Identities of Female Arab Undergraduates and Their Integration in Mathematics Courses in an Israeli University

• In Event: Venturing the Terrains of Mathematical Identities: Theoretical Perspectives on Participation and Inclusion in Mathematics Education

Abstract

Objectives
The Arab Minority in Israel is under-researched and not much is known about the challenges and processes students from this minority undergo in their pursue for higher education, particularly in mathematically rich discipline. Our goal was to explore the process that female students' identity undergoes, both in relation to their academic and mathematical learning, and in relation to their sense of ethnic and cultural belonging.

Theoretical framework
We employ a socio-cultural lens on learners' identity, using the concept of current and designated identities (Author 2; Sfard & Prusak, 2005). These refer to stories about a person in the present, and stories she tells about herself in the future. Identities of success or failure are often built not only by stories authored in 1st Person (1st P) but also by 3rd person (3rd P) stories.

The Arab minority in Israel has multiple challenges, and for female students, these are coupled by difficulties related to changing gender roles in this relatively traditional society. We are building on and extending previous work (Arar & Haj–Yahia, 2016; Roer-Strier & Haj-Yahia, 1998; Schiff, 2002), which has begun to unearth these challenges, but has not yet looked at students in the mathematical/technological disciplines.

Methods and Data sources
Participants were 13 female Israeli Arab students. They were interviewed, orally and in writing, during the beginning, middle, and end of their first semester. Data was analyzed using a grounded theory approach, coupled by discourse analysis in which narratives related to current and designated identities were highlighted and put into tables for comparison.

Results
We report on Rima's and Lana's cases that demonstrate remarkably different trajectories. Rima started out as having relatively low expectations of herself. She reported being the first in the family to ever attend the university and felt pressure from her family to succeed. She was not familiar with people of other ethnicity—outside her own—before having arrived at the university. She did not expect to succeed academically and was mostly worried about the consequences of looming failure. Theoretically speaking, Rima had a current as well as a designated identity of a peripheral participant.

Lana, on the other hand, began the semester with a 1st P identity of a highly successful student. She also reported her 3rd P identity, as told by her family, to be of a very strong student who "could achieve anything she wanted." She did not expect to have difficulties with the Hebrew language, and reported being familiar with cultures other than her own. Yet as the half-term exam approached, a radical change could be seen in the two students' current identities. While Rima succeeded fairly well in her Calculus and Algebra courses, Lana barely passed the mid-terms and failed completely on her final calculus exam.

Scholarly Significance
We analyze possible explanations for these different trajectories in terms of discrepancies between current and designated identities. We pay particular attention to the interaction between central/peripheral designated identities and cultural and linguistic barriers, which may have remained invisible to the two students.

Authors

• Soryna Sabbah

• Einat Heyd-Metzuyanim, Technion Israel Institute of Technology