History, Rationality, Narrative, Imagery: A Four-Way Conversation on Teaching the Arab-Israeli Conflict

Caplan, Neil; Pearlman, Wendy; Sasley, Brent E.; Sucharov, Mira

doi:10.1080/15512169.2012.695980

Cited by 9 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…As educators, our role is to foster critical thinking skills. Although we are careful to guide our students through an array of ideas, narratives, and interpretations (Caplan et al 2012), between us we differ on the extent to which we choose to reveal our own ethnic, religious, or other subjectivity markers and policy preferences in the classroom. Nevertheless, through the subscriber-button option, our students can follow us on Twitter, can access some of our Facebook content, and certainly can read our blogs—some of which we assign.…”

Section: Imagined Audiencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Blogging Identities on Israel/Palestine: Public Intellectuals and Their Audiences

Sucharov

Sasley

2013

APSC

Self Cite

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Drawing on our research and blogging on Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we make three claims about the role of scholar-bloggers in the social media age. First, as scholar-bloggers with some degree of ethno-national attachments related to our area of expertise, we contend that we are well positioned to issue the kinds of critiques that may resonate more deeply due to the very subjectivity that some perceive as a liability. Second, through the melding of scholarly arguments with popular writing forms, scholar-bloggers are uniquely poised to be at the forefront of public engagement and political literacy both with social media publics and with students. Third, the subjectivity hazard is an intrinsic part of any type of research and writing, whether that writing is aimed at a scholarly audience or any other, and should not be used as an argument against academic involvement in social media. Ultimately, subjectivities of both consumers and producers can evolve through these highly interactive media, a dynamic that deserves further examination.T he explosion of social media in the last half decade has raised a number of questions about the place of academics in the digital sphere, especially those engaged in the fields of politics and international affairs. For many active citizens, academics included, social media-including blogs, Twitter, and even Facebook-is now the default channel for consuming, discussing, and analyzing news and current events. Increasingly, scholars active in these arenas contend that they are an effective means of teaching, research, and dissemination of knowledge (Carpenter and Drezner 2010;Pressman 2012;Sides 2011). Similarly, surveys of the discipline indicate that academics are coming to believe that blogging should count toward tenure and promotion decisions alongside traditional publications (Long et al. 2012, 64, 69). 1 Writing in PS as a response to John Sides (2011), Robert Farley (2013) has reflected on the growing acceptance of blogging as legitimate political science. While he agrees that the discipline should provide "incentives" for faculty members who blog (e.g., tenure and promotion), Farley argues that trying to fold blogging too much into the discipline's existing structures runs the risk of imposing rigid conditions and qualifications on bloggers that undermine the very benefits inherent in the nature of blogging (and, in our view, by extension tweeting, writing op-eds, and other social media engagement).We share Farley's view. But including blogging and other social media activity as "legitimate" political science scholarship opens the door to another possible concern, which, while it is has always been present in more traditional publishing venues, may be intensified by these nontraditional activities: the intrusion of a scholar's own nonacademic identity (whether ethnic, religious, racial, gender, or simply ideological leanings) into the give-and-take that marks social media activity.Whereas some people might argue that blogging and other social medi...

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Section: Imagined Audiencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Blogging Identities on Israel/Palestine: Public Intellectuals and Their Audiences

Sucharov

Sasley

2013

APSC

Self Cite

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“…Student imagination is ridden with stereotypes and distorted beliefs about the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. This imagination and its effects are the object of inquiry in a few works that also evaluate strategies to deal with the interference of prejudice about Middle Easterners in the classroom (Abboud, 2015; Caplan et al, 2012; Çavdar et al, 2019; Kazemzadeh, 1998; Stover, 2007; Tétrault, 1996). This stream of work shares the concern that the learning process does not fall prey to simple opinion in lieu of evidence-based argumentation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Orientalism is not my opinion: Decolonial teaching and the problem of credibility in IR courses with a MENA focus

Sanz

Prado

2021

Politics

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Teaching about the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region in politics or international studies courses in ‘the West’ is challenging due to the many stereotypes that inform students’ imagination. A common pedagogical purpose is to help students recognise their biases and work through them. This often renders the classroom a controversial place and the teacher suspect of lack of objectivity. The specialised literature points at ‘cognitive dissonance’ as an intervening factor. On occasions, cognitive dissonance leads to harm on teachers’ credibility. This article evaluates the question of credibility in two activities developed in International Relations (IR) undergraduate courses with a MENA focus, where students had to identify the impact of ‘Orientalism’ in the film Argo and in analyses of the ‘Arab Spring’. The article argues that to fully grasp episodes of cognitive dissonance and attending problems of teacher credibility, the disciplinary context in which learners are socialised into needs to be considered – in this case, IR. The article advocates the articulation of a student-centred decolonial teaching pedagogy that renders subjectivity an object of learning and, at the same time, prepares students to understand the potentialities and weaknesses of different IR paradigms.

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“…Those who teach gender within the MENA context have written about further challenges in teaching MENA-related issues in American colleges (Abu Lughod 2020; Caplan et al 2012; El-Shakry 2020; Haddad and Schwedler 2013; Kazemzadeh 1998; Stover 2007; Tetrault 1996). Scholars have offered a variety of approaches to the study of gender in the MENA.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Teaching about Gender and Politics of the MENA: Undermining Bias and Introducing a Framework

Çavdar

2023

Pol & Gen

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As instructors, we are quite familiar with students coming to our classes loaded with preconceived notions. For instance, some believe that male instructors are better at math, while others think that markets, if left on their own, will produce wealth for everyone. Teaching about gender and politics of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region at an American college is no different. Students come to class rarely knowing the basic facts, history, or culture of the region, mostly because the K–12 educational curriculum in the United States does not typically cover the MENA region. However, students’ lack of formal education on the MENA region does not mean they are unexposed to its issues, which are frequent topics in American media. Unfortunately, students often hold misconceptions and deep biases about women, culture, and politics in the region, and these misconceptions impair the learning process by acting as a “psychological block” for the students. As Haddad and Schwedler (2013, 211) put it, “our years of teaching undergraduates have taught us how images of harems, pyramids, and desert warriors wielding sabers on camelback still shape many Americans’ perceptions of the region.” This essay discusses some of the challenges that instructors teaching gender and politics in the MENA region face in an American college classroom. No single course can eradicate old paradigms and prejudices. However, this piece proposes some strategies for effective teaching about gender and politics of the MENA region.

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History, Rationality, Narrative, Imagery: A Four-Way Conversation on Teaching the Arab-Israeli Conflict

Cited by 9 publications

References 13 publications

Blogging Identities on Israel/Palestine: Public Intellectuals and Their Audiences

Blogging Identities on Israel/Palestine: Public Intellectuals and Their Audiences

Orientalism is not my opinion: Decolonial teaching and the problem of credibility in IR courses with a MENA focus

Teaching about Gender and Politics of the MENA: Undermining Bias and Introducing a Framework

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