New Pedagogical Imperatives in Middle East Studies: MES300, Emotionality, and a Critical SoTL Case Study

[This article was originally written in Summer 2023, before Israel’s genocide in Gaza began. At the end, readers can find a postscript on “Classroom Emotionality and Student Learning in a Time of Genocide.”]

As evidenced by recent initiatives, scholars in Middle East studies (MES) are beginning to show a greater interest in pedagogy. That said, classroom teaching and learning remain subsidiary to most MES scholars’ research-focused agendas. More than relegating pedagogy to a lower status, I believe this imbalance has constrained the kinds of pedagogical work undertaken in MES to the detriment of the field and our students.

In this article, I first discuss two recent and popular initiatives in MES pedagogy: The Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI) and Omnia El Shakry’s edited volume, Teaching and Understanding the Middle East. Timely and popular, the website and monograph are nonetheless limited in their approach, representative of MES scholars’ focus on subject expertise and resource curation to the neglect of other pedagogical imperatives. To address these limitations, I review two concepts—Scholarly Teaching and the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning (SoTL)—that MES scholars might consider in advancing teaching and learning in the field.

Finally, I make a case for MES scholars to engage in Critical SoTL work. Drawing on my Critical SoTL study on emotion in the MES classroom, I provide a working blueprint for MES-SoTL intersections that move us beyond our teaching to approaches that center student learning in MES. In doing so, I contend we are better able to understand our field both inside and outside the classroom.

The State of Pedagogy in MES: Subject Expertise and Resource Curation

The Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI) has become an important resource for many MES instructors. The website contains a plethora of curated resources, including series on “Essential Readings,” “Engaging Books,” and more. The site also links to Jadaliyya podcast interviews with scholars on their research as well as a Middle East Learn and Teach Series which, in part, again collects and comments on materials related to different contexts (i.e., Syria, Iraq, etc.). In addition, there are several useful modules in production such as a Survey Tool to help educators locate resources, an Archives Module containing primary sources, and an intriguing Knowledge Production Project (KPP) that “endeavors to gather, organize, and make available for analysis all knowledge produced on the Middle East since 1979.”

While undoubtedly useful, MESPI’s limited scope is clear: subject experts curate resources for others to draw on in their teaching and research. Of the six existing MESPI modules and fourteen modules in progress, only one—a prospective Module on Teaching Methods— suggests a move to think beyond resource curation.

MESPI’s proclivity for resource curation is then replicated on Jadaliyya’s Pedagogy page with the revolving banner, as of 23 June 2023, switching between two MESPI “Peer-Reviewed Articles” lists, a Publisher’s Roundtable discussion, a celebration of Michael Gilsenan’s career, and a piece on the Kurdish Studies Journal. To be clear, none of the articles focus on teaching or learning. Rather, they explore resource curation and/or knowledge production in the field more broadly. As helpful as these may be for some instructors, the paucity of engagement with teaching and student learning on the pedagogy page of one of the most popular MES websites says much about our field and its valuation of pedagogical work.

Omnia El Shakry’s edited volume, Understanding and Teaching the Modern Middle East, has similarly shone a much-needed spotlight on teaching in the field, but likewise divulges a limited perspective on pedagogical labour. With pieces by Ussama Makdisi on sectarianism, Sherene Seikaly on Israel/Palestine, Darryl Li on the Global War on Terror (GWOT), and more, the chapters in “Understanding and Teaching Historical Content” and “Understanding and Teaching the Contemporary Middle East” are a hodgepodge of reflections by leading lights in our field. Some chapters are mainly syntheses of the scholar’s well-known research with varying degrees of re-orientation towards teaching. Others occasionally describe resources and how they were employed as well as challenges in teaching certain subjects in question. There were also chapters or large portions therein dedicated to narrative histories and historiographical debates. Part 4, “Methods and Sources,” attempts to shift the conversation, but, except for Ziad Abu-Rish’s final chapter, most still center on available (re)sources and/or historiography.

