Policy Futures in Education Volume 10 Number 5 2012 www.wwwords.co.uk/PFIE

552 http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/pfie.2012.10.5.552

Teachers’ ‘Contact’ at the Integrated Bilingual Schools in Israel[1]

ZVI BEKERMAN School of Education and the Melton Center, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 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.

For the last decade and more, I have been researching the integrated (Palestinian-Jewish) bilingual (Arabic-Hebrew) schools in Israel. Because of the conflictual and violent realities of Israel, any such educational initiative can be easily romanticised, and yet my research has taught me a lot about the limitations of integration in education and the assumptions made regarding contact and its potential to help overcome intolerance and lead towards alterity. In this article I want to discuss the one population - that of teachers - which seems to be truly influenced by the integrated bilingual setting, and consider potential reasons for this rather successful outcome. Clearly, nothing in the social sciences should be generalised, especially not when produced from within anthropological perspectives (the science of the universal veto); however, the findings do offer some optimism and might help envision practical directions in all that regards contact situations. Space limitations allow me to include here only limited excerpts from the data upon which to build my arguments. For full details, see Bekerman, 2003a,b, 2004, 2005a,b, 2009a,b; Bekerman & Shhadi, 2003; Bekerman & Horenczyk, 2004. Other researchers who have also written about these schools include Feueruerger (1998, 2001), Gavison (2000), Glazier (2003, 2004), and Bar-Shalom (2006).

On Integrated Bilingual Schools in Israel

Five bilingual schools are functioning in Israel at present. The Neveh Shalom elementary school opened its doors in 1984, having as its aim to foster egalitarian Palestinian-Jewish cooperation in education, primarily through the development of bilingual and multicultural curriculum. In 1998 two new schools guided by similar principles were initiated by the ‘Hand-in-Hand Center’, one in

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Jerusalem and the other in the Upper Galilee. A third school was opened in 2004 in Kfar Karah, the first to be established in a Palestinian village, and in this sense it truly revolutionised fundamental perspectives in Israeli society, which might have been able to accept integrated schools in Jewish majority settlements, but had difficulties in considering sending Jewish children to a segregated Palestinian area. The most recent school was started in Beer-Sheba in the 2007-8 academic year. Overall, today the schools serve a population of over 800 students.

The schools are recognized as non-religious schools supported (in different measures) by the Israeli Ministry of Education. Their faculty is composed of teachers from the two main groups involved in the conflict, Jews and Palestinians (all citizens of Israel), who often co-teach the same classroom. For the most part the standard curriculum of the state non-religious school system is used at the schools, the main difference being that both Hebrew and Arabic are used as languages of instruction. These educational initiatives have to confront what Spolsky and Shohamy (1999) have characterised as being a Type 1 monolingual society - one in which a sole language (Hebrew) is recognised as associated with the national identity, while other languages (i.e. Arabic), though officially recognized as second languages for education and public use (Koplewitz, 1992; Spolsky, 1994), have been marginalized. Moreover, these schools face problems derived from the fact that Israel has had no official multicultural educational policies until today. The Jewish curriculum focuses on national Jewish content and Jewish nation-building, and the Palestinian curriculum is sanitised of any national Palestinian content (Rouhana, 1997). While Jewish students are called to engage in the collective Jewish national enterprise, Palestinian students are called on to accept the definition of Israel as a Jewish Democratic state (Al-Haj, 2005).

The Teachers

The teachers at the schools are mostly women (over 90%), an unsurprising fact given the position of women in western society and the process of feminisation of education which has developed since the enactment of compulsory attendance laws that have generated economic constraints on national educational systems (Richardson & Hatcher, 1983; for potential benefits of the same process, see Trouve-Finding, 2005). All hold at least a BA degree and/or a BEd and a teaching licence.

Like many others in the middle class, women (and men too, though less so) have been raised to believe their work is a calling (Weber, 1976 [1904-1905]; Dawson, 2005), or that it is what they merit; they also adopt the view of the employers and many times, like Fanon’s damned (Fanon, 1965), identify with their goals. Teachers speak, like many other workers, the language of ‘us’, reflecting their identification with the hegemony which in turn exploits them; one of the distinctions of a profession is that it means to its followers service and enthusiasm rather than income (Whitehead, 2005); thus, they are included as a profession while being excluded from the struggle to be properly paid.

Being a teacher is still considered a ‘good job’ (for a woman); it allows women free time (to spend at home working with the children in their second full-time position, of mothering) when children are out of school (Sabbe & Aelterman, 2007).

