On Friday, January 17, CENES Yiddish teacher and scholar Itamar Manoff successfully defended his dissertation, as the final component of his doctoral work in Educational Studies at UBC on the topic of mistakes and errors among adult language learners.
When one of his students described a person in the English-as-an-Additional-Language classroom with the phrase “She has kindness,” he wanted to understand the cultural and discursive frameworks that would lead to this kind of “mistake” in English, and what might be existentially at stake for the speaker in this particular formulation, as opposed to “She is kind.”
Manoff, accordingly, sought to understand the alleged difference (in linguistics and science, broadly) between “errors” (as unavoidable ignorance) and “mistakes” (as an avoidable ignorance), and how the distinction might be much more complex than at first presumed. Manoff then expanded this line of thinking to explore non-violent approaches to error, drawing on philosophies of justice and hospitality from Rorty to Husserl, from Derrida and Levinas to Merleau-Ponty.
We at CENES are thrilled to congratulate our colleague on this momentous and important work, and we look forward to calling him Dr. Manoff!