Personally, I found many chapters interesting, frequently empathizing with our common plights and noting resources I could employ in my classrooms. But not all chapters are helpful to seasoned instructors in transforming their teaching practice. At an informal discussion among educators at MESA’s annual meeting, many praised the volume while nonetheless questioning its practical utility to instructors. The monograph is sorely needed in our field. We have much to learn from each other and must share expertise and insights. I might suggest, however, that the volume teaches critical MES educators less about teaching (and even less about student learning) and more about how MES experts comprehend pedagogical work and what they consider important to classroom instruction.

The above approaches to pedagogy are standard in MES and many other fields and disciplines. Teaching wisdom is presumed to derive almost exclusively from instructors’ classroom experience, research training, and subject expertise. Admittedly necessary, those sources are insufficient on their own, betraying a limited perception of teaching aptitude and care.  Although we often implicitly self-present as teaching experts, our work frequently fails to engage with pedagogical literature from Education and other relevant fields. MES pedagogy is then largely reduced to resource curation or the dissemination of untested teaching methods. Relatedly, the emphasis on subject expertise and our knowledge forestalls a crucial process: focused on content and how we teach, instructors in MES and other fields often fail to ask crucial questions on how and what students learn in the classroom.

Scholarly Teaching, Student Learning, and the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning (SoTL)

Many MES scholars are effective, even celebrated teachers, but even a brief taxonomy of scholarly teaching principles can reveal shortcomings in our practice. Ask yourself: To what extent do you meet the following criteria of a Scholarly Teacher?

• Evidence-based Practice: A scholarly teacher bases instructional decisions on significant and reliable evidence, research on teaching and learning, and well-reasoned theory.
• Reflective Practice: A scholarly teacher engages in a regular and purposeful process of inquiry to discover personal assumptions about teaching and learning and the effects of same on teaching-related decisions.
• Course / Curricular Design: A scholarly teacher selects, shapes, and designs course materials and teaching strategies in ways that align course goals, student learning outcomes, learning activities, and assessment of learning.
• Ethics and Responsibility: A scholarly teacher demonstrates ethical and responsible teaching practices centered on intellectual honesty, the development and empowerment of students, and equity and inclusion.
• Subject-Matter Expertise and Pedagogical Knowledge: A scholarly teacher maintains a high level of proficiency in subject-matter expertise and pedagogically-related knowledge.[i]

While many MES scholars might dabble across these categories, I believe most focus, by choice or institutional coercion, on the latter three (albeit unevenly) to the detriment of the first two. We should note as well that “Subject Matter Expertise” is placed last in this taxonomy, deemed necessary but insufficient when used without research and reflection on teaching and pedagogy. The failure to engage in educational research and regularized reflective practice on teaching might be due to a dearth of time, humility, or incentive (e.g., lack of recognition on job/tenure/merit applications), but it is a failure. Put simply, many if not most of us do not meet the criteria of a scholarly teacher who supplements their subject expertise with continuous research and reflection on pedagogy itself.

In addition to pursuing scholarly teaching, I believe we need to engage, if warily, with another field of study: the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning (SoTL), which my university cites as the “systematic, deliberate and methodological inquiry into teaching (behaviors/practices, attitudes, and values) to improve student learning.”[ii] In effect, SoTL asks us to become scholarly teachers and to evaluate our practices with a focus on what students learn from them. By itself, SoTL is no panacea. To my mind, the field is rife with pseudo-scientific studies that uncritically nourish the neoliberal academy and its conceptions of teaching and learning.[iii] Boxed in by the narrow frameworks created by grant, tenure, and merit committees, SoTL researchers must demonstrate clear application and ‘impact,’ often through a recourse to study designs and survey data that quantify and generalize students’ classroom experiences, effacing their complexity in the process. Learning models and new additions to the acronym production line can all demonstrate ‘impact’ and be easily incorporated into syllabi and strategic plans to show some veneer of care and application. But they have been of little value to me and arguably ward off many potential SoTL researchers for whom they might appear irrelevant, or even harmful, to the genuine concerns that underly teaching in our fields.