Working at an integrated Palestinian-Jewish school adds something exotic and avant-garde. It even adds a bit more to the salary and throws in some perks – a trip to Italy, Germany or any other country fervently supporting peace educational work. Working at an integrated school also adds some worries, especially because while working there you are expected to identify with the cause which might affiliate you to a leftist political stand you might not necessarily hold.

What exactly identifying or supporting the cause means is not easy to define. For a Palestinian teacher it might mean recognising the state of Israel as a legitimate Jewish and democratic state (as if Jewish and democratic could be anything other than an oxymoron), expressing the need for reconciliatory work, holding a relatively open perspective on education, being willing to teach with a co-teacher from the other ‘faith’, and subsequently being able to sustain proper/friendly professional relations. The ideological expectations, even if they are not easy to accept, are the traditional expectations from any Palestinian living in Israel (i.e. be faithful to a country which does not necessarily recognise you as a legitimate citizen (Dahan & Levy, 2000), even when you get little

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in return. For Jewish teachers, identifying means pretty much the same, but it is just easier because Jews are recognised, for the most part, as legitimate citizens in the Jewish democratic state.

The above should not be understood as an accusation against the teachers. I do understand that people in need of work might find themselves in difficult situations having to accept behaviors/perspectives that in better circumstances they would reject. But even then, this is not the situation at the bilingual schools which have created a sphere of equality unseen in the traditional Jewish institutions inhabiting the Israeli Jewish and the so-called Democratic state. These teachers de jure and de facto work in an environment which approximates a fairness unseen in the Israeli scene.

It is about this structural organisation in these schools, which runs counter to the ‘nature’ of Israel’s society and its endemic asymmetry, that I want to talk in the following. I will be speaking about the schools’ potential benefits even when considering that the schools are not perfect in the critical eyes of ideologists and/or academics.

On Contact

A major psycho-social theory that addresses attempts to improve intergroup relations through cross-cultural encounters is the ‘contact hypothesis’. Allport, the leading figure in the contact hypothesis tradition (Allport, 1954), supported social change through extensive integration towards the achievement of social stability and harmony. Allport’s influential initial articulation has through the years evolved into a complex taxonomy of conditions for ‘good contact’ to be possible. The main prescriptions recommended in the contact literature include the following: contact should be regular and frequent; it should involve a balanced ratio of in-group to out-group members while allowing for a genuine ‘acquaintance potential’; it should occur between individuals who share equality of status; and while being institutionally sanctioned, it should be organised around cooperation toward the achievement of superordinate goals.

Many studies have been conducted to investigate and validate the predictive ability of the contact hypothesis. Most of this research compares the attitudes of participants before and after (experimental-artificial) intergroup contact has been initiated in an attempt to determine whether contact that meets the required conditions is indeed effective in improving intergroup relations (Cook, 1984; Pettigrew, 1998). Such studies have produced mixed results. Some support the predictions of the contact hypothesis, and others refute them (Mackie & Smith, 1998). In recent years, this literature has been extended well beyond the early focus on ethnicity and race to encompass many other kinds of social relations (e.g. see Manetti et al, 2001; Adsett & Morin, 2004). The contact hypothesis is now firmly established as one of psychology’s most effective strategies for improving intergroup relations (Dovidio et al, 2003).

In Israel, as in many other societies suffering from intractable conflict (Bar-Tal, 1998), creating the conditions for constructive ethnic and racial relations has proved difficult. Scholars working in places such as Northern Ireland, South Africa and the United States have repeatedly noted how wider structural conditions – historical, political and economic – make conditions of equality and cooperation difficult to implement, or applicable only within a narrow range of settings (e.g. Jackman & Crane, 1986; Connolly, 2000; Bekerman, 2009b). Even when successfully implemented, such conditions readily become unstable and tend to diminish or collapse over time (see also Brewer, 1996). It becomes apparent that contact research must also begin to address some insidious and underexplored features of social relations in less ideal, more complex contexts (Dixon et al, 2005). Commentators are slowly becoming more attentive to the contact-hypothesis potential limitations. Theoreticians (Pettigrew, 1986; Hughes, 2007) have argued that the field requires greater conceptual prudence and coherence, but also that the proliferation of optimal conditions is in danger of rendering the contact hypothesis inappropriate to real-world situations. Dixon et al (2005) have criticised traditional contact approaches for being based on narrow psychological and psychodynamic perspectives related to individual and personality development while being inattentive to historical and contextual constraints. In my own work I have pointed to the limitations of artificial, so-called experimental contact situations, for these are blind to power relations and create illusionary, ‘as if’ contact relations (Bekerman, 2009a).

