ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the story of 15 young Bedouin women who were admitted to a special programme called the Window to the Academy at the Department of Education of the Ben-Gurion University in Israel. It presents the crossing concrete and expected borders on the way to higher education and crossing unexpected borders, which the participants discovered only when they entered university. Taking into consideration the cultural limitation of being Bedouin women and higher education students, they constructed their new combined identity as Bedouin women/students. In Israel, Arab-Bedouins are a Muslim minority in a Jewish state and belong to a culture with strong hierarchical-collectivist values. Fulfilling the dreams meant crossing the border and going too far in terms of their families and social convention. The Window to the Academy programme aimed to serve as a scaffold to help the Bedouin students safely cross these borders.