Criticisms notwithstanding, I believe SoTL’s call to refocus on student learning is sound, revealing paths MES scholars might traverse in moving beyond resource curation and an artifice of scholarly teaching. For example, we often see presentations and (minor) publications on teaching methods in MES. Although I have learned a lot from some of these outputs, many fail to ask and substantively answer a fundamental question: How can we know if these approaches are effective or having their intended effect on student learning? Some might use course evaluations (with their built-in biases and deficiencies), but these are not geared to evaluate a specific approach/method; others might rely on anecdotal evidence or perception; and others may not even attempt to answer the question. In many cases, there is no real inquiry into the methods’ efficacy and, worse still, no systematic attempt to understand student learning.

It is incumbent on us to develop and share teaching methods, as is being encouraged by MESPI, the El Shakry volume, and a plethora of CUMES-sponsored panels at MESA meetings.[iv] But the development and dissemination of teaching methods without their systematic evaluation is again indicative of the problem laid out earlier: an overreliance on our perceived expertise.

In that vein, and perhaps most significantly for MES, Scholarly Teaching and SoTL call for us to reconsider the primacy of our subject expertise in course creation and classroom practice. Placed into conversation with multidisciplinary pedagogical literatures, our subject expertise becomes one piece of a larger puzzle, simultaneously pushing us to think beyond our resources and methods to student learning. The instructor then is partway displaced as the expert arbiter. In practice, we shift away from questions of how and what we believe students need to learn to queries on how and what they learn from our teachings.

MES and Critical SoTL: A Case Study on Emotionality and Emotive Writing in the MES Classroom

Full disclosure: I am in a tenure-track ‘Educational Leadership’ position in the Department of History at the University of British Columbia (UBC). I am therefore incentivized to pursue scholarly teaching and SoTL in my discipline (History) and field (MES). Trained as a research historian, I struggled often with the shift to a pedagogical focus. Scholarly Teaching made immediate sense, but I resisted SoTL for a long time. Beyond my (sometimes) irrational mistrust of surveys, universalizing models, and quantitative data, I was dismayed by SoTL studies that seemed at best superfluous and, at worst, uncritical contributors to the neoliberalization of university education.

Given the above, I am not calling for us to uncritically embrace SoTL nor to undertake SoTL for the mere sake of it, as is often done. And while there can be utility in conducting minor SoTL studies on student reception of a primary source or the effectiveness of a certain ‘active learning’ technique, I suggest instead a more significant approach that might appeal to critical MES educators with less professional incentive for pedagogical labor: embrace Scholarly Teaching and a Critical SoTL in MES.

More than simply shifting from resource curation to investigating student learning, I believe Critical SoTL work should simultaneously a) query the foundations of our field and the conventions that delimit knowledge production; b) explore what underlies, constricts, and/or animates teaching in our field and others; and c) challenge an academy that frequently constrains radical, transformational work by instructors and students alike. In this way, we interweave research and teaching in a more fruitful manner than resource curation while attenuating SoTL’s less desirable aspects.[v]

To provide an example, I will discuss my first attempt at applying a Critical SoTL lens to MES through a study conducted in UBC MES’ core course, MES300 The Middle East: Critical Questions & Debates. More than an introduction to the Middle East, I wanted students to grapple with the troubled history of MES and the Middle East, and then actively contribute to the creation of a more just and equitable field of study. I built the course with novel emotionality, social justice, and critical hope interventions to transform students’ understanding of MES and their role in the academy. Administered in the Winter 2021 and 2022 cohorts, I titled the SoTL study “Emotion(ality) and Emotive Writing: Assessing the Impacts in/on the Middle East Studies Classroom.” Here I hope to provide a working blueprint of this Critical SoTL-MES project from conception to dissemination:[vi]

1. Start with your big questions or concerns. In a way, this project was ten years in the making. By training, I am a scholar of memory and conflict who teaches courses on the modern Middle East, the GWOT, traumatic memory, and other subjects that can elicit high emotion. Ever since I began teaching, and long before my SoTL study, students in these courses often reported feeling depressed, angry, helpless, fatigued, and more. I often felt the same. Worse still, many Middle Eastern students confided that they felt stifled in their classrooms, unable to express their thoughts honestly and emotionally lest they be written off as “biased” by instructors and classmates.

