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This study deals with perceptions of 'proper intimacy' disseminated through digital parent-teacher communication in early-childhood education and the implications for parents' reflexive projects of self. The article brings sociological understandings about perceptions of proper parenting and intimacy together with research on digital communications. Qualitative data was collected from an on-line discussion of early-childhood educators on their uses of parent-teacher digital communications. Analysis reveals the dissemination of two ideals of 'proper' intimate relationships. Digital sharing of what goes on at preschool invites parents to have an 'observant intimacy' with their children, based on knowledge-from-a-distance of the child's day. Complementing digital communication with face-to-face communication invites parents into an 'instrumental intimacy' with teachers -- an emotional connection for the purpose of the child's education. The article concludes with possible implications the perceptions of 'proper intimacy' disseminated through parent-teacher digital communications may have on contemporary parenting culture.

Based on interviews with low-income, Israeli mothers about their experience supporting children's remote-learning during COVID, this study offers theoretical insights about the accomplishment of natural-growth. The accomplishment of natural-growth is a theoretical concept coined by Lareau to describe the logics of low-income childrearing. Though concerted cultivation, which describes the logics of middle-class childrearing has garnered theoretical elaboration, little research has elaborated on practices for accomplishment of natural-growth. This study elaborates on these practices as they were revealed in mothers' narratives of adjustment to difficulties placed by remote-learning. The women described practices by which they sought to bind themselves and their children into a social network and to bridge out and utilize resources within and beyond this network. The analysis reveals that these practices work through social as opposed to cultural capital, revealing a childrearing logic based in a different type of capital than that of concerted cultivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a theoretical argument regarding the power of school to shape parental involvement in culturally informed ways. The paper emerges out of preliminary fieldwork among Jewish middle-class parents in a town in northern Israel, during which our attention was drawn to the intense activity in and around their children's transition to primary school. This activity became a lens for the exploration and articulation of a theoretical claim, according to which parental involvement is not just a matter of the fit or lack of fit between the cultural capital imported from home into school, as posited by much of the relevant literature. Rather, the cultural shaping of parental involvement takes place "within and through" encounters between school and family: by means of the school's cultivation of "proper" disposition and comportment for parents, the power of emotional community and the recruitment of a key cultural symbol.

This article looks at an Islamic teacher training college in Israel in an attempt to understand how religious revival shapes women's understandings of being Muslim women professionals in Israel. The college grew out of Islamic revival in Israel; its teacher training program reflects the sensibilities that Islamic revival hopes to foster in women who study there and in the children they will teach. The article is based on ethnographic research at the college. Adopting a theoretical approach to spirituality as a cultural phenomenon, experienced as authentic, yet culturally informed, can serve as a powerful resource for creating social meaning and as a source of pedagogies of change. I illustrate the means by which the institution makes space for a spirituality that infuses teacher training with a sense of social purpose, civil commitment, and personal unity with the divine.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in an Islamic teachers' college in Israel and interviews with women lecturers, this article explores how the women combine education and religion to create a revitalized self and sense of belonging despite lived experiences of structural racial, national, and gender inequalities. The women's experience is understood through the lens of various social theories that are informed by religious or spiritual epistemologies. We see how the women build on sacred energy to make their selves known to the sacred and to the community in a way that infuses their own education and educating with the power to transcend oppressive social categories. I suggest that these women's known selves present an alternative conceptualization of citizenship, not previously recognized by scholarship on Israeli society.

This article, through looking at mothers' modes of engagement with their children's education, proposes an integrative analytical approach to the study of the making of mothers, mothering, and motherhood. The article presents and brings into dialogue four different bodies of anthropological and sociological literature: mothering as a form of care work, anthropological work on child-rearing in different cultural settings, sociological studies of the class negotiation of home-school boundaries, and the theoretical and empirical literature on consumption in post-industrial society. Bringing together ideas of care, culture, class, and consumption into one analytical framework is crucial for attending to, in holistic fashion, the complex ways in which mothering, in different social-cultural contexts, is perceived and practiced.

This paper discusses the reproduction of hegemony and social hierarchy through education. It brings together two case studies of marginal groups at a university--Russian Jewish immigrants and Palestinian Israeli women--who make sense of their position in social hierarchies and power relations through constant interpretative work on the various dimensions of university knowledge. The article reveals how marginal actors' interpretations of knowledge simultaneously are guided by students' positioning vis-a-vis the dominant collective and also articulate and redesign positioning. The two groups redesign their marginalities vis-a-vis the Israeli-Jewish collective by transforming knowledge to identity. In so doing, these groups reproduce national borders of Israeli social hierarchy, while working to change the meaning of these borders for their group's positioning. Key Words: Israeli society, marginal groups, nation, university

This article looks at how Palestinian-Israeli middle-class mothers, who enjoy the advantages of the middle class yet belong to a geographically and socially marginalized minority, educate their children in and about socio-spatial reality. The study brings the field of geographies of parenting into dialogue with relevant insights from literacy studies. Building on the concept of spatial literacy developed through previous ethnographic research with Palestinian-Israeli women university-students, we analyze recent interviews on mothering and education carried out with the same population more than a decade later. Borrowing Vygotsky's concept of scaffolding, findings reveal three major 'scaffolding strategies' used by the women to teach their children to read social relations in Israeli society: shaping the learning environment, directing spatial proficiency and supporting spatial proficiency. Throughout, we juxtapose the women's elaboration of spatial literacy as students and of scaffolding strategies as mothers. The study contributes to geographies of parenting by elucidating how parent-child interactions may serve as a context for learning about space and social relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses teacher training as a process of becoming literate in educational discourse. Through ethnographic research of a project for training science and math lecturers in educational practice, I follow how participants created a concept they called ‘Class-B’ to symbolise progressive educational discourse. Bringing the concept of key symbol and a New Literacy Studies approach to the analysis, I show how literacy in educational discourse is worked out and elaborated around the symbol of Class-B. The ethnography teaches us that key symbols can be keys to literacy, and perhaps be considered as a useful tool for teacher trainers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a theoretical argument regarding the power of school to shape parental involvement in culturally informed ways. The paper emerges out of preliminary fieldwork among Jewish middle-class parents in a town in northern Israel, during which our attention was drawn to the intense activity in and around their children’s transition to primary school. This activity became a lens for the exploration and articulation of a theoretical claim, according to which parental involvement is not just a matter of the fit or lack of fit between the cultural capital imported from home into school, as posited by much of the relevant literature. Rather, the cultural shaping of parental involvement takes placewithin and throughencounters between school and family: by means of the school’s cultivation of ‘proper’ disposition and comportment for parents, the power of emotional community and the recruitment of a key cultural symbol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In feminist anthropological studies of Palestinian women gender change is often interpreted as contributing to the national struggle. Based on research of Palestinian Israeli university women's marriage talk, I look at how gender change articulated through liberal discourses can reproduce state national hegemony. Palestinian educated women are forbearers of gender change in that they re-create women's role in courtship and marriage from one of object to subject. Yet the subject position they take up is of the modern bourgeois individual - the required subject of the nation-state. Their marriage talk reproduces the hegemony of the nation-state by advocating and attaching the women to one of its central mechanisms of sovereignty - intimacy. Further, they espouse this intimacy within the genealogical limits that serve as the basis for definitions of the state's national character. Thus, even while calling for gender change, they `talk' themselves into oppressive nationally defined power relations of the liberal state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]