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The bilingual schools in Israel are almost an ideal setting to explore contact in real-life situations. Developing an argument about the intricate connection between the real as in ontology, the real as in ‘current/daily’ experience, and the artificial is not in my plans for this article; yet I do hope the reader understands I’ll be walking the in-between of this semantic field, for the schools are both real and artificial depending on the coordinates within which you are positioned (as teacher or student). It is to be assumed that for teachers the school is real - as real as it can be - for it is their real working place. Thus, in the following I look at these teachers who enter contact in a real-life situation.

The (Selected) Events

When looking at the ways activities are organised in the schools it becomes apparent that teachers successfully work at sustaining good relations among themselves. Maybe one of the most outstanding tasks the teachers have to confront at the bilingual school is the fact that two home-room teachers share a class. For these teachers, teaching has stopped being a lonely profession. The teachers are jointly responsible for the class, plan instruction together, share teaching duties and, all in all, seem to enjoy their collaboration. Joint responsibility for the class activities offers the possibility of dividing tasks, adopting different roles, and implementing reflexive practices conducive to professional growth. All these elements took place in the classes we observed and in their interviews the teachers identified them as beneficial to their functioning.

When looking at this collaboration, I asked myself questions about the relationships among the teachers and the ways in which they related to the children. In general I found professionals who got along well together and respected each other’s work. This does not mean that tensions were not present. However, they were addressed with consideration and never allowed to reach the point of an open confrontation.

In the third grade, the Jewish teacher Elle seemed to be leading the events most of the time. Elle is also the coordinator of maths studies at the school and she is highly regarded by the principals. Elle has a strong and energetic character. Mem, the Palestinian teacher, is more restrained and seemed to have adopted a somewhat more passive position, allowing Elle to lead most of the activities. The teachers seemed to have agreed to play different roles - Mem a more motherly one, and Elle stricter in relation to the students’ behavior. Given the majority-minority relationship that exists in Israel, these role assignments could easily be explained as one more example of Jewish domination. However, given that the role assignments were reversed in my observations in first grade, with Nun, the Palestinian teacher, taking the lead and Yod, the Jewish teacher, acting more passively, I do not believe this explanation to be relevant in this case. It seems to have more to do with the teachers’ character and disposition than with ‘ethnicity’. When Elle, for any reason, was absent from class, Mem easily undertook all needed tasks, being able to sustain an orderly class and both playing out the motherly role and undertaking stricter tasks.

I have seen teachers struggling seriously with ideological issues (e.g. when realising that their personal and group narratives are not necessarily recognised by their peers). In those moments they most resemble the rhetoric and actions of the wider Israeli society. Yet, for the most part I have seen them able not to be as attentive to their national/religious identities (e.g. not attaching these categories to their students’ attitudes/behaviors) as might be expected in conflictual societies where identities’ are usually very salient. This is not so because the teachers lack a strong sense of belonging to their national collective, it is because, having it, and when confronting ‘real-life’ situations, they have realised national/religious identities do not embrace the entire repertoire needed to sustain the ‘good’. Such is the case when, with children in sight, they needed to discuss some ideological problems. For when children were in sight, teachers seemed to realise that the problems are not just ideological abstractions but ‘real’ problems which cannot be dealt with cutting, either/or answers. For example, Serin (a Palestinian teacher) tells me the story of her teaching in third grade about the Nakbe and the Palestinians being expelled from their homes and land. A Jewish girl approaches her at the end of the lesson, and tells her she realised her family might be living in a home of those displaced. I believe that Serin believes, as many Palestinians (and a few Jews) do, that the solution is to return lands/homes and or to compensate the expropriated as well as to give up on Israel’s Zionist definition (Smooha, 2004), but Serin also knows that the

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child is young and not responsible for the deeds of her parents and grandparents. Serin also knows the child is her student, and that she cares about her and wishes her no harm. Serin found a way to respond, by emphasising the responsibility shared by adults, to allow the child to overcome the guilt, and while doing this she discussed the issue with her co-teacher and even found herself discussing it with the child’s parents. Sua expresses similar feelings when she tells us about one of her students losing her grandpa:

Hana [the Jewish co-teacher] went to console Raful’s daughter. [Raful was a retired Chief of Staff of the Israeli army who recently died and whose grandchild studies at the school.] I couldn’t do that ... but talking to the student was not difficult ... her grandpa had died ... you understand?’

