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The introductory chapter begins by clarifying the rationale that led the editors to delve into this project despite the many challenges in this field of study. First, we outline the rationale that preceded our journey, while explaining the gap in the academic literature in this field. Thereafter, we address each of the four parts of this book. The first part deals with immigrant and immigrant-origin teachers. It reviews the social and linguistic challenges they face in geopolitical contexts in Israel, Europe, and the USA. The second part reviews the experiences of indigenous teachers as minorities in multilingual and bilingual schools. The third focuses on international minority teacher educators, and examines the pedagogical and cultural challenges they face as educators, instructors, and supervisors of pre-service teachers. The fourth and final part showcases ethnic minority teachers integrated into educational frameworks around the globe, highlighting the challenges and benefits involved. We conclude this chapter by presenting the potential contributions of the empirical evidence contained in this open-access book to the growing theoretical and practical understanding of the potential benefits and risks involved in these processes.

This chapter contributes to a better understanding of how minority teachers in majority schools experience their work and how their participation in such educational contexts helps shape their sense of ethno-cultural belonging and their sense of self-efficacy. Through comparative work, we gain insights into the context-specific conditions which might help support or undermine minority teachers’ inclusion. To do this we compared the reported experiences of Palestinian Israeli teachers working in two somewhat different educational contexts; the Hebrew speaking schools which serve the regular Israeli Jewish population and the bilingual integrated schools which offer the opportunity for the two populations to study under one roof in a society in which schools are mostly segregated. Both these educational contexts include Palestinian Israeli teachers in their faculty. Our findings point mostly at similarities in the way these teachers experience their work at the schools but also some notable differences have been exposed. Both groups of teachers’ express satisfaction regarding their work at the Hebrew speaking and the bilingual integrated schools. They are satisfied with their work and feel they belong to a very special ‘club’ a metaphor that affords them a strong and positive positioning within the school context.