This paper investigated whether there were variations in career choice motivations of Israeli teacher education students depending on their religious background. Given the division in society and the education system, the question arose whether religion might have a so far overlooked influence on the motives for choosing the teacher profession. 

The FIT-Choice framework served as a theoretical framework for the study. Motives were  analysed  looking at group differences by religion in the motivations for entering the teaching profession. While most motives were homogenous among religious groups in Israel, some exhibited significant differences affiliated to religious values. 

This  indicates that by ignoring religious affiliation, voices of underrepresented groups might be silenced resp. not respected in their special views. This leads to conclusions for dealing with underrepresented (religious) groups within teacher education settings in ways that help to attract and retain them for the teacher profession. 

Objectives and purposes 

The  project from which this paper originated  compared the career choice motives of future teachers from different countries, among them Israel. The Israeli cooperation partners  decided to swap a descriptive item asking for the nationality of participants with one that asked to which religious group they belonged. 

As religion and the feeling of national belonging are reported to be strongly combined in Israel (Breit and Wolff, 2012)  the initial oversight of religion's role in the international project may  have been attributed to cultural bias. We took the chance of the unplanned coincidence and argued in line with Suryani  et al. (2016) that it might be important to take religion into account as additional information for countries where religion plays a significant role in society.  This could pose an opportunity to give a voice to specific religious groups within the Israeli education system which might have been underrepresented so far.

Theoretical framework

In 2009, the Israeli population (7.55 million people) was made up of  74.5% Jewish, 20.3% Arab (Muslim, Christian or Druze) and 4.2% classified as ‘other’ (Breit and Wolff, 2012).

Furthermore, religious affiliation encompasses more than mere religious beliefs in Israel as it stretches out into the educational system, where segregation takes place as there are different schools for different religious groups (ibid.).       

Breit and Wolff (2012) address the fact that there is a systemic difference in PISA and TIMMS performance  when comparing Hebrew and Arab schools (ibid.). The Hebrew schools perform better than the national average and the nationwide exams show a significant better performance of Hebrew than Arab schools as well. Thus, the  authors call Israel a “divided society with divided schools”.

There are hints of systemic differences within the group of teachers in existing research as well: Garra-Alloush et al. (2021) addressed the question of career choice motives among female Arab students of EFL (English as a foreign language) in Israel. The authors  combined the affiliation to a religious group with career choice motives in Israel by using FIT choice  (Watt and Richardson, 2007) as a theoretical framework. 

The FIT- choice framework describes  “factors influencing teaching as a career choice” (Watt and Richardson, 2007) and was validated first for Australian universities. It is based  on the expectancy-value-model by Eccles et al. (2000) and differentiates  between extrinsic and intrinsic higher-order factors. It has been widely used and validated in many countries, making it suitable to compare countries (Suryani et al., 2016).  Suryani (ibid.) added in her Indonesian FIT-choice-study religious influences as an important factor to be considered (ibid, p. 180). 

We used a paper and pencil version of the FIT-Choice questionnaire by Watt and Richardson (2007) that was translated into Hebrew. The questionnaire consisted of Likert-scaled-items regarding study choice motivations (n=7), career choice motives (n=37), beliefs regarding the teaching profession (n=13) as well as sociodemographic information (n=12). For sociodemographic information, we knew the religious background of the participants, but not if they themselves visited a religious school as pupils. Regarding the Jewish participants, we did not know if they belonged to the group of orthodox or secular jews. We conducted descriptive, univariate analysis to describe data, Levene tests were used to test for variance homogeneity between groups using SPSS. Participation in the study was anonymous and voluntary. The participants consented to the use of their data for research purposes (informed consent). The items regarding the career choice of future teachers were grouped to form the factors already validated by Watt and Richardson (2007). We conducted reliability measurements for the given sample that showed acceptable reliability for most, but limited reliability for some scales (lowest α: expert career with 0.44). For group differences, values between 0.5 and 0.7 can still be accepted (Lienert et al., 1998). The low alpha scores are in concurrence with other studies that had issues to reproduce all FIT choice scales (Watt et al. 2012) and had to be taken into account as a limitation when interpreting the results. Data sources: We collected data from 106 freshmen teacher education students at a teacher training college in Israel in 2018. Our sample included students from the following religious backgrounds: The participants were 68% Jewish, 1.9 % Christian, 8.5 % Muslim and 16 % Druze. We aggregated the last three groups to the group “Arab” as this is also done for statistical reports in the country. The distribution seems to account for the country in general. Israel’s Arab population is further divided in 70% Muslim, 9% Druze and 21 % Christian. Thus, in our sample the Druze population is slightly over- and the Christian population slightly underrepresented (Central Bureau of Statistics, 2008). The underrepresentation of Muslim participants could be due to structural barriers that limit their access to tertiary education (Breit and Wolff, 2012). Almost all the participants were female. This is in accordance with other international data that depict teaching as a “female profession” (Drudy, 2008). Jewish participants were older due to the draft for mandatory military service.

We could identify six out of 12 motives with significant group differences (two-sided t-tests (Levene)) regarding to religion: “shape the future of children”, “social influence”, “teaching as a demanding job”, “status”, “pay” and “time for family”. The Jewish participants ranked the first three motives higher, whereas the Arab participants ranked the last three significantly higher than the Jewish ones. This can be related to different values or value rankings varying between religious groups. Family, for example, plays an important role among Muslims and can therefore influence career decisions, probably especially for women (Garra-Alloush, 2021). The motive “Teaching as a demanding job” is ranked higher among Jews although they rank status and pay lower in their career choice, at first view a puzzling result. However, due to the higher PISA performance of Jewish schools, the demand of teaching might be perceived higher, while at the same time due to the higher education level of Jewish students, teaching might not necessarily mean a social upward mobilty. But especially Muslims have limited access to tertiary education and possibly they regard teaching more than other groups as a high status job that is well paid. Scholarly significance of the study: Due to the sample size we can only draw conclusions carefully. Religion seems to play a role when examining motives to become a teacher. There could be different cultural or religious values and meanings behind concepts like status and pay. We recommend to consider cultural values when researching career choice motives among teacher students. To examine this further, research should be extended to qualitative investigation. To adress teacher education candidates more adequately, teacher education settings should respect their heterogeneity. This could be a means to first respect different cultures and minorities, fight teacher attrition within underrepresented groups and to enhance social equity.

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