All the comments clearly illustrated that emotion was ever-present in the MES classroom. Despite some of my early efforts, they were still being suppressed in an academic environment that delegitimizes emotive responses in the name of “objectivity” and particularly when expressed by racialized persons with personal stakes in the subjects at hand. The comments raised the question of my role as an instructor in suppressing and cultivating certain emotions that impacted students’ wellbeing in addition to what they learned, the way they learned, and their ability/desire to continue critically engaging with the Middle East. They also reflected and exacerbated my own sense of anger and despair when studying the region. Add in the pandemic’s effects, History’s lingering conservatism, and increasing attacks on radical, progressive politics in the academy, and I was convinced: dealing with emotion was vital to forging a more honest and productive (MES) classroom, challenging unjust academic conventions, and perhaps even addressing emotional wellbeing.

2. Do your research. I read widely on emotion and related subjects in education but grew wary of studies promising easy universalizing fixes. We should examine but not linger on these kinds of works. Like others, I was most inspired by critical pedagogues like Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and others. I wanted to manifest their diverse reflections on emotion, (critical) hope, and activism in academia in my MES classrooms, but questions remained:  How could I translate inspiration and theory into specific classroom practices? What adaptations could/should I make for our field and MES300’s subject matter? How could I integrate emotion in ways that enhance learning and engagement? And most worryingly, how might I create emotionality interventions that did not (further) traumatize my students? In searching for answers, I found little apart from the commonsense generalities of ‘trauma-informed teaching’ and alike concepts. A handful of Writing Studies scholars had written on classroom emotionality interventions, but they did not speak to the MES classroom; they provided a meager foundation to build on. Excitingly, however, the clear gaps in the literature signified there was important work to be done.

3. (Re)Design interventions. For many years, I experimented with informal techniques (i.e., modeling vulnerability) and minor positionality and memoir assignments. These approaches were often veiled attempts to break students free from conventional thinking on History, MES, and academic knowledge production more broadly. But for a more honest MES classroom to emerge, I needed to be candid with students about our aims in MES300. Only then could they embrace the project of forging a more just and equitable field and academic classroom. I made emotion, social justice, and critical hope central to the syllabus and early weeks. I also designed new interventions:

• A major ‘Emotive Writing’ Assignment
• A major Critical Hope Assignment
• The inclusion of ‘Emotive Short Reads’ by MES scholars/activists paired with other kinds of scholarship
• Dedicated times for open, emotive discussions, written and oral, with and without instructor participation
• Students as Partners (SaP) course- and community-building activities

4. Evaluate the interventions. How could I investigate something as elusive as emotion in the classroom? How would I assess the interventions’ impacts on student learning and engagement? These were difficult questions, and relying solely on my own perception was not an option with such a sensitive subject. I thus applied for and received a SoTL Seed Fund grant to study the interventions’ impacts on students. The project description read:

In MES300 The Middle East: Critical Questions & Debates, students examine the troubled history of Middle East Studies (MES) and then work to decolonize and resituate the field within a social justice framework. This project evaluates the impact of emotion(ality) in MES300 and beyond. In particular, it assesses the transformative potential of classroom emotion(ality) and emotive writing on students’ ability to a) produce inclusive and just visions of the Middle East and MES; b) upend inequitable academic conventions and modes of expression; c) attend to emotional wellbeing in courses with traumatic subject matter (and in fraught times more generally).

The grant paid for a SoTL expert to help devise survey and focus group questionnaires, complete ethics board applications, administer the surveys and focus groups, and collate the data.

