Writing Centers in the Higher Education Landscape of the Arabian Gulf

Osman Z. Barnawi, Osman Z. Barnawi

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783319553665
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Comparative Education

This book addresses issues surrounding writing centers in the Arabian Gulf region. Including a foreword by Professor Ken Hyland, it brings together a number of thought-provoking chapters on the history, concept, and ground realities coupled with critical comparative discussions of writing centres in the region. The book begins by offering critical historical accounts of writing centers in the Gulf countries, before moving onto empirical research and reports on pedagogical practices that vividly capture the on-the-ground realities faced and experienced by different actors. These accounts serve to highlight how the writing centers vary between countries, as well as how they differ from the more well-known writing centers in the US and the UK. Finally, the book explores what sort of commonalities and differences the current trend of writing centres is producing within and between the six countries of the Arabian Gulf. This book will be highly relevant to those involved with writing centres along with directors, policymakers, researchers and teacher educators in the fields of Education and Sociology, particularly those with an interest in the Arabian Gulf area.

Part I
Historical Review of Writing Centre(s) Across the Gulf Countries

© The Author(s) 2018

Osman Z. Barnawi (ed.)Writing Centers in the Higher Education Landscape of the Arabian Gulfhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55366-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Emergence of Writing Centres in the Saudi Higher Education Landscape: A Genealogical Investigation

Hamid Ali Khan Eusafzai¹

(1)

University of Central Asia, Naryn, Kyrgyz Republic

Hamid Ali Khan Eusafzai

Hamid Ali Khan Eusafzai

is a Teaching of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) practitioner. He is also a doctoral student at the University of Exeter, UK. He has nearly two decades of English-language teaching experience. Previously, he has taught in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Currently, he is an English as a Second Language (ESL) faculty member at the University of Central Asia in Kyrgyz Republic. Eusafzai’s research interests include individual differences, teachers’ development, internationalization of higher education, English as a medium of instruction and post-method pedagogy.

End Abstract

Introduction

Writing centres (WCs) are, generally, an integral part of student academic support services in educational institutions. Apart from the name “writing centre”, other appellations like “writing labs”, “writing studios”, “writing places” and “writing rooms” have also been used. WCs, as a support for helping students with writing, represent a physical space, a concept and a practice (Harris, 1985). They have their genesis in North American educational institutions and the students’ need for writing support in those institutions. As there is a trend in the flow of educational products and ideas from the developed countries to the rest of the world, the idea of WCs also proliferated out of North America and served as a prototype for establishing WCs in various countries across the globe. The Gulf region was no exception to this proliferation trend. WCs began to emerge in higher education (HE) institutions of the region with the dawn of the current century. Saudi Arabia, located in the region, was also affected by this trend, whereby a number of WCs have been established in HE institutions of the country. However, any formal research documenting the history of the emergence of these centres in the kingdom does not exist. Therefore, this chapter is an attempt to bridge this gap and to capture the history of the emergence of WCs in Saudi Arabia. However, the focus of this attempt is not merely to present an account of the chronology of the emergence of WCs in the kingdom but to present the “specific situations” which contributed to the birth of these centres (Tamboukou, 2003, p. 6). The allied objective to this aim is to understand the very essence of the current state of WCs in the kingdom as an idea, as a space and as a practice. Foucauldian framework of genealogy has been used to achieve this aim and the allied objective. The chapter starts with a brief presentation of the origin of WCs, followed by an overview of the WCs in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). Then, a brief rationale for the current study is stated. Next, the methodological approach of this research is explained, followed by a findings and discussion section. The chapter culminates in a conclusive section.

KSA and WCs in the Kingdom

A search for WCs on the expanding horizon of the Saudi higher education institutions (SHEIs) results in very few centres. Besides this, the Middle-East and North Africa Writing Centres Association (MENAWCA), an affiliate of the International Writing Centres Association (IWCA), has only five members from Saudi Arabia on its website (Raforth, 2012). Four of these members have fully established and functional WCs. Two of these centres are situated in institutions in the capital city of Riyadh and the other two are in institutions located in the cities of Jeddah and Yanbu Al-Sinaiyah on the western coast of the country. A few other SHEIs provide services similar to WCs, but such services are on a micro scale and performed as general and broader students’ academic support services rather than through independent purpose-established WCs. Table 1.1 presents a list of these WCs and their details.

Table 1.1

List of WCs in the KSA

S. No.	Name of the writing centre (WC)	Host institution	Location	Date established
WC 1	Writing Studio	Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University	Riyadh	2011
WC 2	The Centre for Writing in English	King Saud University	Riyadh	2012
WC 3	Writing Centre	King Abdulaziz University	Jeddah	2012
WC 4	Writing Centre	Royal Commission Yanbu Colleges and Institutes	Yanbu Al-Sinaiyah	2014

Writing Studio at Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University

Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University (PNU) has the prestige of being the largest women-only university in the kingdom as well as in the world. It is situated in the capital, Riyadh. Established and inaugurated in 2006 and 2007, respectively, the university hosts a total number of 60,000 students in its main campus. The university also has the prestige of establishing the first WC in the kingdom. The WC at PNU started working in 2011.

