Cultural Factors Influencing Israeli Arab Novice Teachers' Learning Strategies During Induction

• In Event: Novice Teachers’ Experiences in High-Needs International Contexts

Abstract

Novices learn within communities of practice while sharing experiences with veteran teachers (Birkeland & Feiman-Nemser, 2012). Although collaboration is an effective condition for workplace learning (Jurasite & Harbison, 2010), teacher learning depends on the school leadership, organizational structures and culture (Avalos, 2011). Additionally, more culturally grounded variables might clash with teachers’ organizational commitment at the workplace, as found in the Arab community in Israel (Cohen & Abedallah, 2013).
The Israeli Arab community is an ethnic minority (Abu-Saad, 2003) in high needs (OECD, 2016), characterized by collectiveness, patriarchy and conservatism (Barakat, 1993). While this community is affected by processes of modernity (Sherman, Shapira, Arar, & Azaiza, 2010), preservice teachers who are trained in a westernized, democratic teacher education system still face difficulties to implement western educational approaches in Arab schools (Eilam, 2002). This gap between the culture of teacher training and the school culture could be problematic for Arab novices’ learning during their socialization into the school culture at the early stages of teaching (Zeichner, 2012). Therefore, this study focuses on how cultural factors influence the learning strategies used by Arab novices in Israel, during the first year of teaching.
This study took place in the context of induction in Israeli Arab schools, as part of a wider national research funded by the Israeli Science Foundation (ISF). Participants included 22 Arab novices during their first year of teaching in Elementary, Junior and High schools.
In this presentation, we focus on the analysis of qualitative data of 22 in-depth semi-structured interviews (Kvale, 1996). The interviews focus on novices’ learning, specifically the involved processes, strategies and agents. The analysis integrated meaning categorization (Kvale, 1996) and thematic analysis (Creswell, 2003). During this process, a qualitative computer based analysis software (ATLAS) was used for organizing, coding and searching for texts associated with specific codes (Creswell, 2014).
The findings reveal three predominant cultural factors informing novices' learning strategies: First, participants feel that the collegial space at school is unsafe and judgmental and fear of being misunderstood and rejected by colleagues when expressing opinions, disagreement, and difficulties. Therefore, they avoid sharing difficulties and rely mainly on solitary learning strategies, often turning for advice to family members or friends teaching in other institutions.
Second, novices perceive their superiors as authoritative and avoid disobeying their requests. Consequently, they take up multiple incompatible assignments that limit their availability for learning to teach and bring them to adopt survival strategies.
Finally, novices express their mistrust of traditional practices such as frontal teaching and hierarchical relationships with pupils. Participants criticize those practices and describe their colleagues as unreliable learning resources. Therefore, they avoid accessing veteran colleagues and turn to independent trial and error learning strategy.
Our findings provide new insights on novice teachers learning in high needs traditional communities and reveal the influence of cultural factors at the workplace on novice learning strategies. The study calls for designing culturally-sensitive induction frameworks to support schools in establishing collaborative learning environments which enhance constructive novice learning strategies especially in high needs communities.

Authors

• Hiam Nasseraldeen, University of Haifa

• Ayelet Becher, University of Haifa