Jewish teachers also relate instances in which their commitment to the well-being of the children and/or their commitment to sustaining professional relationship of respect with their Palestinian colleagues colluded with their (first) emotional/ideological reactions to a given event such as the recent Gaza war (winter of 2008-9). Such was the case of Merav, who relates to us:

on the one hand I had the urge to tell them ... you know many of the children come from leftists’ homes ... that Jewish civilians are being bombarded and that this is not right ... I know I could not do it. I had to wait to speak for the class to be all Jews (uni-national) ... and even then had to be careful, for not all children agree.

In disregard of their ethnic affiliation, teachers expressed satisfaction with the way they had managed to attend to the difficulties implied in conducting regular classes during the Gaza war. Personally they might have held to different perspectives, but:

from a professional standpoint, the school coped with the war, with the encounter of Jews and Arabs, with murder and killing – very professionally. The teachers met in the morning and evening, for ventilation and discussing the place of the school. Every day we checked what was done and where we stood. I think we took good care of ourselves, we didn’t conceal anything.

Teachers felt they had succeeded in creating a safe home in the school for the children based on friendship and similarity, as opposed to the national conflict between Jews and Palestinians that is waged outside the school gates. Yet, safe at times could mean safe from the inquiring, at times suspicious eyes of parents and/or school supervisors, something the teachers took very seriously, for such people had the potential to threaten the school’s existence. A Palestinian teacher recounts an event that occurred during which she believed it was important to convey to the pupils that children on both sides underwent suffering because of the armed conflict. She said:

it was very important for me to sharpen the identity of the Arab children, so that they would understand – they are killing my people. So that the Arab and Jewish children wouldn’t say – it’s not us. We had an argument about who was suffering more – the Arab children or the Jewish children. It was hard for the children to accept the suffering of the other side. It was necessary to intervene, and say that people on both sides were suffering – we wrote on the board the needs of both sides. It was very difficult – the Arab children came out with a harsh feeling, that it wasn’t true. But as an educator, I wanted to emphasise the parity.

In the interview we conducted later the teacher emphasised: I want each side to understand the suffering of the other side. However, on a personal level, I believe that the two sides were not ‘equal’ in suffering. I’m not satisfied with the results of the class discussion that fails to make a strong statement of any kind.

In this and other circumstances, teachers understood the need to at times give up on their strong didactical and or ideological beliefs for the sake of a greater good – safeguarding the school as an educational institution.

The events above show how teachers in their working professional sphere develop strategies to confront personal ideological problems while seriously considering the needs of all those that surround them (parents, administrators), but more specifically those of the children. The teachers are very aware of, and appreciate, the efforts themselves and their colleagues make when negotiating the proper responses to the conflictual events they need to deal with in class. In personal interviews teachers expressed these appreciation, as when, for example, declaring their

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‘admiration to the way in which Sua dealt with the questions children raised ... I know how difficult it is for her ... I know her family story ... I love her for that.’

Last in my observations I noted that teachers in in-service workshops reacted more strongly when discussing ideological/emotional loaded issues, such as national commemorations days, than when similar issues where raised in the teachers’ lounge at the school, or in their classrooms. This is understandable, given that the educational setting of the training programme, in a sense, offers a secure place in which to air disagreements, or even encourages them. Still, in these situations, and in spite of their honesty when expressing their disagreements, they seemed to have in mind that tomorrow or the day after they will be back in school, in ‘real-life’ work situations with each other. This understanding seemed to impose on them a need to reflect upon, to consider, what can be said, and when and how. This was so because the issues raised, the ideas discussed, echoed their joint life experience at work in the school - their lives as representatives of their groups, but also their professional lives as caring and dedicated teachers of students in an integrated bilingual school. Representing their groups in the discussions, speaking on behalf of their national/religious affiliations was not enough. They well knew that children are children and that they do not necessarily (only) represent groups (not at this early age), but are instead small and full humans in search of a path which does not necessarily need to replicate the one chosen by their adults.