WC at King Saud University

King Saud University is situated in Riyadh. It was established in 1957 as the very first public university of the kingdom. The university has 50,000 students enrolled at all levels of university study (from university foundation year to PhD). However, compared with the long history of the university, the WC at the university is a recent phenomenon. It was established in 2012. The centre provides one-to-one academic writing improvement consultancy to students as well as to faculty.

WC at King Abdulaziz University

King Abdulaziz University is located in Jeddah. Jeddah is the largest Red Sea port of Saudi Arabia. The university was established in 1967. A total number of 82,000 students are enrolled in the university (university website). The WC at the university was established in the academic year 2012 (MENAWCA newsletter 2012). The university hosted WCs for both English and Arabic language. However, they were closed within two years of their inception due to funding reasons.

WC at the Royal Commission Yanbu Colleges and Institutes

The Royal Commission Yanbu Colleges and Institutes (RCYCI) has two undergraduate colleges and two institutes located across five campuses. These colleges and institutes are situated in Yanbu Al-Sinaiyah, which is an industrial city situated on the Red Sea coast of the kingdom. The WC at the RCYCI was established in 2014. The centre provides services aiming at helping students, faculty and the community to improve their writing skills. The services are provided through tutorial sessions. English-language teachers at the RCYCI dedicate some hours to work in the centre as tutors. Senior students also volunteer to provide peer tutoring to their fellow students.

Rationale for the Current Chapter

Whereas there is a substantial body of historical account of WCs in the North American context, any account tracing and recording the emergence of WCs in the Saudi context is lacking. Concepts, institutions and practices do not emerge suddenly and without any reason. They have a trail of social, economic and political reasons and events leading to their genesis and evolution. To take stock of the present and to set directions for the future, constructing and recording history is necessary. The same applies to the WCs in the KSA. There is a need to take stock of the present and then move backwards to construct and record a history of the WCs in order to determine future directions. While doing so, it is also necessary to understand the WCs in Saudi Arabia in their totality. This will not only initiate and develop a “scholarship” of the WCs in the kingdom but also lead to legitimizing and defining the role of the WCs within the spectrum of SHEIs (Murphy & Law, 1995).

The current chapter is an endeavour to achieve the aforementioned objectives. The focal points of this whole attempt are to

• construct a history of the WCs in the kingdom by determining situations and events leading to the emergence of these WCs;
• explore how the WCs are presented and represented in the spectrum of SHEIs;
• explore the nature of the concept and practice as they exist currently; and
• determine the future directions of the WCs.

To achieve these ends, genealogy was used as a research framework. The next section presents the details of the framework.

Genealogy as a Research Framework

Genealogy has been defined as “history of the present” (Foucault, 1977). However, the word “history”, in essential Foucauldian epistemology, does not imply history that we are traditionally familiar with. It is not history in the traditional sense. Traditional history is sequential. As such, it aims at capturing, recording and presenting the exact moments of the happening or a timeline of the events leading to the present. However, in genealogy, the starting point is the present. Genealogy, as an historical account, lacks chronological order and historians’ itinerary in time is backwards rather than starting in the past and descending to the present. Historians, working within the parameters of the Foucauldian epistemology of genealogy, try to understand the past from the focal lens of the present. The present becomes the reference point for tracing and exploring the past. The dilemmas and questions emerging about the present trigger this exploration. The difference between genealogy and traditional history lies in the very objectives of the two types of histories. Genealogy essentially has a critical objective:

Genealogy’s aim is to trace the struggles, displacements and processes of repurposing out of which contemporary practice emerged, and to show the historical conditions of existence upon which the present day practices depend. (Garland, 2014, p. 373)

The implication, in the above quote, is that genealogy is not a history of the events in the very historical sense. Rather, it is concerned with an interaction and friction of the “various systems of subjection” (Garland, 2014) from which the present originates. McPhail (2001) defines these systems of subjection simply as “power plays” which structure meanings and practices, and give them their present shape (Grinberg & Saavedra, 2000). Pullman (2013) expresses the same opinion. She names these systems or power plays as “discourses” and characterizes genealogy as an “analysis” of “how a subject or object is discussed or represented, how it is produced, altered, or rejected” (p. 175). Thus, having dismissed the traditional sense of history and having established that genealogy is concerned with interaction and friction of systems leading to the development of a discourse, we can say that genealogy is travelling back from the present into the past and examining, with a critical lens, the interplay of various apparently disconnected and unrelated “procedures, practices, apparatuses, and institutions involved” in the genesis of a current practice, knowledge or institutions which have evolved into an established and acceptable discourse (Pullman, 2013). Foucault (1991) defines genealogy as “an analysis of where things come from” (p. 83).

As a research method, genealogy mainly focuses on archives of documents and texts. As in the words of Foucault (1991), “genealogy is grey, meticulous, and patiently documentary. It operates on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have been scratched over a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Historical Review of Writing Centre(s) Across the Gulf Countries
• 2. Writing Centre(s) on the Ground
• 3. Comparative Investigations of Writing Centres in the Arabian Gulf Countries