“Welcome to the Club”: Palestinian-Israeli Teachers in Bilingual Integrated and in Hebrew Speaking Schools

Abstract

This chapter contributes to a better understanding of how minority teachers in majority schools experience their work and how their participation in such educational contexts helps shape their sense of ethno-cultural belonging and their sense of self-efficacy. Through comparative work, we gain insights into the context-specific conditions which might help support or undermine minority teachers’ inclusion. To do this we compared the reported experiences of Palestinian Israeli teachers working in two somewhat different educational contexts; the Hebrew speaking schools which serve the regular Israeli Jewish population and the bilingual integrated schools which offer the opportunity for the two populations to study under one roof in a society in which schools are mostly segregated. Both these educational contexts include Palestinian Israeli teachers in their faculty. Our findings point mostly at similarities in the way these teachers experience their work at the schools but also some notable differences have been exposed. Both groups of teachers’ express satisfaction regarding their work at the Hebrew speaking and the bilingual integrated schools. They are satisfied with their work and feel they belong to a very special ‘club’ a metaphor that affords them a strong and positive positioning within the school context.