But there is more to this, especially when considering the asymmetries which the school cannot overcome, for they reflect an outside reality the school has no power to change. It is clear that the bilingual schools, in spite of having come a long way in terms of inclusion and recognition of the Palestinian narrative-culture plight, are still limited by the reigning Zionist ideology within which they evolve. As we have seen, teachers know well that certain boundaries cannot be crossed without losing legitimacy and risking the very existence of the school. Thus, there is a limit to how much recognition and inclusion of the Palestinian voice can be achieved, and this limit is set by the Zionist hegemonic voices which, even when liberal, will not easily (or not at all) give up on the oxymoron called a Jewish Democratic State. Palestinians need to twist their views more, they need to give up more, renounce their beliefs, and settle ideologically and practically for less than what they expect. There are plenty of reasons for this. At times it is because the schools offer the Palestinian children academically more than what they can expect from most Palestinian monolingual schools in an Israel impeccably devised by the Jewish/Zionist hegemonic system to have Palestinian children fail (Coursen-Neff, 2004). At other times it is because they need the job, and at still others it is because they realise at this point that what they help create in the schools is the best they can wish for.

Yet, Palestinian teachers have also seen their Jewish counterparts change, radically, with regard to their perspectives on alterity and their political positions. This will not always happen, but change (at the institutional level) seems not to be attainable through decrees but only through slow and small deeds which the schools prove over and again are attainable. The schools are directed by two principals, equal in power, and even equally judged by their professional qualities; there are also two home teachers who direct each class, equal in power and again equally judged by their professional qualities; in addition, there is an NGO behind the initiative that also counts, along with co-directors; and the parents’ committees are inhabited equally by Palestinians and Jews who might not always share the same meaning regarding what the nature of the Israeli state should be, but do share in terms of their expectations on what good education is all about; even when they do not, these issues are aired and discussed respectfully.

I am not trying to idealise the teachers’ work. What I’m trying to demonstrate is that understanding cross-cultural, intergroup encounters in ‘real-life’ situations is of utmost importance, much more so than understanding them as they occur under experimental conditions of sorts. Only when looking at real-life situations can we truly appreciate the complexity, the intricacy, of human activity, cross-cultural or otherwise. When appreciating the infinite and unpredictable turns of real-life situations, we are humbled and become able to recognise the limitations of the theoretical paradigms which support our work.

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Discussion

Teachers seem to be learning something in the ‘real life’ of the integrated schools. They 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 (Karl & Frederick, 1976 [1932]). What will be learned next is difficult to predict. Yet, for the moment, the schools are making a commendable effort at offering some dignity and recognition to a minority otherwise rejected. The schools are commendable even when it is considered that they serve a very limited sector of the Israeli society, the one strongly identified with middle-upper-class values (Bekerman, 2009b). ‘Sensitive liberals’ might not like this and even be ready to criticise it, but I have come to appreciate the power of real-life initiatives, such as the schools which have grown bottom up and are guided by folk perspectives and not by specialists. Indeed, real-life situations and their practices put the real as a limit to the ideological and have set the school on a journey whose end we do not know and which may surprise us.

What is really different between educational initiated (artificial) and ‘real’ events (such as the ones which take place in the workplace) is assumed to be that in educational initiatives, cross-cultural encounters occur among pre-defined cultural categories at the level of groups or individuals. These educational settings, guided by perspectives developed in the traditional social sciences, do not concern themselves with all possible human categories. The categories (nationality, religion, ethnicity, etc.) that they attend to are restricted and seem for the most part to reflect pre-given theoretical and/or ideological/invented ones in line with the surrounding context of fashionable political interests of the day. While focusing on these politically salient identities, they miss their emancipatory goals (if emancipation is what they are after) by attaching themselves to reified perspectives which prevent that which is central to the understanding of human complexity. Thus they keep us on the dark and/or support present political national agendas (Bekerman & Maoz, 2005; Bekerman, 2007). The Palestinian-Jewish schools (as schools?) are a type of intentionally initiated encounter settings in which individuals/groups are assumed to represent the parties involved in the conflict (and thus denied of agency or free will).

The schools explored here – as workplaces – offer a unique arena for research, an arena which has been much less researched, if only because it is more difficult and time consuming. This arena is more real than the cross-cultural encounter they initiate by being dedicated to desegregating children who otherwise live in segregated groups. They offer a ‘real’ arena of encounters within an initiated encounter setting (the school) which is the workplace for those who work there – teachers.

