Pedagogy in Practice: Training Teachers in the Arab Region

Pedagogy in Practice aims to build a local program based on our previous EdJAM research for training teachers, bringing together insights from our Palestinian and Jordanian counterparts, writing academically and with a view to policy, and sharing the final output with the public. These will deepen the legacy of the project, as well as offer opportunities to expand the teacher training program in the future and support our training manual to remain in the public domain beyond the end of the project. The impact of the project will be both direct through the teacher training itself, as well as indirect through lasting public resources.

This project aims to:

1. build a program for training public school teachers about how the violent past may be taught through indigenous history, literature, and language;
2. implement the program over two seminars in Arabic, based on the project’s curriculum and pedagogy, for 30 teachers in Jordan;
3. host a conference in Amman about how teaching about the violent past may be incorporated into schools and other institutions of education, including universities, institutes, and language centres;
4. share the experience by publishing the teacher training manual itself, an academic paper, and a policy report.  “Pedagogy in Practice” is based on the direction of our current EdJAM work.

As it develops an educational program which tackles the violent past through creative and critical tools in an intimate and supportive learning environment, the project will contribute towards EdJAM’s goal of enabling collaboration, learning, sharing and impact in the following ways:

Collaboration: We will collaborate with our Palestine counterpart and three other organizations in the Levant in implementing the program itself and through the conference. Given the similarities between the Jordanian and Palestinian context, both historically and demographically, such collaborative work would be invaluable for the success of the project.

Learning: by building a program for training teachers and implementing it, we will deepen our knowledge about how the violent past may be approached through the formative stage of secondary schools. In particular, the academic output will be an opportunity to think thoroughly about the place of our intervention in the larger field of critical pedagogy in secondary school education.

Sharing: The conference and teacher-training manual will be our primary output to share with national and regional audiences; the academic publication will allow us to reach a broader international audience and think comparatively about strategies and methodologies across contexts.

Impact: This project aims to increase the impact of the EdJAM network by training teachers, collaborating with other projects and stakeholders, and rendering our work visible to the government through the policy report. It will continue the work we began in the initial EdJAM project and deepen its impact by getting to the stage of training teachers.

Results

This project is concerned with the past and ongoing forms of violence experienced by the vast majority of Jordan’s current population. The city of Amman was built by generations of refugees, each with its own relationship to violence. This modern history begins with late nineteenth and early twentieth century Circassians and Armenians fleeing religious and ethnic persecution in the Caucuses and Ottoman Empire to mid-twentieth century Palestinian and Iraqi refugees entering the city in successive waves.

In the past two decades, a record number of Syrians has entered due to the Syrian civil war, in addition to smaller but active communities of Ethiopian and Sudanese migrant workers. The strength of Jordanian nationalism has not allowed these identities to come to terms with past violence. Given the complex political and demographic dynamic in Jordan which values a straightforward narrative of nationalism over reckoning with the past, there are nearly no outlets for Jordan’s myriad refugee identities to come to terms with explicit, memorial, and structural violence.

The history of civil dissent and political opposition to the status quo has been met, especially in the 1970s, with rarely acknowledged repression by the state. The void of expression has been subsequently mediated, in the aftermath of International Monetary Fund (IMF) mandated changes in the economy, by an increasingly market-oriented culture, which has transformed Jordan’s diverse groups into an increasingly homogenous consumer society. The superficial antidotes of nationalism and market freedom have led to the suppression on the part of the population at large of its violent past.

The educational sector, and particularly public-school curricula and teacher training programs, are in an especially dire state. The educational sector focuses almost exclusively on Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects at the expense of the humanities and social sciences. This is compounded, even in STEM subjects, by a school and university culture which awards rote memorization and the application of imported methodologies instead of creative, critical, and reflective engagement with personal and national identity.

Despite these issues, Jordan has maintained a degree of stability not found in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the West Bank. Indeed, many refugees end up in Amman due to such relative stability. As a result, Amman is an especially fertile and strategic city for a serious reckoning to take place with both past violence and the geographically proximate conflicts which have led to the displacement of most of its refugees.

“Pedagogy in Practice” intervened in this state of affairs by building a teacher-training which tackled the violent past through a humanities curriculum and special pedagogy. The project brought insights from our Palestinian and Jordanian counterparts, and developed academic and policy documents to be shared with the public. These elements will offer opportunities to expand the teacher training program in the future, as the manual will remain in the public domain beyond the end of the project.

Further information:  

• Project Website: www.ictamman.org/edjam (Website will be updated with published articles and resources)
• Book chapter, titled “Teaching the Humanities as a Mode of Reckoning with the Violent Past: A case from Jordan” for an EdJAM edited volume to be published by Bristol University Press (Publication planned for 2025)

Meet the team: