Teachers' ‘Contact’ at the Integrated Bilingual Schools in Israel

Abstract

This article is about teachers working at the bilingual integrated schools in Israel. The study allows us to problematise and critically approach cross-cultural encounters on the basis of contact theory, which posits understandings regarding social interaction across cultural-political boundaries. It exposes potential differences between the outcomes of educational-initiated contact (as the ones initiated for students in the schools) and contact as this occurs in more natural/real settings, such as the workplace (in our case, the school setting as the workplace of the teachers). In the ‘real’ life of the integrated schools, teachers are learning something about the need to accommodate ideological issues to achieve some practical gains. They seem to grasp in some way that ideology sets the human condition upside down, as in a camera obscura. It is as if real-life situations and their practices put the real as a limit to the ideological and set the school in a journey whose end we do not know and which may surprise us. The arguments presented are an attempt to move towards a better understanding of the complexities of the construction and crossing of social borders as well as the practices which might be open to transaction/ negotiation in social encounters and those which might not.