Motivation to teach: the case of Arab teachers in Israel

This paper describes an attempt to identify factors influencing teachers’ motivation in the Arab education system. In-depth interviews with 10 school principals, 15 teachers and 3 counsellors, yielded three themes influencing Arab teachers’ motivation: (1) Arab culture, (2) the school climate and (3) government policies. Arab teachers try to meet both government requirements and the minority Arab society’s expectations that they will shape students’ academic achievements, national identity and culture. Deficient resources and Arab principals’ detached management styles augment the difficulty, negatively influencing teachers’ motivation. Suggestions are given to improve government policies and Arab principals’ work and thus to enhance teachers’ motivation.     

Turning points in the lives of two pioneer Arab women principals in Israel

This study investigates the managerial career development of two Arab women, pioneer principals within the Arab education system in Israel. Using in-depth interviews relating to the characteristics of the different stages leading up to and within their careers as school principals (childhood and academic studies; the struggle to achieve the position; and the period in their position as principal), the study reveals the characteristics and evolution of their managerial style. The research findings indicate that these are two highly motivated women who dared to swim against the tide from an early age and achieved their positions, albeit with the support of their families, but not without serious battles. As the first women principals in their communities they continue to develop, while coping with the norms of Arab patriarchal society, where they need to prove that, despite their gender and the associated expectations, they are effective leaders. This necessitated their initial adoption of an authoritarian administrative style, which they eventually adapt into a more empathetic style. The study contributes to the study of female management styles by showing the evolution of the two women's management styles within the context of their traditional society, thereby questioning previous studies that see women's management styles as a static phenomenon.     

The meanings,risk factors and consequences of religious extremism: The perceptions of Islamic education teachers from Israel

This multiple case study examines the attitudes of 14 Islamic education teachers from Israel towards the meaning, causes and consequences of religious extremism among students in their Arab and Muslim-majority middle and high schools. These teachers define religious extremism as belief in absolute religious truth, inflexibility in religious interpretation, or strict adherence to Islamic teachings. In addition, the teachers distinguish the personal (adolescence, family problems and psychosocial needs), religious (unquestioned following of extremist imams or religion scholars; adopting of selective, literal and decontextualised readings of the religious text; influence of partisan teachers) and socio-political factors (students' feelings of fear and anger towards Israel and its unjust and oppressive role in the Palestinian–Israeli conflict) that push students towards religious extremism. Religious extremism, the teachers conclude, may lead to hatred or violence against followers of other religions, antagonism between Muslims and Jews in Israel, increased Islamophobia in Western societies, the rejection of Islam, the oppression of female students and reduced student achievement and diminished future prospects.     

Court-led educational reforms in political third rails: lessons from the litigation over ultra-religious Jewish schools in Israel

This paper offers a model for evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of judicial involvement in educational reforms. It uses the model to analyze two case studies of court-led educational reforms in the third rail of Israeli politics – the curricula and the admission policies of ultra-Othodox (Haredi) schools. These case studies are located at the knotty junction of human rights, religion, and politics in education policy, generating concern in many countries. The conclusions demonstrate that even when the courts are cautious, judicial involvement in third rail educational reforms may produce impacts that drive the cogwheels of policy-making in directions that are apt to undermine the interests of the petitioners. Therefore, the choice of courts as a forum for shaping education policy in political third rails should be prudently considered. The paper also demonstrates the need to evaluate litigation by means of a contextual, evidence-based analysis. It highlights that in certain cases, what may appear to be unjustified judicial activism or restraint is, in fact, a reasonable response, whose harmful ramifications may be attributed to the context of political third rails. Even the best judges are not immune to the well-known assertion that ‘hard cases make bad law.’     

From gender-not-an-issue to gender is the issue: the educational and migrational pathways of middle-class women moving from urban Bangladesh to Britain

