Pedagogy Chaburah

Bring the magic of SVARA to your teaching

SVARA’s Pedagogy Chaburah is a rigorous ten-month learning opportunity for queer and trans rabbis and educators working in Jewish communities. This space nurtures those who are seeking to expand their pedagogical toolkits to include SVARA’s empowering (and traditionally radical) approach to teaching Talmud.

This learning space will help you integrate elements of SVARA’s method into your classroom, bet midrash, or other teaching setting, and will include sessions on pedagogy and practical skill-building.

This learning space is for folks who:

  • have previously learned Talmud with SVARA
  • have experience learning rabbinic texts in the original beyond the intermediate level (can study texts in SVARA’s method in chevruta without the use of Hint Sheets, can recognize and identify binyanim, has the ability to decode Rashi script)
  • are experienced educators/facilitators (have 3+ experiences as teachers/facilitators)
  • lead with self-awareness, groundedness, humility, and mentschiness
  • are committed to acknowledging and interrogating mechanisms of power and inequality in the world and the bet midrash
  • are interested and invested in incorporating SVARA’s pedagogy & practice into their learning spaces in some way
  • are currently serving in a regular teaching role where they will have the opportunity to explore incorporating elements of SVARA’s pedagogy & practice into their learning spaces

Calendar & Curriculum

This ten-month program has a weekly commitment of approximately 3-4 hours of learning (1.5 hours of shiur and 2 hours of chevruta). Elements of the Pedagogy Chaburah include:

    • October-December| Learn and ground in SVARA’s method through weekly chevruta learning and shiur, accompanied by readings and reflections
    • January-February | Explore SVARA’s pedagogical framework and approach (“COMP”) through workshops, readings, and reflections
    • March-May | Implement practice teaching with coaching and observation [no synchronous meetings]
    • May-June | Reflect & synthesize

Tuition

The tuition scale for the Pedagogy Chaburah is $950-3,000. If this sliding scale is prohibitive, you can contribute any amount to tuition that is meaningful to you, and you will be given an opportunity to do so in the registration process after the application process is complete. Here is a resource that informs our approach to sliding scale tuition. As part of SVARA’s commitment to leveraging our work in support of reparations, all tuition is waived for Black and Indigenous participants of teacher training programs.