Some of the research published on initiated intergroup encounters mentions their potential to empower the minorities participating in them (Sonnenschein et al, 1998). Since there is so little follow-up research on the participants of initiated encounters, it is difficult to say whether empowerment does indeed take place. What has become clear from my research activity following ‘real-life’ cross-cultural encounters is that the minorities usually stand at, and stay at, the losing end, at least for those who consider progress to be (only) that made on ideological premises. However, in a setting that in its very structure assumes the need for equality, much equality is achieved, even when ideologically not everything looks satisfying enough. As we have shown, the schools, in spite of having come a long way in terms of inclusion and recognition of the Palestinian minority in Israel, are still limited by the reigning Zionist ideology within which they evolve, and teachers recognise these limitations and adapt to them, for they know acting differently might risk the very existence of the schools.

Advancing in an emacipatory direction in the framework of the schools implies the need to work hard to further uncover the banal practices which the sovereign national state context utilises to trap us in its cultural/semiotic frames (Billig, 1995; Giroux, 2004). This task is similar to the one described by Duro for the arts: ‘The task of any discussion of frames and framing in the visual arts is first and foremost to counter the tendency of the frame to invisibility with respect to the artwork’ (Duro, 1996). Undertaking the activities needed to make the frame visible is not easy; the sovereign is a parergon (or frame) to present paradigmatic perspectives in the social sciences; he or she is not alone though. The sovereign and the social scientist constitute each other, neither being absolutely intrinsic or extrinsic to each other. Untying the knot that connects them, overcoming the nation state’s paradigm, involves finding ways to offer ourselves literacies with which to read the ‘real’

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world which also constitutes and is constituted by the ‘art-i-ficial’. In Burkean terms, I offer ‘dramatism’ (Burke, 1969): the realization that the relationships between life and theatre are not ‘metaphorical’ but ‘real’, and that the understanding of symbolic systems (e.g. economic, spatial, aesthetic) holds the key to the understanding of social organisation. Finally, it requires getting all to realise that we are in need not only of an epistemological change but also of a political one.

The epistemological has to do with understanding that nouns (e.g. names for categories, values, processes) are not qualities of individual minds but qualities in the world; activities which take place not at the individual level, but at the social level – in the public sphere in the market – to be produced and become. No Jews no Palestinians. The political does not point to the grandeur of revolutions but to the painful paying attention to the immediate details of everyday life. Slavoj Žižek puts this well:

The lesson here is that the truly subversive thing is not to insist on 'infinite’ demands we know those in power cannot fulfill. Since they know that we know it, such an ‘infinitely demanding’ attitude presents no problem for those in power. ‘So wonderful that, with your critical demands, you remind us what kind of world we would all like to live in. Unfortunately, we live in the real world, where we have to make do with what is possible.’ The thing to do is, on the contrary, to bombard those in power with strategically well-selected, precise, finite demands, which can’t be met with the same excuse. (Žižek, 2007, p. 1)

For Dewey, action ‘is an invasion of the future, of the unknown. Conflict and uncertainty are ultimate truths’ (Dewey, 1922, p. 12). The ‘real [action]’ calls for an invasion of the future, it bursts into the unknown were we need to invent ourselves anew. Risky as this might be, it offers opportunities which might free us to try new experimentation in the peripheries of the accepted and the known. There are no other options, for we all know nothing is predetermined – no meanings and no outcomes; the ‘real’ calls for a reconsideration of the possible, even that possible which our experience proves to be true. Working in the real imposes an epistemology which is practical (in a sense not an epistemology any more), and though risky, it might open new spaces for new actions and subsequent meanings. The conditions described in the literature for ‘good contact’ to come about cannot be predicated nor initiated; they can only be actions implemented in ‘real’, in a reality where people need to make a living beyond present artificial/real political constructs.

Scholars are starting to problematise and critically approach cross-cultural encounters on the basis of contact theory (Allport, 1954) which posits understandings regarding social interaction across cultural-political boundaries. They speculate that these perspectives seem to rest for the most part on reified categorical conceptions which ultimately benefit reigning national hegemonies (Bekerman & Maoz, 2005), and call (Rudmin, 2003; Dixon et al, 2005) for methodological approaches and new theorisation which will help better understand 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. The arguments presented above have been an attempt to move in this direction.

Note

[1] The present article is a revised and extended version of ‘Working with “Others”’, published in Hebrew in Organizational Analysis, 11, 22-28.

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ZVI BEKERMAN teaches anthropology of education at the School of Education and the Melton Center, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and is a faculty member at the Mandel Leadership Institute in Jerusalem. His research interests are in the study of cultural, ethnic, and national identity, including identity processes and negotiation during intercultural encounters and in formal/informal learning contexts. Correspondence: mszviman@mscc.huji.ac.il