This paper explores the educational and migrational pathways which a number of middle-class women from Bangladesh took as they grew up in the 1980s and 1990s. It draws on qualitative research, conducted between July and November 2011, with highly educated Bangladeshi women who migrated to Britain in the early 2000s. French Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's critique of education, as a means of middle-class social reproduction [Bourdieu, P., and Jean-C. Passeron. ([1977] 1990). Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. 2nd ed. Translated from the French by Richard Nice. London: Sage], and his notion of ‘academic capital’ [Bourdieu, P. 1984. Distinction: A social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated from the French by Richard Nice. London: Routledge; Bourdieu, P. 1986. “The Forms of Capital.” In Handbook of Theory and Research For the Sociology of Education, edited by J. G. Richardson, 241–258. New York: Greenwood] are applied to this empirical data. While the participants’ experiences of early education confirms Bourdieu's arguments, in terms of the centrality of the family's educational and cultural capital in making a qualitative difference to their children's academic achievements, the analysis of the participants’ higher education complicates this picture. Here, the paper calls Bourdieu's umbrella term ‘academic capital’ into question. The author suggests that three categories of academic capital were needed to explain the different and unequal ‘value’ of the participants’ academic qualifications before and after migration. These are – elite, standard and general. Through this exploration of these women's educational and migrational pathways, and the classed and gendered nature which many of them took, this paper seeks to further the feminist project of making Bourdieu's theories ‘useful’ in understanding contemporary issues which affect women's lives (Adkins, L. 2004. “Introduction.” In Feminism After Bourdieu, edited by L. Adkins and B. Skeggs, 110–128. Oxford: Blackwell, 3).     

Higher education for Palestinian Muslim female students in Israel and Jordan: migration and identity formation

The article investigates the migration of Palestinian Muslim women, citizens of Israel, to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem or to Jordanian universities for academic studies, and the influence of this migration on their norms, behavior and identity. Narrative interviews were conducted with Palestinian Muslim women graduates: eight from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem and eight from Jordanian universities. Findings revealed that the women’s migration from their home communities to academic campuses involves issues of affiliation and identity; studies in Jordan constitute temporary cyclic emigration between two safe spaces, while studies in Jerusalem often involve alienation and foreignness. In both cases, higher education is a powerful force shaking up women’s lives. Following graduation, Hebrew University graduates remain in Jerusalem’s environs and migration to Jerusalem may become permanent. Higher education enables these women to engage with and confront identity issues, empowering them to reconsider their value and belief systems and relations with others.     

Transnational academic capitalism in the Arab Gulf: balancing global and local,and public and private,capitals

This article contributes to the emerging theoretical construct of what has been called ‘transnational academic capitalism’, characterised by the blurring of traditional boundaries between public, private, local, regional and international, and between market-driven and critically transformative higher education visions. Here we examine how these issues are reflected in higher education policy in the Arab Gulf, asking: what kinds of capital are being constructed and traded? By and for whom? What is the relationship between higher education competition, governance and the public good? We find contradictory trends, which we see as strategic ambivalence pointing to country-specific readings of similar regional markets and attempts to hedge bets between rival forms of apparent capital. The exploration offers a counterpoint to more widely cited examples, hereby helping to shape new paradigmatic ‘glocalised’ understandings of this field.     

Explaining a reverse gender gap in advanced physics and computer science course-taking: An exploratory case study comparing Hebrew-speaking and Arabic-speaking high schools in Israel

In the past three decades in high-income countries, female students have outperformed male students in most indicators of educational attainment. However, the underrepresentation of girls and women in science courses and careers, especially in physics, computer sciences, and engineering, remains persistent. What is often neglected by the vast existing literature is the role that schools, as social institutions, play in maintaining or eliminating such gender gaps. This explorative case study research compares two high schools in Israel: one Hebrew-speaking state school that serves mostly middleclass students and exhibits a typical gender gap in physics and computer science; the other, an Arabic-speaking state school located in a Bedouin town that serves mostly students from a lower socioeconomic background. In the Arabic-speaking school over 50% of the students in the advanced physics and computer science classes are females. The study aims to explain this seemingly counterintuitive gender pattern with respect to participation in physics and computer science. A comparison of school policies regarding sorting and choice reveals that the two schools employ very different policies that might explain the different patterns of participation. The Hebrew-speaking school prioritizes self-fulfillment and “free-choice,” while in the Arabic-speaking school, staff are much more active in sorting and assigning students to different curricular programs. The qualitative analysis suggests that in the case of the Arabic-speaking school the intersection between traditional and collectivist society and neoliberal pressures in the form of raising achievement benchmarks contributes to the reversal of the gender gap in physics and computer science courses.     

Claiming modernity through clothing: gender and education in Pakistani Muslim and Indian Hindu communities

Through focusing on forms of clothing, this article reveals how educated women from marginalized communities in Pakistan and India made differential claims to being modern. Our analysis of two ethnographic studies shows how the participants mobilized their subjectivities as modern and educated women through a distinction between ‘local modern’ and ‘local traditional’. In this article, our goal is not to define modernity, but instead to illuminate what it meant to be modern in both contexts. We integrate the narratives of young, rural Muslim women in Pakistan with those of young, rural Hindu women in India to disrupt the linear telling of the production of universal and homogenous modernity through education.     

