficiency.