The Palestinian minority in Israel: when common core curriculum in education meets conflicting national narratives

This paper starts with a brief survey of how the Israeli education system has handled the issue of the existence of an Arab community in Israel’s collective identity, and how this was affected by reforms that were initiated in the education system throughout the years. The second part of the paper examines various possibilities regarding how the inclusion of the Arab collective identity can best be accommodated in the education system and its curricula.     

The White Man's Burden: Ersatz Customary Law and internal pacification in South Africa1

Abstract In accounting for the recent popularity of ‘indigenous law’ studies in South Africa, this paper traces out the connections between establishment anthropology, the legal basis of the South African state and the application of native law. It details the structure, philosophical origins and scholarly justification for its practice and argues that in the exercise of Apartheid ‘customary law’ can best be seen as an instrument in the practice of what Giddens terms ‘internal pacification’.     

The implications of ‘naming’ on Roma and Sinti right to education and social inclusion: an ethnography of education among a Sinti family network

Acknowledging the European political commitment to Roma education and the research in this field, my article deals with the experience of education of a Sinti ‘minority’ (The terms ‘minority’ and ‘majority’ will be used in this article, according to the meaning that is given to them within Anthropology and Education studies (cf.). The inverted commas are used to note that they are categories, used with the aim of a clearer explanation for the present text but not necessarily showing the complexity of the social and cultural contexts observed) in northern Italy. The study presents an interpretation of the observations collected during 21 months of ethnographic research among a Sinti family network and in a multicultural middle school, attended by their teenage children in Trent. The ethnographic interpretations point out how the languages and communication codes used within schools partly reproduce the asymmetric power relationships that exist between Roma and Sinti ‘ethnic minorities’ and the Italian so-called majority society. The process of ‘naming’ the ‘other’ plays a crucial role in this analysis, as it shows how meanings are imposed and handled in the relationship between institutions, ‘groups’ and individuals. Consequently, this process highlights the important role of anthropologists in pointing out the ‘emic’ and ‘etic’ (The concepts of ‘emic’ and ‘etic’ were coined in 1954 by the linguist Kenneth Pike and then used by anthropologists. ‘Emic’ refers to the ‘insiders’ points of view on their cultures, and ‘etic’ refers to the ‘outsiders’ accounts on cultures that are not their own) dimensions of every culture. Furthermore, the study’s methodology testifies to the author’s choice of pursuing an ‘engaged anthropology’. Finally, the relevance of the concept of propriospect will be stressed as a means to interpret educational and cultural processes in which the subjects actively take part, with particular attention to young Sinti and their peer groups.     

Work-based learning in social work education: the challenges and opportunities for the identities of work-based learners on university-based programs

This article explores the experiences of work-based learners undertaking social work degrees in the UK. The article is based on research of work-based learners on undergraduate social work degrees based in two universities, a local face-to-face university and a national distance learning university. Based on narrative inquiry methods for data collection, the article presents two case studies from the wider study which provide narratives of ‘becoming’ and ‘being’ a student. Drawing on identity theory, the article analyses how identity is an important concept in understanding the challenges and opportunities for this group of students on their journeys into and through higher education. The paper concludes by considering the implications for current provision of social work education.     

Geometries of ‘global’ evangelicalism

In this article, I explore the power dynamics at play in religious place‐making. I critically discuss the uneven co‐configurations of imaginaries of the ‘local’ and ‘global’ within global evangelicalism. Specifically, I analyse the recent recording of a live album by the famous charismatic Australian band Hillsong United (of Hillsong Church) at various locations in Israel‐Palestine, which was followed by a concert tour in Israel. Palestinian evangelical Christians were critical of this endeavour, for they felt that it marginalized and excluded them from their global evangelical faith family. The frictions between the Palestinian evangelical community and Hillsong United illustrate how dominant evangelical actors create an imagination of the ‘local’, which enters the imaginary of global evangelicalism (and bears material consequences). In the article, I thus argue that privileged financial and cultural resources and travel regimes lead to specific notions of geometries of power in global evangelicalism.     

Arab school principals in Israel – between conformity and moral courage

ABSTRACT

The Arab-Israeli education system is a separate but not autonomous system serving Israel’s inhabitants whose first language is Arabic. These include the Muslim and Bedouin majority communities and smaller Christian, Druze and others, whose children attend schools in which the curriculum is determined by a Zionist perspective, taught in Arabic. Thus, in the context of a system established according to the Israeli cultural/national narrative, this study brings to light the voice of ten principals who, through open, in-depth interviews – ‘small stories’ – reveal their prospective and management of issues-in-conflict to formulate and present their professional identity according to their own sense of self. It presents the conflicts their position confronts vis-à-vis both the formal education authorities and the unique situation their society and culture pose in executing their educational/administrative and moral responsibilities. The findings reveal situations ranging from active acceptance of the institutional dictates of a conformist nature, through passive acceptance, (‘conformity’) to attempts at promoting autonomous activities within the defined limitations (‘moral courage’).     

What it means to be a ‘model minority’: voices of ethnic Koreans in Northeast China

Ethnic Koreans in China have been widely recognized as a ‘model minority’ primarily for academic success. Using the data collected as part of a larger ethnographic research on Korean elementary school students, this paper examines how 27 Korean families construct meaning out of the model minority stereotype in the context of their lived experience in Northeast China. Research results indicate that Koreans constructed the multi-faceted nature of ‘model minority’ as a matter of cultural superiority and dual economic marginalization in the Chinese and South Korean mainstream societies, and valued education as a practical means to achieve economic upward mobility into the Chinese mainstream. This paper argues that the model minority stereotype with the cultural explanations for Korean success may reinforce the cultural deficiency argument about the academic failure of ‘backward’ minorities, silence the disadvantages suffered by Koreans in China's reform period and lead to no active intervention to remedy them.     

Race-Making/Race-Mixing: St. Helena and the South Atlantic World

Abstract

This paper focuses on the South Atlantic Oceanic World, and the pivotal place of the Island of St. Helena within that world, as both a context and a conceptual tool for thinking about race-making and race-mixing in South Africa. Drawing on various historical ‘snapshots’ from documentary and archival sources on St. Helena, as well as from exploratory fieldwork in South Africa, St. Helena, an Atlantic World of flux and fluidity, is invoked as a contrast to an Apartheid world that insists upon fixity. These contrasting worlds are the context for thinking about the racial identifications made by St. Helenian immigrants, and their descendants in South Africa. Following Robert Young the paper is interested in ‘counter-active’ constructions of race, which means that the context of race-mixing that this paper invokes is simultaneously a context for race-making.     

What do we know the experiences and outcomes of anti-racist social work education? An empirical case study evidencing contested engagement and transformative learning

ABSTRACT

In social work education there have been very few attempts to empirically capture and measure how professional training programmes prepare students to work with ‘race’ equality and cultural diversity issues. This paper interrogates the experiences and outcomes of anti-racist social work education and evaluates the pedagogic relevance and practice utility of teaching social work students about ‘race’, racism and anti-racism. The data presented in this paper suggests that it is possible to discover the situated experiences of learning about anti-racism and measure how this teaching can affect and lead to knowledge, skills and attitudinal change. The triangulated mixed methods evidence presented in this paper combines nomothetic and idiographic approaches with quantitative data for a matched pair sample of 36 social work students and uses non-parametric statistical tests to measure at two time intervals (before and after teaching); knowledge, skills and attitudinal change. The paper explores how anti-racist social work education enables students to move from ‘magical consciousness’, where racism and racial oppression is invisible and thereby left unchallenged and maintained, to more critical and reflexive level of awareness where it is named, challenged and no longer shrouded in a culture of professional denial and silencing.     

Disabled students’ narratives about their schooling experiences

An ongoing interest in disabled learners’ voices has been reflected in a number of studies that explore students’ experiences of schooling, as part of the quest to understand how inclusive education can be achieved. These studies, however, have been conducted mainly in industrially developed countries, while very few studies exist from industrially developing countries such as Greece in which disabled people’s voices are under-represented not only in political processes but in research as well. The aim of this study was to investigate disabled students’ educational experience, their social interactions with peers and teachers, the choice of school and the support they received for responding to curricular demands and complexities. The results of the study confirmed that disabled students can provide invaluable information on matters involving their education, and showed how personal experiences of disability are influenced by the socio-cultural experiences lived in different social arenas, such as that of education.     

Gender inequalities: the integrated approach to the gender dimension in Europe

Despite the increase in, and focus on, gender equality in European debate – along with a substantial amount of policy initiatives and legal regulations – gender equality in the workplace and in careers is still some way off. In order to see the magnitude of the gap between women and men in European countries we have considered some significant domains such as the economy (employment structure and occupational segregation), education (educational attainment) and politics (political empowerment). The article aims to present data demonstrating that the employment structure in the EU, even in those countries where women have achieved high employment rates, still suffers from segregation, both ‘horizontally’ and ‘vertically’; and to single out some ‘weak signals’ but with a strong potential for social change and some indicators for social alternatives for the future.     

JOHANNESBURG INTERIORS

Almost two decades into the post-apartheid era, inner-city Johannesburg – like much of South Africa – remains structured by deeply ingrained forms of physical and imaginative segregation. Building on architect Sarah Calburn's suggestion that one way to address these divisions would be to make the city's external or outside spaces feel more like domestic interiors as well as on the calls of writer Njabulo Ndebele for new forms of public intimacy, this article explores three distinct artistic projects that each attempt to push beyond segregation by opening up private homes for public perusal and/or making public space more intimate and home-like: Kgebetli Moele's novel Room 207, Christoph Gurk's performance art collection X Homes Johannesburg and Terry Kurgan's public photography/digital media experiment Hotel Yeoville. Working with concepts of home, hotels and hospitality, it theorizes the modes of ‘intimate exposure’ these projects enact as forms of hospitality or Derridean ‘hos(ti)pitality’ potentially capable of welcoming diverse groups into a shared public space while at the same time foregrounding inequalities in need of redress. While the role of artistic projects in shaping culture should not be overemphasized, the article also underscores how such works have emerged in contemporary South Africa as vibrant ways of thinking in public and thinking the public.     

Music Education and minority groups cultural and musical identities in the ‘newer’ South Africa: white Afrikaners and Indians

Music Education, as well as cultural and musical identities are all being renegotiated, post‐Apartheid, within the so‐called ‘newer’ rather than the commonly known ‘new’ South Africa. The developing situation with certain minority groups is particularly interesting. Education in general has undergone much change since the first democratic elections in 1994: music education specifically has been affected by such change in terms of content, delivery and assessment. Within the South African context, cultural and musical identities are often intertwined with language, racial and even tribal identities, and discussing one implies the others. We are particularly interested here in the role of formal Music Education in relation to white Afrikaners and Indians as they renegotiate their cultural development, including musical aspects.     

Opening our eyes,changing our practices: learning through the transnational lifeworlds of teachers

This article examines the inclusion of a culturally relevant curricular practice of social identity papers within teacher education in the USA that incorporates the transnational lifeworlds of teachers. Using tenets of feminist interdisciplinary frameworks, we highlight how this curricular practice allows teachers and teacher candidates in urban and rural contexts to examine transnational lifeworlds and their influence on culturally relevant practices in relation to notions of oppression and privilege. We focus on linguistic border crossings and both/and perspectives of teacher’s social identities. More research is needed to better understand the construction of teacher’s social identities within and across transnational lifeworlds and the ways it impacts their practices and student’s academic and social achievement.     