Education,gender and Islam in China: The place of religious education in challenging and sustaining ‘undisputed traditions’ among Chinese Muslim women

The essay investigates the place of religious and secular education in the lives of Chinese Muslim women. Education is treated as a site where state and society are reproduced and/or challenged, where tensions arise over control of minds and bodies, and over interpretations and uses of religion and culture. Specifically, the essay compares contrastive situations of female religious education within a matrix of inter-dependent issues such as the diversity of Muslim contexts in China, state treatment of minorities’ rights to religious practice and to education, organisation and implementation of religious education, and relations between secular education and Islamic education.     

Dealing with difference in the divided educational context: balancing freedom of expression and non-discrimination in Northern Ireland and Israel

It has long been established that an effective citizenship education in a multicultural society must incorporate some exposure to a variety of views on different topics. However, the ability and willingness to deal with difference relating to controversial matters of national identity, narrative and conflict vary. This is not least the case in the ethno-nationally divided and conflict-affected jurisdictions of Northern Ireland and Israel. This article relates qualitative research conducted among students, teachers and policy-makers in these two jurisdictions that explores the area of dealing with difference within citizenship education. Using the starting point of a framework based on international law on education, the article goes on to consider how freedom of expression and non-discrimination are variously interpreted and balanced when exploring controversial issues in the classroom of a divided society.     

The case of Palestinian civil society in Israel: Islam,civil society,and educational activism

This article examines the educational activism of two Arab civil organizations in Israel: the Follow-Up Committee on Arab Education (FUCAE) and the Eqraa Association (Eqraa). On the one hand, it explores the possibilities and limitations of the involvement of the FUCAE in the state’s Arab education system, as a secular organization that is heavily engaged in the contentious identity politics of the Arab minority in Israel. On the other hand, it reflects on the competing yet complementary roles played by Eqraa vis-à-vis the state in the field of education, as a faith-based organization that has been operating its own independent successful initiatives in education. More specifically, this article compares the goals, strategies, activities, and sources of funding of these two organizations, thus providing insights on the role of civil society organizations, either secular or religious, on Palestinian identity formation and political mobilization in Israel. Additionally, it clarifies the meaning and characteristics of Islamic entrepreneurship and activism in education.     

Slippage and/or symbolism: gender,policy and educational governance in Scotland and Sweden

This article provides an overview and analysis of the relationship between gender, educational policy, and governance in Scotland and Sweden and the two countries’ response to European Union and global legislative and policy change. In Scotland, gender is mainly invisible in recent policies on inclusion, achievement beyond academic attainment, and the idealisation of the child. Gender is thus marginalised within a range of factors contributing to social in/equality. In Sweden, in contrast, gender has higher visibility in policy and governance as both an indicator of democracy and a means of preserving social democratic consensus and prosperity. However, recently its privileged position has come under attack. We draw on social capital, gender, and policy theory to analyse the range of influences on gender and educational governance in the two countries including that of the social capital of organised feminism.     

Israel Engagement in Practice: An Empirical Look at the Impact of The Year of Service Emissaries

The current field of Israel engagement has been significantly challenged by young North American Jews’ reported alienation from contemporary Israel. Literature in the last decade has addressed this challenge in depth, offering a wide variety of theoretical analyses and recommendations for program development. The present study is the first to thoroughly focus on one of these programs, the young emissaries (shinshinim) program, a joint initiative between the Jewish Agency for Israel and a growing number of Jewish communities around the world. Data were collected in the Greater Toronto Area, out of which the local Jewish Federation operates the largest shinshinim program worldwide. Levels of emotional, behavioral, and cognitive engagement with Israel were assessed in 47 local institutions’ representatives, 84 host families, and 197 high school students in relation to their interaction with shinshinim. Changes in attitudes toward Israel, Jewish tradition, and peoplehood, following their Year of Service, were also assessed in 36 shinshinim. All data were collected using questionnaires developed especially for the purposes of this study. Results show that the shinshinim program has a significant and positive impact on host families’ level of Israel engagement and that the Year of Service has a significant and positive impact on the shinshinim inclination to adopt Jewish traditions and to affiliate themselves with a Jewish Peoplehood. Results also show that the program is positively associated with Israel engagement among students and Jewish institutions’ representatives. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

Agency in action: young Muslim women and negotiating higher education in Australia

This article draws on an analysis of the narratives of Australian young Muslim women to explore their higher education experiences and aspirations. The article aims to explore the notion of agency employed by Muslim female university students in relation to the ways they discover their own capabilities along their deployment of available financial, cultural and social resources under cultural and structural constrains. The women’s accounts suggest that pursuit of higher education is highly perceived as a key to girls’ success and economic independence in the present precarious neoliberal environment yet concerns over Islamophobia and gender and racial discrimination which may curtail employment opportunities are present. The research findings also suggest that educational outcomes entail complex forms of negotiation, bargaining and resistance, stressing the ways in which class, gender, ethnicity and religion interrelate.     

