In the complex lived reality of the world in the era of the Covid 19 educators tackle situations of uncertainty. On the one hand, they must address the children's emotional, social and cultural challenges, and on the other hand, they must maintain an orderly and regular quality learning-teaching process and continue to deepen the disciplinary knowledge.

The purpose of this study is to examine the perceptions, difficulties, and actions of students dealing with situations of uncertainty in a multicultural school with children from minority groups in Israeli society.

Uncertainty in education

Uncertainty is defined as a subjective cognitive experience of a person who is aware of his or her lack of knowledge, and this experience may be accompanied by feelings of ambiguity, skepticism, and confusion (Han, Klein, & Arora, 2011).

Grupe and Nitschke (2013) noted three components of the uncertainty: (1) the lack of ability to anticipate the results of a familiar situation; (2) the lack of ability to manage situations; (3) lack of knowledge of acceptable behavioral norms of action options and potential consequences. According to them, being in a state of uncertainty can cause anxiety and stress, unpleasant feelings, and loss of self-confidence.

Shulman (2005) explains that the teacher can find himself in a busy routine of classroom uncertainty. The teacher may not always know in advance how the children will respond or how they will behave. In such situations, he must exercise discretion and make decisions that will help him recruit students for learning and best understanding of the subject being taught, and make them active and involved.

In addition, Darling-Hammond and Baratz-Snowden (2007) argued that teachers needed to find creative solutions to uncertain situations. These solutions sometimes require work "behind the scenes" and develop personal skills of flexibility, openness, and ability to examine in real-time the personal-cultural-social context.

Today, the preservice teachers' training process adopts traditional and planned teaching approaches based primarily on theoretical knowledge, while experiences in situations of uncertainty with a foreign and unfamiliar culture are less acceptable. There are studies (Eliayhu-Levi and Gantz-Meishar, 2018; Kambutu & Nganga, 2008) that support designing environments that invite preservice teachers to meet children from different cultures and deal with uncomfortable situations in which to examine perceptions, knowledge, feelings, and beliefs with each other. Such experiences may promote cross-cultural ability and encourage educators to bring about social change through awareness of the power relations between weak and strong groups in society.

Intercultural Competence

School population reflects the diversity and multiculturalism of Israeli society: Jews, Arabs, new migrants, and non-Jewish migrants. Teachers are required to act in connection with the multicultural concept of the Ministry of Education for equality between cultures irrespective of religion, race, nationality, socio-economic status, or color.

Teacher training colleges are required to respond to this challenge, examine children practice at school, and discuss whether the practice enables the construction and design of authentic teaching practices that will help them work in situations of uncertainty in a multicultural environment while showing respect for minority groups (Stephan & Stephan, 2013; Fantini, 2007; Malewski, et al., 2012).

It is agreed that teachers are among the significant factors for children, and therefore, teacher training processes are of great importance for developing an intercultural competence-based personal connection that enables the creation of learning instruction appropriate for diverse populations in different social contexts (Ben-Peretz & Flores, 2018).

The study participants are 36 students attending the College of Education in Israel. In their training, they take theoretical courses and participate in a research workshop. In addition, they teach once a week in a multicultural school individually, in groups, and in the classroom.

Methodology The study was conducted in two multicultural schools in central Israel. In schools, a pluralistic concept is grounded in values of equality of rights and tolerance, respect for diversity and acceptance of diversity. There we can find a wide range of identities: Jews, Arabs, migrant workers, refugees, and asylum seekers. The study is a qualitative-interpretive one that focuses on the interpretive paradigm to examine, describe, and explain student perceptions, difficulties, and actions in a situation of uncertainty in multicultural classroom teaching (Zur & Eisikovits, 2015). The interpretive paradigm allows one to explore different interpretations and explain their faces and complexities by hearing students' personal voices as they emerge from the interviews and from the documentation, replication, and summary work in the digital record (Sabra-Ben Yehoshua, 2016). The research findings were collected using two qualitative tools: Documents and interviews. Documents - include documentation and reflections written by the students at the end of each school practice. Interviews - were held at the college for about an hour with fifteen of the students individually. In the first part of the interview we collected personal details of the students and in the second part, we asked open-ended questions on three topics: perceptions, difficulties, and ways of dealing with situations of uncertainty. We recorded and transcribed all the interviews. Data processing The content of the interviews and documents were analyzed in a content analysis focusing on what the students said and not on how things were said. Content analysis according to Shkedi (2003) is a kind of window that allows one to look into the inner experience and focuses on students' words and descriptions as reflecting their perceptions, actions, difficulties, and knowledge. Furthermore, according to Krippendorff (2004), content analysis allows for a description of the data and draws valid conclusions into their broad context. During the analysis phase, each of the researchers read the data sections separately to determine which category the segment belongs to. In the second stage, reliability among judges was set at 86%. We then reread the texts of each category and raised notable deaths in that category. Ethics Ethical rules were strictly adhered to in the study: maintaining anonymity and confidentiality of the respondents and the data, avoiding abusive questions, and giving students a choice whether or not to participate in the study. We received approval from the College's Ethics Committee to conduct the study.

The findings of this study outline two content categories: (1) Perceptions (2) Difficulties and dealing with the personal-cultural and educational aspects. We found that at the first session, the students expressed feelings of confusion, discomfort, and stress while not being able to assess for sure what was going to happen, while later in the annual process they developed perceptions of flexibility and empathy and some even expressed a desire to effect change while enhancing the visibility of the other culture in the public sphere. These findings reinforce previous research (Kahneman, 2013; Shore & Nebo, 2018) that uncertainty stimulates learners to transition from negative emotions at the beginning of the process to positive feelings of curiosity, challenge, initiative, interest, and investment in effort and thinking later in the process. In examining the difficulties and actions in the personal-cultural aspect, the students testified that the main difficulties were in the area of interpersonal communication and their ability to reduce the tension between the two cultures. They also added that the difficulties, foreignness, and ambiguity were greater and more complex than they had experienced or had known from previous experience. In examining the difficulties and actions in the learning aspect, we found that the main difficulties are low achievement, low motivation, and irregularity in meeting among disadvantaged minority groups on the social margins. We found that the students initiated effective actions to place the child at the center, for experiential learning, and for maintaining intensive contact. They exercised independent judgment and formulated new understandings about their educational role. The findings indicate that the children cooperated, improved their achievement, and increased their sense of self-capacity for success. It seems that despite the uncertainty, an empathic connection has been established between the students and the children who supported and helped them to exhaust their abilities.

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