'Intelligentsia' as an Ethnic Habitus: The inculcation and restructuring of intelligentsia among Russian Jews

This study employs Bourdieu's concept of 'habitus' as an analytical tool to reveal how the notion of 'intelligentsia' is inculcated, transposed and generative during socialisation, and becomes a constitutive force in Russian Jews' personal and collective identity. This analysis is based on the reading of life histories narrated by 43 Russian Jewish university students who have been living in Israel since the 1990s. The findings reveal four distinct socialisation practices employed by the Russian Jewish family in inculcating a notion of belonging to the intelligentsia, and how this notion was restructured in adolescence in Jewish informal frameworks that became widespread during Perestroika. The study corroborates Bourdieu's thesis about the formative force of early socialisation and verifies the transposal quality of habitus--its ability to adjust to major biographical and social-historical changes. The discussion proposes that considering both kinds of change sheds light on the dynamics of habitus in socialisation.     

Implicit dimension identification in user-generated text with LSTM networks

In the process of online storytelling, individual users create and consume highly diverse content that contains a great deal of implicit beliefs and not plainly expressed narrative. It is hard to manually detect these implicit beliefs, intentions and moral foundations of the writers.We study and investigate two different tasks, each of which reflect the difficulty of detecting an implicit user’s knowledge, intent or belief that may be based on writer’s moral foundation: (1) political perspective detection in news articles (2) identification of informational vs. conversational questions in community question answering (CQA) archives. In both tasks we first describe new interesting annotated datasets and make the datasets publicly available. Second, we compare various classification algorithms, and show the differences in their performance on both tasks. Third, in political perspective detection task we utilize a narrative representation language of local press to identify perspective differences between presumably neutral American and British press.     

Employee mistreatment and muted voices in the culturally diverse workplace

This study examines mistreatment through the perspectives of employees with different cultural backgrounds and positions in order to understand the ways in which some voices are muted and others are privileged. Mistreatment is interactional, distributive, procedural, or systemic abuse of employees taking place at both interpersonal and institutional levels on the basis of cultural diversity. Narrative analysis of semi‐structured interviews with employees of a large research and development organization revealed three types of muted narratives used to respond to mistreatment (muted‐but‐engaged, angrily disengaged, and resigned) as well as one type of privileged response. The narratives provided evidence of two processes by which voices became muted: repeated silencing over time and silencing through ambiguity of policies.     

Detecting bias in selection for higher education: three different methods

This study examined selection bias in Israeli university admissions with respect to test language and gender, using three approaches for the detection of such bias: Cleary’s model of differential prediction, boundary conditions for differential prediction and difference between d’s (the Constant Ratio Model). The university admissions process in Israel, like those in many countries, is based on a combination of school-related achievement and a general scholastic aptitude test. The selection process was found to be biased in favour of Arabic speakers and not biased with respect to gender. The three approaches for detecting selection bias were similar in the pattern of the results they produced, but differed, as expected, in the magnitude of the bias they detected. The discussion focuses on the results both with respect to the specific groups studied (first research question) and with respect to the three approaches for detecting selection bias (second research question).     

Converting to belong: immigration,education and nationalisation among young ‘Russian’ immigrant women

The paper examines religious conversion to Judaism among young ‘Russian’ immigrant girls in Israel. Looking into the process of conversion in religious boarding schools for girls only (Ulpana) and in the broader context of the Israeli nation‐state, we examine the strategies the educators contrive in inculcating religiosity among the girls, how they legitimise and facilitate their self‐transformation, and mobilise them to desire a religious subjectivity. At the same time, we study the experiences of the Russian girls in the Ulpana, and the meanings they assign to their conversion as depicted in the personal stories they narrated to us. The paper reveals how the Ulpana operates as a major nationalisation agent that cultivates a path for the girls to belong to the national religious camp, thus assuring their affiliation to Israeli‐Jewish society at large.     

Which Pedagogical Parameters Predict the General Quality of ICT Integration from the Perspective of Elementary School Leaders?

Technological changes in the digital age require schools to integrate innovative technologies in learning and the curriculum. This study analyzes data collected from elementary schools toward the end of the second and the third years of the national program for the gradual integration of ICT in Israeli schools. The study examines how school principals and ICT coordinators assess the systemic changes that have occurred in their schools. The parameters explored were collaboration (intraschool vs. interschool collaboration), digital content (using vs. designing digital content), and e-communication (within the teaching staff vs. between staff and families). An online questionnaire was distributed to the entire district of the Ministry of Education. The analysis was carried out on a total of 358 schools. Regression analysis showed that intraschool collaboration, digital content use and design, pedagogical update of class websites, and e-communication within the teaching staff explained 47.7% of variance in the general quality of ICT integration. It seems that school ICT leaders assess the general quality of ICT integration according to internal factors—in terms of collaboration within their schools and online interactions with colleagues—rather than external factors—collaborative activities between schools or e-communication with students and parents.     

Adolescents from disadvantaged neighborhoods: Personal characteristics as related to volunteer involvement

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the relationships between involvement in volunteer activities of youth from disadvantaged neighborhoods and their life aspirations: the intensity of their remembered positive experiences: and their sense of coherence (SOC). Scales measuring these factors were administered to three groups of adolescents from disadvantaged neighborhoods: a) 57 adolescents who had been active volunteers during the course of one year, b) 37 adolescents who had merely registered to become involved but had not yet begun their activity, and c) 42 adolescents who were not involved in any volunteer activity. A cross-sectional design was selected to compare the three groups. The results showed that adolescents who had been involved in such activities for a period of at least one year expressed a stronger sense of coherence in their lives, a higher desire to commit of themselves to society, and a greater capacity to experience more intense positive experiences, in comparison to the other two groups of their noninvolved peers. The potential significance of volunteer activity for disadvantated adolescents was explored, and suggestions were offered for new directions in social rehabilitation programs.The authors would like to thank Dee B. Ankonina for her editorial assistance.     

In their Own Words: Understanding Student Conceptions of Writing Through their Spontaneous Metaphors in the Science Classroom

This article explores student views on writing as shown by the metaphors they use when asked to reflect on their own writing-to-learn tasks in the science classroom. The study examines the metaphors and metaphoric themes of 97 eighth grade students, discusses how they compare to important theories on writing to learn, and explores how student views on writing are affected by their classroom writing experiences. The study shows (1) that the identification of metaphors and clustering them around recurring themes can help to systematize the experiential meanings of writing with reference to four dimensions: cognitive, social, emotional and meta-cognitive; (2) that student views on writing correspond to various theoretical models, but are not identical to them; (3) that metaphor use is strongly affected by student writing experiences and that writing-to-learn tasks, feedback and reflective writing greatly influence student views on writing; and finally, (4) the study found two multidimensional conceptualizations reflected in the student metaphors, corresponding to the constructivist and transmission views of teaching and learning. in final form: 19 April 2005