5. Study data, reflect, and revise interventions. Critical SoTL study results should not be an end unto themselves nor a mere means to produce publications. They should first be an invitation to reflect and revise with the goal of improving student learning. A cursory glance at the MES300 survey and focus group results revealed the interventions’ transformative potential as well as overwhelming student support. Closer inspection of the qualitative and quantitative data, however, revealed areas for improvement and concern (see #6). Consequently, I gathered a Students as Partners (SaP) team composed of myself and three former MES300 students. We collaboratively examined the study data and worked to address the major concerns. We revised the major assignments and in-class activities, and created written guides to help future students thrive in this novel course. I ran a revised MES300 in Winter 2022 and re-administered the course surveys to gather fresh data. We continue to modify the interventions.

6. Disseminate Findings. Finally, we need to share our results. With the second round of data collection concluded, my dissemination efforts are only beginning, but I believe Critical SoTL publications should reveal successes as well as the challenges of doing this kind of work. My findings are sometimes prescriptive, promoting an open embrace of classroom emotionality based on the impacts on students’ understanding of the Middle East, MES and academia. But, to list only a few examples, I believe my study also reveals cautionary tales on how (not) to broach or study emotionality in the (MES) classroom, questions on how we should proceed given some differential impacts on Middle Eastern and non-Middle Eastern students, and guarded ruminations on students’ emotional wellbeing when they reported, for example, that emotive components made them feel at once liberated and anxious, empowered and vulnerable.

The results, in short, are messy, revealing more questions than answers about classroom emotionality and the MES classroom. This might diminish the study’s “impact” factor given the interventions cannot be easily transposed to different classrooms, fields, or university contexts. To my mind, however, a Critical SoTL mentality should obviate a copy-and-paste approach. Instead, I hope my findings will push instructors in MES and other fields to question the place of emotion in their classrooms (and research) in addition to what they feel shapes learning in their own (sub)fields and disciplines.

Conclusion

Many MES scholars are already doing meaningful, even radical work in their classrooms. The dark history of our field, the politics of our subject matter, and public imaginings of the “Middle East” can constrict our work at the same time as offering innumerable possibilities for transformative teaching. But given the dearth of publications detailing this kind of work, we should question whether it is being done in a researched manner and/or with an aim to evaluating and disseminating impacts on student learning. With the help of MESPI, CUMES, and scholars like El Shakry, our field is beginning to contemplate pedagogy in a more substantive manner. But publications and presentations largely remain limited to resource curation, historiographical debates, and reflections on untested methods.

Not everyone has time for a large SoTL study or access to funds that pay for SoTL assistance. And we need to be wary of SoTL’s neoliberal underpinnings. But engaging with Scholarly Teaching principles and deliberating on the intersection of MES and a Critical SoTL can start moving us beyond resource curation and other well-worn paths. Even a subtle, philosophical shift from a focus on our teaching to student learning in MES can generate crucial questions about our classrooms: What do students actually learn in our classrooms and from our approaches/methods? What do they carry with them upon leaving? What facilitates/hinders student learning about and engagement with the ‘Middle East’? What lies beneath the surface of our syllabi, readings, and classroom activities?

Most importantly, what enlivens our field, work, and classrooms? Emotionality, social justice, and critical hope spoke to my experiences and engagements with students, but other instructors or students may see different priorities. It is incumbent that we contemplate this question, individually and collaboratively. For in attempting to answer it, we do more than understand how and what students learn about the Middle East. Rather, we start to connect our research and teaching in a more consequential manner; one that helps us better understand our own journeys and imperatives as students in this field.

Postscript: Classroom Emotionality and Student Learning in a Time of Genocide (July 2024)

I taught MES300 The Middle East: Critical Questions & Debates for the fourth time in Spring 2024. Israel’s genocide in Gaza was, we wrongly believed, at its frightful zenith. A volatile campus environment was yielding new stressors each day. And university administrators were testing, at turns, our right to academic freedom and professors’ resolve to educate on, let alone speak out against, the atrocities.

