Emotion regulation among Bedouin teachers in Israel: inherent conflicts between two different cultural systems of emotion rules

ABSTRACT

The aim of the current study was to explore Bedouin teachers’ emotion management in schools that serve Bedouin students living in traditional communities in the south of Israel. Semi-structured interviews with 14 teachers from elementary schools (for Bedouin students) emphasised the central place of the local culture in shaping teachers’ emotion management and the dilemmas they face between modern and traditional emotion rules. Emotion management and regulation in the Bedouin school differs largely from that in Western educational systems. Living in a society whose culture praises power, formality and masculinity, the Bedouin teacher tends to suppress emotions at work, particularly those perceived as positive in Western cultures (e.g. happiness, joy), and sometimes display those perceived in Western cultures as undesirable (e.g. anger towards students).

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion regulation
• Bedouin society
• traditional values
• teachers
• Jews-Moslems relations

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. All names are pseudo names.

2. The first number indicates the interviewee’s age and the second refers to years in teaching. The letter M refers to Male and F to Female.