Busting the myth of gender bias: views from men and women primary-school trainees and teachers

We explore the ideology associated with gender equality that despite primary schools and initial teacher education (ITE) institutions doing all they can to recruit men into primary education, a huge gender imbalance still exists. We frame our study around the notions of gender equality and professional responsibility. Using a multi-case study approach, this inquiry examined views of men and women from 12 English primary schools and one ITE institution regarding the cause and effect of gender bias. Findings show a differentially large gender gap in the sample schools and that there is good practice where schools are successful in attracting and retaining men teachers. Implications of these findings suggest that leaders in primary schools need to take a more active role to help change and shape the perceptions of men teachers in education. We conclude that leaders also need to help close the teacher gender gap in schools and ITE institutions through collaborative dialogue.     

Higher education and feminism in the Arab Gulf

This article explores how higher education is being conceptualized as part of a neo-liberal ‘feminist’ social change project in the post-imperial context of the Arab Gulf. Challenging the tendency to essentialised treatments of gender and women in Muslim countries, it makes visible the diverse experiences and views of a particular group of Gulf purposively sampled women – students, graduates and academics – as it explores how they are situating themselves against available feminist narratives, how they are seeing themselves as citizens and political actors, and how higher education’s spaces and constraints are mediating these processes. A conflicted picture emerges, of mass higher education helping provide women with radical ideas and ambitions, and helping to make public demands and assert self-representation, while their freedoms to act are limited by underlying hegemonic structures that are still predominantly male and against which women variously rationalize their strategic conformity.     

The academic career: a study of subjectivity,gender and movement among women university lecturers

Changes in the higher education system have resulted in increased demands on effectiveness and marketisation. These demands have changed what it means to do academic work. In this study, 19 female academic lecturers have been interviewed in order to get them to reflect upon their opportunities and conditions in career. The aim is to analyse how this specific group manoeuvres; that is their 'becoming subjectivity' in academic career. This means an interest in analysing their locations, positions as well as their material and discursive conditions. The results show how many see teaching as important in career, but also as a trap that restrains them in their chances of research advancement. Several express that a lot of teaching drain the time and energy needed for other opportunities in career. There are also a few who experience teaching as a place where people actually collaborate more than compete and find alternative career strategies. Even so, these women appear caught in their careers, which can relate to gender, and to the experience of ‘incapacity’ to find directions in a more competitive structure.     

Understandings of gender and education in the political and cultural context: the case of Afghan students in an MA (education) programme

Globally, gender differences in education have been an area of policy concern, research, and development partnerships. The international agenda of gender equality has been adopted by national governments even in countries, such as Afghanistan, where predominant views are clearly at variance with this agenda. Attempts to analyse such conditions must be based on examination of gender and education in the broader political and cultural context. Gender issues have been a central theme in an EU-funded Master's programme in Educational Research and Development for Afghan students at Nangarhar University, conducted during 2008–2010. This article analyses the political and cultural context of gender in Afghanistan, which constitutes the framework for the Afghan students' understandings of gender and education. These are examined as expressed in texts produced by the students and in group interviews. On the basis of our analysis, the following tension is clear: the students are aware of the international agenda of gender equality in education, but at the same time they are concerned about problems in the practical application of this agenda in their own society and relate these concerns to their interpretations of principles of Islam and Afghan cultural traditions.     

A Qatari perspective on women in the engineering pipeline: an exploratory study

Under-representation of women in engineering has received a great deal of attention, but remained limited largely to a Western context. Thus, this article aims to unveil the barriers to progress, tracking the performance and the emerging trend of success at the undergraduate level of women in engineering in a different cultural dimension. Secondary research, particularly statistical data of female undergraduate engineering students at Qatar University (QU), is used in this study. Findings show that the booming economic development and access to modern education are the key drivers that change the position of women in Qatari society. A shift away from a masculine-dominated society to a more balance masculine/feminine society was identified as the impetus for better enrolment and achievement of female engineering students in Qatar. Similar to the trend in the USA, recruitment and not retention was the reason behind the under-representation of female undergraduate engineering students at QU.