Outside of teaching, and like many others in our field, my days were spent frantically responding to proliferating crises, supporting students and faculty in need, and working with others to organize events to educate the community on the genocide and the threats to our university. When I wasn’t teaching or engaging in the above, I was often crying in my office while reading about Israel’s daily barbarisms and raging at the Global North’s hypocrisy. I was also admittedly fearful of what MES300 would yield in this environment. To put it bluntly, I was an emotional wreck; a state constrained only by a further feeling (guilt) that I had no right to be one. 

For all these reasons though, I doubled down on MES300, its social justice orientation and embrace of emotionality. As the university sought to foreclose criticism of Israel and promote a specious “neutrality,” there was a palpable need for a more honest discourse on the Middle East and the university at large. Forefronted by the genocide, MES300’s questions on what it meant to be an intellectual, how to change our interlocutors, and find community and higher purpose in academia took on even deeper meaning.

But it was also clear that students (and I) needed a space where we could speak honestly and openly about the genocide, the impacts of which were being felt more deeply by some than others. We used MES300’s emotionality interventions and assignments to affirm the legitimacy of our feelings (grief, despair, rage, even hope) against that false “neutrality” and collaboratively explored how this embrace could produce a more genuine and ethical scholarship. MES300 became then a refuge, at least for me and numerous students, at a place and time of near-unremitting hypocrisy and unfeeling. Together, we worked to forge a space where we could consciously couple affect to academia, not for the sake of self-pity but in the service of others.

Teaching MES300 during the genocide largely reified my prior study’s findings on classroom emotionality and student learning. More than emotion being ever-present in our classrooms, a mass of students came to understand that acknowledging and expressing emotion was essential to classroom learning, ethical scholarship, and mental and emotional wellbeing. This is a complicated matter but goes far beyond simple catharsis to difficult questions on what might facilitate a concomitant learning and healing.[vii] Given our diverse contexts, courses, and privileges, we cannot all do this kind of work to the same degree.[viii] But I am more convinced than ever that a wholesale failure to engage emotion in the (MES) classroom is not simply a disservice to students but a form of injustice, especially for minority students and/or those who have stakes in historical and contemporary traumas like genocide. It is also, as it always has been, a perverse distortion of scholarly work that reifies for students a banal but dangerous vision of education, shorn of feeling and meaning, and in line with that promoted by far too many craven administrators.

Second, my prior criticisms of MES’ emphasis on resource curation stand, but it is clear we need more of it to educate publics and help other educators teach effectively on Palestine and the genocide. Likewise, the question of how we teach should not be ignored. It is ever-present as university administrations seek to circumscribe our courses’ content and methods. But shifting the emphasis from what we (think we) know to understanding how and what students learn is an important starting point to these crucial initiatives. It helps us better understand, for example, which resources on Palestine students and non-specialist educators need, how to best grapple with traumatic subject matter, and what we can do to more effectively combat the bigotry and apathy that made this genocide and other atrocities possible in the first place.

I want to end, again, with the question of why we teach, which has too often been assumed as either self-evident or a mere professional obligation. Israel’s genocide has crystalized or shifted many instructors’ understanding of the classroom space, cowing some into silence but emboldening innumerable others to reclaim the classroom as a radical space for self- and collective transformation. We should share methods and principles that guide this latter endeavor. But I suggest we also take inspiration from a less conventional source tied to the genocide: the student encampments, which I view as model classrooms that challenge, among other things, the (over-)professionalization of higher education in addition to flawed assumptions on student learning and emotionality. The genocide and encampments are a call to instructors to remember our vocation beyond profession and question again and again why we teach. Conducting this inquiry, and doing so in the classroom with students, can do more than demystify scholarly work for them. In the shadow of genocide, and against overlapping cultures of silence, this labor helps reconstitute—for them and us—research, teaching, and advocacy work as symbiotic and mutually informed, as affective and necessarily so.

*I wish to thank UBC’s SoTL Seed Fund and Students as Partners Course Redesign Fund for their support of my projects.