Cohort March 2022: Faculty of Arts – Pheroze Unwalla, Sophie Roth, Magdalen Hamilton, Yasmina Seifeddine
Project background
MES 300 “The Middle East: Critical Questions & Debates” is the core course in UBC’s new Middle East Studies (MES) program. Now in its second year, the course is distinctive for centering student voices and encouraging a radical embrace of emotion(ality), community building, and critical hope as a means of bettering the field and fostering new visions of the Middle East. The program and course, however, are in their infancy. Through Students as Partners (SaP) work, we see a real opportunity to further deliver on MES’ mission to be a program built by and for students. Most importantly, we believe a SaP approach is needed to evaluate, enhance, and refine a course that aims to empower students and transform their learning experiences.
Project Details
We will focus on three MES 300 components:
- MES 300’s classroom emotionality and emotive writing interventions have been analyzed in 2021W through a SOTL Seed Fund study. The study evaluates the impact of classroom emotion(ality) and emotive writing on students, and their ability to produce inclusive and just visions of the Middle East and MES, upend inequitable academic conventions, and attend to their emotional wellbeing in a field pervaded by distressing subject matter. Given the focus on students’ wellbeing and learning, former MES 300 students on this SaP team will take a leading role in analyzing the findings and using them to alter/enhance the interventions to make them more sensitive, impactful, and constructive for future students.
- MES 300 relies on weekly work within fixed student groups as a means of fostering discussion and community. Most students lauded the creation of these mini-hamlets within our larger course community. Several students expressed the desire that these groups be made more meaningful through the creation of a larger group assignment. We thus aim to transform MES 300’s final written assignment on ordinary people and critical hope into a full-term collaborative project. Our SaP team will create the full-term assignment, including the learning outcomes and grading criteria. We will also work to integrate the project into weekly sessions so that they complement the topics under examination.
- MES 300 has no prerequisites and students are not required to have any pre-existing knowledge of the Middle East or MES. That being said, some students struggled with the course’s interrogation of theories and paradigms that shaped MES as a field. For example, Week 9 “Intersections: Queering Middle East Studies” explores the ways in which intersections between MES and other fields, such as Queer Studies, hold the potential to address shortcomings in both fields and produce better, more ethical scholarship. Student engagement in this week was high, but many students suggested that learning outcomes and overall understanding would be better achieved if the theoretical analyses could be grounded by, and in, empirical Middle Eastern case studies. The same was noted of several other weeks/sessions. Our team will locate and/or produce empirical case studies that complement the theories/paradigms under examination. This will involve deciding on appropriate cases, locating resources and readings, and helping produce appropriate, complementary lecture content.
Testimonials
In my experience, engaging in a SaP project is a great way for students to have a positive impact on the program they are involved in. I would encourage students to research the SaP model themselves, and propose their project ideas to faculty members. Increased student involvement in SaP projects have the possibility to bring out the best of the SaP model, and can open the door to new kinds of pedagogy, learning, and sustained student investment in academic work and academic communities.
— Sophie Roth