Teacher relationships in a shared learning programme in Israel: Intergroup contact theory and the importance of friendships

For the last decade, Israel has been making inroads in education programmes aimed at peacebuilding between Israeli and Palestinian children and young people in the Israeli education system. While these efforts began with bilingual Arabic-Hebrew schools, more recently, shared learning programmes have been piloted, which promote collaboration between separate Arab and Jewish schools and are adapted from a model for shared education that was originally developed in Northern Ireland. This qualitative research study investigated how teachers in one Israeli shared education project are developing their relationships with one another to gain a deeper understanding of the successes and challenges they experienced. Intergroup contact theory (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006; Allport, 1954) informs the field of the special importance that friendship has in positive contact. The study found that teachers most commonly referenced aspects of friendship as markers of success or challenge in their developing relationships. Findings also suggest that developing teacher relationships were limited by tensions surrounding the inability to discuss certain aspects of the conflict and the existing asymmetrical power dynamics between the Jewish and Arab populations in Israeli society.