Metabolism and colonization. Modes of production and the physical exchange between societies and nature

Written by a sociologist and a biologist, this paper attempts an interdisciplinary approach to describing the basic exchange relations between human societies and their natural environments. One type of exchange relation is termed ‘metabolism’ and related to the biological metabolism member organisms of societies require. A historical overview (part 1) demonstrates this exchange relation in terms of mass throughput per inhabitant to have grown in the course of human cultural evolution—without necessarily increasing the quality of life of those concerned—to the twentyfold it now amounts to in industrial societies (as is demonstrated empirically for Austria in part 3). A strategy of ‘contraction of physical metabolism’ (reduction of physical growth irrespective of ‘economic’ growth) of industrial societies is proposed as a strategic means of survival and possible ways to this goal are discussed quantitatively. The other exchange relation termed ‘colonization’ refers to treatments of natural environments that purposively change some components to render better exploitability (for the purpose of social metabolism), while still relying upon their basic self‐regenerating qualities. It is sketched how colonization strategies developed historically, and it is demonstrated empirically that industrial societies now use about 50% of the available plant biomass (the energetic basis of all animal life) upon their territories for human purposes (part 4). Part 5 classifies different ‘paradigms’ for judging the ‘harmfulness’ of social interventions into the environment and outlines the logic of an information system that would enable society to generate an awareness of its own interventions into nature. On the whole the paper presents a theoretical as well as an empirical attempt to view societies as physical systems (among other physical systems on this planet) and confront sociology with the paradigmatic task to analyze the social regulation of these physical processes.     

The Prehistory of MOOCs: Inclusive and Exclusive Access in the Cyclical Evolution of Higher Education

Abstract

In providing free access to educational resources from some of the most prestigious universities in the world, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been hailed as both a revolution and threat for the ‘traditionally elite’ higher education system. Stepping away from the label of ‘traditionally elite’, this article argues that universities actually have relatively open origins and that the democratisation of higher education, as espoused by the big MOOC providers, is not entirely new. Instead, this retrospective analysis of the development of universities indicates a cyclical model of change, one in which waves of inclusivity alternate with bouts of exclusivity. In highlighting this issue, and parallel ideas about university as a ‘place’, this historical overview provides a useful backdrop to contemporary debates about MOOCs. It shows how MOOCs, as they currently appear, are neither revolutionising nor destroying higher education, they are simply part of its cyclical evolution.     

Occupational Sex Segregation and Part‐time Work in Modern Britain

It is often argued that women's full‐time work is becoming less gender segregated, while their part‐time work becomes more so. This article looks cross‐sectionally and longitudinally at the relationship between occupational sex segregation and part‐time work. An innovative application of segregation curves and the Gini index measures segregation between women full‐timers and men and between women part‐timers and men. Both fell between 1971 and 1991, as did overall occupational sex segregation. These results were used to contextualize a longitudinal analysis showing how shifts between full‐time and part‐time hours affected women's experiences of occupational sex segregation and vertical mobility. Human capital explanations see full‐time and part‐time workers as distinct groups whose occupational choices reflect anticipated family roles. The plausibility of this emphasis on long‐term strategic planning is challenged by substantial and characteristic patterns of occupational mobility when women switch between full‐time and part‐time hours. The segmented nature of part‐time work meant that women who switched to part‐time hours, usually over child rearing, were often thrown off their occupational path into low‐skilled, feminized work. There was some ‘occupational recovery’ when they resumed full‐time work.     

Between ‘homeland’ and ‘diaspora’: multicultural education in Israel and South Korea

The aim of this qualitative case study was to explore multicultural education for ‘newcomers’ in Israel and in South Korea. Despite their differences, the two countries face the same inflow of two types of newcomers – one group that is expected to fully integrate, and the other of newcomers considered temporary. The educational challenge that results is recognition of the cultural groups, and providing equal educational opportunities, for both. Four schools were compared, two in each country, measuring multicultural education according to Bank’s five dimensions. Findings show that the same dimensions could be identified in all schools. The differences were in the school’s interpretation of the cultural identity of the students, congruent with their legal status, and degree of acceptability by the host country. The groups that were expected to fully integrate into the host country (perceived as a ‘homeland’) were given a more assimilatory education, as manifested in the Content Integration dimension; whereas the groups that were considered foreign were given a more multicultural education, with the schools making more references to their national culture, thus enhancing an identity of a ‘diaspora.’