The Students Have Spoken

In previous posts I have expressed my views and experiences of student protests in Oman. After reading an article urging students to return to classes in the Muscat Daily newspaper last week, I flew up at 4 in the morning to dash off a comment to the article online. Today it showed up in the print edition's Letters to the Editor. Nutshell: I love my students. I love Oman. I am a firm believer in the power of self-directed learning. And we as educators have our work cut out for us. Here is the letter (or find the online version here). 

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Levelling the Playing Field. Seriously.

Just about the most serious thing it's possible for one person to do with another is to play a game.

- Tom Chatfield, Fun Inc. 

I have been in a frenzy of reading about games and learning recently (more about that in a later post).  While reading about the mesmerising power of play, and its magical effect on learning, I had a pang of guilt that my own core class had become so serious. Our core courses are a rather serious business, covering academic writing, spelling, grammar, a project and study skills in the short span of eight hours a week. All this is higher-level work done with students who are generally still false beginners due to an unrelenting legacy system.  The Herculean task of mastering academic report writing with students who spell their names differently every day tends to lose its levity easily. 

The recent student protests did a great deal to change the atmosphere, but learning engagement was still very low. Then a miracle happened. 

A neighbouring class challenged my students to a football match. They arranged everything, and I just showed up to watch. It was a staggering realisation that the agile, capable youths who had set up this match and played it with such focus were the self-same students who often staggered into class late without a pen, or the classroom skills to excuse themselves. It was sobering to think that on a football field I am far less capable than they are in an academic report. 

This experience did more than remind me how great the differing strengths of individuals can be. It also brought a new team spirit to the classroom. Even more surprising is the rapport that has grown with "weaker" students who are now enthused. One student literally went from sheer apathy, side talking and a failing grade to enthusiasm, concentration, a decent passing mark and - AND! conversing with classmates in English before lessons. All this in a matter of a week. Other factors are at work, of course: he has been spending time with new friends and practicing writing with the class buff. Yet at the core is a change of heart. 

All this because of a football match? Well, of course it doesn't necessarily have to be a match. But the power of a game, team spirit, caring and authentic communication are a quick and powerful transformer of what happens in the classroom. I am still stunned. 

Image: mtcleroux, from the match

Sabbatical: Fruitfully Fallow

Image: Rusty Plough by Marie-Therese Le Roux

Farmers know that land yields the best harvest if it is allowed to lie fallow, or unused, after several seasons of production. The academic world has long given its great minds the same privilege in the form of the sabbatical. So much more than a holiday, a sabbatical is a hiatus that refreshes mind and soul with a purposeful respite.

It is promising to see that this wise tradition is extending to the wider world of work. An increasing number of corporations now include sabbaticals in their employees’ career trajectory, while many provide the option as a way of retaining and developing top human resources. A few days ago The Sabbatical Mindset blog reported that 21 of Fortune magazine’s 100 Companies to Work For offered (paid) sabbaticals as employee benefits in 2011, and suggested that it is an upward trend.

The trend certainly isn’t hurt by a growing lobby for sabbaticals targeting both employees and companies. Your Sabbatical is a website that assists companies in implementing a sabbatical policy, and equips employees to campaign for sabbaticals where these are not yet in place. Resources for planning an optimal (and corporately accountable) sabbatical are also provided. The Career Break Site is a more informal site aimed mostly at employees planning for a change of pace.

My personal interest in sabbaticals? I am sure my agenda here is crystal clear. The idea has always intrigued me, and I have always promised myself to take a break in my seventh year of work. Yet I never really kept count, having held occupations like balloon seller, artist-a-porter, tour guide and of course English teacher of multiple ranks. A few weeks back it struck me that I will soon complete my sixth year in the higher education system in Oman. It is time to put my money where my mouth is. A sabbatical does take planning, and above all, a great and noble purpose. And that is what I’ll be working on.

What great and noble purpose? That is a great question to ponder. Any suggestions? 

The Arab World Uprising: Implications for Education on the Ground

Students gather peacefully for the outcome of negotiations to be announced.

As People Power continues to sweep the Arab World, a teacher stationed here cannot avoid asking what this means for education. This was a comfortably theoretical question until six days ago, when our campus cafeteria suddenly transformed into a thronging Speaker’s Corner, with students on chairs flinging their turbans in the air and chants beginning to rise. Although rumblings in Oman had subsided, my immediate pulse-racing assumption was that this was political. It turned out to be far more significant.

On my campus, students had harnessed the spirit of empowerment and rallied together in an unprecedented call for – wait for it – improved educational conditions. In a tertiary institution with no student union and few formal associations, there had been no channel for this until it spontaneously emerged this week. Granted, it was an incoherent, ineloquent and slightly immature uprising. Yet its very existence tells me that students have awoken to a sense of personal responsibility (see my musings on that here).

Over the past four-odd years local higher education institutes have been implementing an array of top-down strategies to secure their pending accreditation under the Oman Academic Accreditation Authority. Among the myriad resulting buzzwords, “graduate attributes” guide our educational process. One key attribute is for students to take responsibility for their own learning – an aim in which I admit limited success. The events of the past days show that learner responsibility is now emerging organically from grassroots level. It seems that students, too, are now on board to work towards world class standards within a local context. And that of their own accord.  

The groundswell of popular participation in the Arab World has many complex facets. As a guest I will not pretend to understand it all (unlike the over-excitable international mass media and hype-happy Twitter mob far across the big blue blameless sea). What it does tell me, as an educator committed to the fulfilment of individual and collective potential, is that the youth are awakening to the fact that they themselves are responsible for their learning and their lives. The educational partnership that results from this demands the very best from me, my students and our organization.

In my last post I wished for my students’ intelligent and wise harnessing of the spirit of these times. I could not have imagined that its impact would be so profound and personal for them. And I could not possibly have imagined just how my esteem for them would grow.

After four days of peaceful and friendly, but very real, disruption to classes, students gathered peacefully as the results of negotiations were announced (image above). Reasonable demands were met where possible, while others had been referred to task teams and relevant authorities. College leadership handled the entire incident very positively, and acknowledged that it pointed out areas for improvement within the system.

Note: My entire hat collection off to Dhofari Gucci for unparalleled English language coverage of the situation in Dhofar. 


Update, Monday March 7: Rumours of a leadership shake-up are rife but have not been officially confirmed. I am personally aware of the dedicated work of so many of the educators involved, and hope that any changes will be to the benefit of all these individuals, and to education at large. We each have our sphere of influence, and I trust that we will exercise our powers within it first, before casting stones. 



Update, Wednesday, March 9: A few dedicated students have been in class for what have been very interactive, personal and meaningful sessions, although these have been interrupted by gangs of riled-up students pressuring them to leave. I almost cried with pride when my fifteen students convinced one noisy mob that they would join protests as soon as our "chat" was over. Alongside  is a picture of my students taking photos of the whiteboard, since they didn't want to provoke confrontation by openly taking notes. 


I wholeheartedly support the awakening of public participation. Yet I should stress that this makes education, wisdom, common sense and compassion all the more essential. Like my students, I want a great college, a great future and a great country. To make it happen, we all need to take our new insight and passion and get back to class and use them. 


Final Update: Students returned to classes on Saturday, March 12, even though protests persisted on other campuses around the country. Despite having missed almost two weeks of instruction, the authenticity of English communication brought about by these events seems to have elevated students' language use, alertness and general eagerness to learn and take a hand in their own lives. All has been peaceful and for the greater good. As they say round these parts, Alhamdulillah.