Sapir College

This article explores how Arab social work students in Israel conceptualize solidarity, navigating between ethnic identity, community loyalty, and universal professional ethics. Using a phenomenological qualitative approach, 25 in-depth interviews were thematically analyzed. Findings revealed that students view solidarity as a multidimensional phenomenon, including moral value, emotional empathy, daily mutual aid, and professional identity. A distinction emerged between takaful (communal-religious mutual support) and tadamun (moral trans-border solidarity). The study highlights the tension and interplay between identity-based and universal solidarity, offering an indigenous perspective that bridges local cultural values with global ethics in social work practice.

ABSTRACT This qualitative study examined professional experiences of 34 female Bedouin social workers, graduates of academic institutions in Palestinian Authority territories, who were employed in Israel’s social welfare services. The research aimed:to explore their lived experiences of exclusion, professional delegitimization, and o examine the implications of such exclusion for their professional practice, identity, and well-being, within a complex cross-cultural, national, and political context. All members of the research sample had up to one year’s experience in social work and were enrolled in the Connecting Bridge program, designed to bridge professional and linguistic gaps. Additional data came from focus groups and autobiographical accounts by four Connecting Bridge mentors. The data underwent thematic analysis, using inductive coding and principles of grounded theory. The findings indicated patterns of silencing of the social workers professional voice, including nonrecognition of their authority, lack of professional support leading to reliance on personal connections, a sense of personal and professional insecurity, retreat into appeasement practices, and focus on bureaucratic tasks instead of professional interventions. The implications of these phenomena not only affect the quality of service and the workers’ professional identity, but distort the perception of the social work profession as an arena of recognition, struggle, and resistance.

The growing concentration of innovation-driven economic activity in core metropolitan areas threatens the sustainable development of peripheral regions. Conventional aid programs are giving way to place-based strategies that harness endogenous regional resources. Yet most computable general-equilibrium (CGE) models—the standard tools for policy appraisal—operate at the national scale and generally treat regions as passive recipients. This study adopts the regional system (RS) approach and contributes a step towards its practical implementation with the introduction of a Regional Economic Development (RED) model—a CGE framework that embeds the region as an explicit behavioral block inside a national system. The model comprises four interlinked modules and makes a key distinction, often overlooked in the RS literature, between a region’s domestic product (output generated within the territory) and its regional product (income earned by resident labor and capital, irrespective of where those factors are employed). This distinction captures income leakages and interregional spill-overs—factors that are critical for peripheral economies. Scenario analysis couples exogenous policy levers—tax incentives, infrastructure upgrades, human-capital investment—with endogenous outcomes such as employment, income, and structural change. By disentangling internal production capacity from external income opportunities, the RED model lets policymakers compare strategies that prioritize local output with those that maximize household welfare. Iterative simulations reveal feasible development targets, the policy mixes required to achieve them, and the structural implications of each trajectory.

Mathematics constitutes more than a computational tool in physics–it provides the fundamental structural framework for describing and understanding complex biological phenomena. This article presents a pedagogical framework based on the syntactic-semantic approach, emphasizing the role of mathematics as a foundational model that enables description, prediction, and discovery of biological phenomena. The research demonstrates how the integration of mathematics and physics together creates a multi-modal framework that allows biology students to understand complex phenomena such as population dynamics, molecular biophysics, and quantitative physiology.

This exploratory study develops and tests a new approach to the study of expertise in journalism. It introduces a new method, News Sorting, which takes journalists out of their comfort zone by asking them to rank a sample of their recent publications and reflect on their challenges. This novel method is combined with two theoretical frameworks: Journalistic Content Knowledge, designed to study specialized beat journalists, and Naturalistic Decision Making, which examines the performance of experts in natural settings. These are tested on Israeli military journalists that are considered highly knowledgeable. Findings indicate that a minority of journalists develop not only intrinsic, beat-specific traits of expertise, but also extrinsic expertise that characterize experts in other occupations, such as pattern recognition and fine discrimination. The good news is that journalists can develop extrinsic traits. The bad news is that they only develop among a minority of highly experienced journalists, which might be too late in an era of shortening careers. Hence the need for measures to accelerate their expertise.

This study examined the use of podcasts as a learning tool for teacher education students, focusing on their learning experience and the contribution of podcast creation to the development of critical thinking and social-emotional learning (SEL). This qualitative phenomenological research analyzed reflections from 46 students across several courses. Findings suggest that podcast production contributes to a sense of self-efficacy, self-awareness, social involvement, and enhanced critical thinking. The reflective process revealed deeper aspects of learning, including decision-making and coping with challenges. The study highlights the importance of integrating digital tools in teacher training and the potential of podcasts as an effective pedagogical tool.

This paper investigates how democracy influences economic growth through innovation and institutional quality. Using an augmented Solow growth model and panel-data mediation analysis across 123 countries (2011–2022), we quantify democracy’s impact on GDP per capita. Our results show that institutional quality accounts for 83.3% of democracy’s total effect on economic output, while innovation explains only 16.7%. This study contributes to the literature by distinguishing between institutional and innovation channels in the democracy–growth nexus and provides policy-relevant insights for promoting inclusive economic growth (SDG 8) and building resilient infrastructure and innovation (SDG 9).