Book in Focus
Aspects of Social Justice in an Arab Israeli Teachers' College"/>

12th October 2022

Book in Focus
Aspects of Social Justice in an Arab Israeli Teachers' College

Principles, Practices and Politics

Edited by Deborah Court, Randa Khair Abbas and Zaki Kamal


Aspects of Social Justice in an Arab Israeli Teachers’ College: Principles, Practices and Politics shows how social justice, multiculturalism and teacher education are inextricably and powerfully bound, sometimes in unexpected ways.

John Dewey famously wrote that education is not preparation for life; education is life itself. Dewey’s intention in making this statement was that educational activities must be connected to learners’ real lives and day-to-day experiences in order to be meaningful and to become part of a person’s identity. We do not passively accumulate knowledge and attitudes for “someday” until we finally emerge, fully formed, at the end of our formal education. On the contrary, we acquire values, knowledge, behaviors, abilities and propensities through the educational activities and human interactions in which we engage every hour, evaluating, experimenting, interacting and making choices.

We can extrapolate from Dewey’s statement to teacher education. Teacher education is, of course, future-oriented, working to prepare people to be teachers, through the lived experience of, and reflection on, coursework, feedback and guidance, discussion, writing and practice teaching. Teacher education is also about the here and now. In real time, successful teacher education must connect to future teachers’ interests, needs and real-world experience. It must touch them viscerally. Through this process, we create ourselves as educators: we construct our identities and form our pedagogical beliefs. This process is emotional and personal, as well as intellectual. In teacher education, what happens in every class, during every interaction, is a small and vital building block of teacher identity formation, making us into the teachers we become.

We can also apply Dewey’s statement to the idea of social justice. Equity, equality and fairness are goals for the future, for which we must build and plan, but they are also the stuff of real life, in the real world, right now, in the ways we act, relate and consume, and in the decisions we make. In fact, if learning about social justice and learning to teach for social justice are not connected to real life, if they do not become part of us and spring from us, then lessons learned, values chosen and behaviors acquired will be largely academic and will not last.

There are social justice issues in any society, whether or not that society is classically “multicultural”. Every society has social strata, poverty and inequalities of resource distribution. We all live these issues, though when we are part of a privileged economic or cultural group, our awareness is often dimmed. A central role of teacher education should be to shed light on, and understand, social justice issues in the here and now, and to explore possible ways to reduce economic gaps and eliminate ethnic, racial, religious, economic and gender discrimination through education. The contributors to this book have taken up this challenge. This is not a book about how to teach future teachers about social justice. It does not describe academic social justice programs or curricula. Rather, this collection shines a light on the lived experience of teacher educators who strive to strengthen equity and fairness for their own students and for themselves and their own communities.

All the contributors to this volume work in teacher education at the Arab Academic College in the Northern Israeli city of Haifa. The context, atmosphere, culture and political and religious reality are multicultural. We are Arabic-speaking Christian, Muslim, Bedouin and Druze students, faculty, and administrators, as well as Hebrew-speaking Jewish faculty. English is the academic language that everyone must learn. Three languages, several religions (all religious holidays are marked and celebrated), sometimes differing political views in a complex country contribute towards a culture of learning that is both troubled and greatly enriched by our multicultural community. It is not always harmonious, fair or easy, but tension and difficulty teach us to be better. Education and teacher education are the natural home of social justice learning.

Social justice issues are inherent to a multicultural community, as different groups exercise varying kinds of power and influence, and bring different kinds of cultural capital to their shared communal life. As we envisaged and then wrote this book, viewing our educational work through a social justice lens sharpened our awareness of the work we do, as the chapters in this volume show.

The first section of the book offers theoretical and conceptual insights into multiculturalism, social justice and education, including a conceptual synthesis of the different, but interrelated, concepts of social justice, multiculturalism and education; analysis of the relationship between social justice and the academic integration of minority students into higher education; and the importance of civics education for children in order to develop their critical thinking abilities, sense of fairness and justice and understanding of ways to promote these values in a democracy. Closing out the first section is an analysis of how modern detective fiction both embodies and advances social issues through the depiction of minority group detectives and their struggles, determination and wit.

In the second section, college faculty members present studies of their own work as viewed through a social justice lens. These studies include stories of the struggles of Arab women, many of whom are the first in their families to attend higher education. These are women coping with academics, with English, with overloaded days and, often, unsupportive families. The photovoice project described here empowers these women to express themselves through photographs.

One of the central academic struggles is learning English. We learn in another study about the successes of the peer mentoring program in the English Department.

We may tend to think of social justice issues in the context of the social sciences exclusively, but the final four chapters of this book shine a social justice light on the sciences.

One chapter explores the concept of environmental justice, investigating how issues like environmental pollution are related to the lives of particular under-privileged groups, and whether and how science teachers understand and teach about this area.

Another study reveals the lack of opportunity for Bedouin students in the Negev to study advanced physics, the reasons for this situation, the importance of learning advanced science for academic and professional advancement and some possible solutions to this social injustice.

A further chapter demonstrates the importance of lecturers’ pedagogical beliefs in providing equitable mathematics education, separating knowledge and beliefs, and finding lecturer beliefs to be the strongest factor in student success. When the lecturer believes that all students can learn mathematics and acts accordingly, this advances equity and fairness.

The closing study portrays the challenges faced by Arabic-speaking computer science (CS) students who must, together with learning a complex and rapidly changing content field, deal with terminology, references and texts that are not in their native language, but in their second or third language. The chapter describes the multi-faceted work of the CS faculty in helping learners through this, thus advancing social justice in the CS classroom.

This is the ongoing work of the Arab Academic College, whose academic faculty have contributed to this book. These quiet social justice warriors prepare teachers who possess not only subject matter knowledge and knowledge of how children learn, but also knowledge, skills and attitudes that will enable their future students to discover and realise their potential, thus advancing the promotion of social justice and the multicultural project.

Writing this book has sharpened our faculty’s awareness and determination to live, teach, develop and promote social justice at our college, and, by extension, in the wider community. Our teacher graduates take to their classrooms the knowledge, values, behaviors and strategies they learn during teacher education. In addition, while the work presented in this book is all based in the Arab Academic College in Haifa, which sends teachers out into Arabic-speaking schools in Israel, we believe that the lessons learned here, as well as the strategies and insights described, are applicable to advancing social justice through teacher education in other multicultural settings. We hope this volume makes a small contribution toward that great goal.


Deborah Court is Professor of Education at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and academic advisor at the Arab Academic College in Israel. She has published more than 60 journal articles, and her recent books include Insider-Outsider Research in Qualitative Inquiry (2022) and The Israeli Druze Community in Transition: Between Tradition and Modernity (2021), both with Randa Khair Abbas.

Randa Khair Abbas is Professor of Education, and President and Academic Head of the Arab Academic College in Haifa, Israel. She was the first Druze woman to earn a PhD from Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and her research interests include the culture of the Israeli Druze community in changing times. Her recent publications include Insider-Outsider Research in Qualitative Inquiry (2022) and The Israeli Druze Community in Transition: Between Tradition and Modernity (2021), both with Deborah Court.

Zaki Kamal is a criminal lawyer from the Druze sector in Israel. He has been associated with the Arab Academic College in Israel for many years, spearheading program development and working to promote women into leadership roles. He is well-known in the Arabic-speaking world as a tireless promoter of dialogue, multiculturalism and peaceful co-existence.


Aspects of Social Justice in an Arab Israeli Teachers' College: Principles, Practices and Politics is available now in Hardback at a 25% discount. Enter code PROMO25 at checkout to redeem.

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