Minoritized Middle-Class Parental Choice: Palestinian Middle-Class Parents' Choice of Palestinian-Jewish Bilingual (Arabic-Hebrew) Education

• In Event: 15.060 - MTCC Roundtable Session One
  In Roundtable Session: 15.060-7 - School Choice and Intersectionality: Comparative and International Perspectives From the United States, China, and Israel

Abstract

Parental choice of schools has gained prominence in educational reform and research over the last few decades (Berends et al. 2009). Most of this research is Western-oriented and positivist in its research and methodological orientation. Emerging research is challenging this traditional perspective by looking at South/East locales (Elacqua, Schneider and Buckley, 2006; Joshi, 2014; Wu, 2014; Liu and Apple 2016), the choices of Black middle-class parents in the UK (Vincent et al. 2012; Ball et al. 2013; Rollock et al., 2014), and Black working-class parental choice in the US (Pedroni, 2005). This less traditional research is also directing attention to other types of schools that participate in the educational market, such as magnet schools and specialized programs (e.g. Smrekar and Goldring, 1999) and, more recently, urban public schools (e.g. Cucchiara and Hovart, 2009; James et al., 2010; Posey, 2012; Billingham and Kimelberg 2013; Posey-Maddox, 2014). In line with this important research development, which is shifting the discussion on parental choice to include communities and schools that have tended to be overlooked, this study seeks to shed light on the choice of middle-class minoritized communities, specifically Palestinian middle-class parents who choose Arabic-Hebrew bilingual education for their children.

Building on Bourdieu's work (1984, 1986, 1991) and critical scholars who understand school choice as a socio-cultural process rather than a purely individualist rational one (Gewirtz et al., 1995; Hatcher, 1998; Ball, 2003; Vincent et al., 2012), the paper examines the education choices of this group of parents as a consumption choice mediated by habitus and contextualized by their particular locale. The paper explores how the parents' education consumption behavior embodies middle-class conversion strategies and their efforts to maintain and enhance their class position.

The data for this paper are from a qualitative case-study of a Palestinian-Jewish bilingual (Arabic-Hebrew), multicultural (Muslim, Christian, and Jewish) public K-6 elementary school in an urban setting in southern Israel. In the framework of the study, semi-structured interviews were conducted during the 2017-2018 school year with twelve Palestinian parents from middle and upper-middle class backgrounds, regarding their choice of Arabic-Hebrew bilingual education for their children. Preliminary findings suggest that the parents navigate between strategies to enhance their class position, on the one hand, and to maintain their ethnic and national identity, on the other. As minoritized indigenous parents in a conflict-ridden society, that treats them with hostility, discrimination, and oppression, issues of ethnic, national, and religious identity inject loaded meaning into the use of what Rollock et al. (2014) have termed "strategies for survival" in choosing their children's education. This paper will contribute to the growing body of scholarship on school choice that is not focused on the traditional White middle-class chooser and that seeks to contextualize and understand school choice in non-Western locales.

Author

• Assaf Meshulam, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev