Dr. Vardit Ringvald is the country’s leading scholar of Hebrew pedagogy.  She is the Director of the Middlebury School of Hebrew and C.V Starr research professor for Language and Linguistics at Middlebury College.  She served as Senior Academic advisor at Hebrew at the Center until 2015.

Dr. Ringvald spent three decades at Brandeis University, where she was the director of the Hebrew Language program, teaching Hebrew language, culture, and pedagogy.  She founded the Hebrew Summer Language program at Brandeis in 1996.  During her career at Brandeis, in addition to directing the Hebrew language program, she also directed the Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, and Arabic language programs.

A pioneer in teacher education, Dr. Ringvald created the Master of Arts in Teaching Hebrew at Brandeis in 1998. In 2013 she established the MA in teaching Hebrew at Middlebury College, and in 2016 she established a new Doctorate program in Hebrew which focuses on pedagogy research.  She is one of the developers of the Oral Proficiency Interview for Hebrew, and is the primary author of Brandeis Modern Hebrew, Volumes I and II, the first textbooks to be based on the proficiency method.