Inclusion or exclusion? Arab teacher leaders’ experiences of faith visibility and cultural recognition in Western schools

Inclusion is widely promoted in Western education, yet how it is lived by minoritised professionals in everyday school life remains underexamined. This interpretive qualitative study investigates how Arab teacher leaders in Western schools experience and interpret inclusion in routine professional interactions, especially where faith visibility and gendered courtesy norms become salient, and how they respond when such moments generate tension or disagreement. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 teacher leaders working across Western countries. Data were analysed using NVivo, and findings indicate that inclusion is often experienced as conditional, enacted through boundary tests around greetings, touch, warmth, and sociability, and stabilised through sensemaking that can amplify incidents into reputational judgements. Participants also described intersectional scrutiny and credibility penalties that shape whose explanations count, constraining informal authority and teacher leadership legitimacy. The study extends inclusion and teacher leadership scholarship by theorising inclusion as a struggle over recognition and interpretive authority and by identifying everyday mechanisms through which legitimacy is granted or withdrawn in practice.