In this article, we focus on the transformations imposed on schools by individual parents, arguing that schools as modern organisations change not only through top-down pressures orchestrated by an array of international organisations, for-profit companies and media as shown in previous research, but also through the agency of mobile parents, who…

This article makes an empirical contribution to the study of the global middle class (GMC), and sheds light on the complex relationships that are constructed and sustained by these families with their 'home nation' through their educational strategies. Drawing on an inductive analysis of 20 in-depth interviews with Israeli migrant mothers in the…

This article focuses on middle-class parent activism in the Israeli policy-making arena. In recent decades, public education governance in Israel has been moving gradually from a quasi-social democratic mode to a neoliberal one. Two e-mobilizations of middle-class parents are studied: the 'Strollers Protest' of 2011 and the 'Sardines Protest' of…

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…

A large linguistic distance exists between spoken Arabic and the Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) the literary language (a diglosia). Novice readers, therefore, struggle with the complex orthography of Arabic as well as the mastering of MSA. Here, we tested whether structured activities in MSA would advance kindergarteners' MSA aptitude by the end of…

The present study explored cultural differences in parental beliefs about motor development across 2 Western cultures: Israel and the Netherlands. Can 2 cultural models be distinguished regarding infant motor development in Israel and the Netherlands or are parental beliefs about motor development similar across these cultures? Using a…

"Concerted cultivation" has been described as a common, urban middle-class practice concerning the enrollment of children in a variety of age-specific activities that may promote the learning of valuable life skills as well as the development of individual abilities (Lareau, 2003). Music is one such activity. This study investigated the…

The goal of the study was to examine the joint and distinct contribution of attachment security and social anxiety to Arab children's peer competence in middle childhood. We focused on Arab children as very little research has examined close relationships for this group. A sample of 404 third-, fourth- and fifth-grade Arabic students (203 boys and…

The study investigates acquisition of verb inflections by four monolingual Hebrew-acquiring children from middle-class backgrounds, audio-recorded in longitudinal, weekly samples at a mean age-range of between 18 and 26 months. Productive use of inflectional morphology is shown to manifest increasing structural specification, as a function of…

In an attempt to address minority issues with Israeli Arab English-as-a-foreign-language ninth-grade students, I as a teacher researcher introduced picture books on the issue and invited students to respond in different modes, one of which was artistic. In one of the lessons, students created collages to represent their identities. In this…

We examined middle-class Israeli preschoolers' cognitive self-transformation in the delay of gratification paradigm. In Study 1, 66 un-caped or Superman-caped preschoolers delayed gratification, half with instructions regarding Superman's delay-relevant qualities. Caped children delayed longer, especially when instructed regarding Superman's…

This study focuses on "Independence Day", an episode of "Arab Labor" (first season, 2008), a pioneer bilingual Hebrew-Arabic satirical Israeli TV series, written by Sayed Kashua, an Arab-Israeli author and journalist. "Arab Labor" was a breakthrough in the Israeli popular TV scape, where, as a rule, Arab-Israeli…

The phenomenon of nonmarital motherhood among upper-middle-class, educated women has increased dramatically over the last few decades in most industrialized countries. The purpose of the current research is to examine how women who elect nonmarital motherhood compare with women who elect other family configurations with respect to their…

High and low SES mothers of one- and three-year-old children (N=104) were interviewed. Results showed that low SES mothers believed that infants acquire basic cognitive skills later and that the introduction of cognitively stimulating activities should occur later than did high SES mothers. (JMB)

Following a mathematics test, 134 sixth-graders from different social class/national origin groups, were asked to attribute causality for their success or failure. All groups tended to attribute success more to internal than external causes and more to stable than unstable causes. Attributions of failure varied between the groups. (Author/SJL)