Internationalizing Middle Eastern Politics (MEP): A Study of the Educational Potential of Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) for Middle East Politics Pedagogy

Abstract

Middle East studies, and in particular the study of the politics of the Middle East stands at a crossroads pedagogically a decade after the Arab Spring. This study observed an experimental pre- or partial Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) engagement between Political Science students in New Zealand and the Sultanate of Oman to investigate whether COIL-based approaches, couched in decolonizing pedagogical theory and new digital communication technologies, could offer a useful tool for instructors and students in the field to begin to address enduring western (un)conscious paradigms of “The Middle East.”

Keywords:

• COIL
• hidden bias
• internationalization of higher education
• middle east politics
• experiential learning
• transformative pedagogy

Acknowledgements

We express our sincere gratitude to Eram Al-Rawas and Sheikha Al-Mamari for their invaluable coordination and promotion of the pre-COIL activities at Sultan Qaboos University and their unwavering support throughout the phase of data collection for this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This study received ethics approval by the University of Otago Human Ethics Committee on October 1, 2021 (ref: D21/296).

2 One exception was Canterbury University historian, John Joseph Saunders who wrote extensively on Middle Eastern history in the 1960s.

3 For more details on the scholarly debate on the relevance of Area Studies, see Teti (2007).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Internationalization of the Curriculum Grant, No. 11922101SBO, “Fostering Cross-Cultural Dialogue and Collaboration.”

Notes on contributors

Carmen Fulco

Carmen Fulco is a teaching assistant at the Department of Politics at the University of Otago (NZ) and one of the authors of “The Neoliberal Cage: Alternative Analysis of the Rise of Populist Tunisia” and “Rethinking the Legacy of Tunisian Pact-making in the post-July 2021 Order.” Her prime research interests comprise politics and religion, pact-making and populism in the Middle East and North African region. She pursued her bachelor’s and master’s degree in Oriental Studies at La Sapienza University of Rome and lived and studied in Egypt and Tunisia which remain her geographic areas of interest. In her PhD thesis, she explored the change capacity of the Party of al-Nahda Movement and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, by unpacking their organizational dynamics in the post-Uprisings period (2011–2020) and assessing the overall imprint that those dynamics left on their respective organizations ten years later.

Leon Goldsmith

Leon Goldsmith is a senior lecturer of Middle Eastern and comparative politics at the University of Otago (NZ). His research looks at ethno-religious conflict and integration processes, sub- and supranational identity politics, youth politics, political participation, political culture, institutions and comparative political systems. His main geographic areas of research are Syria, Oman and the Arab Gulf states. Leon’s current theoretical interests are Arab-Islamic empiricists Ibn Khaldun and Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi.