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ABSTRACT
For more than thirty years, collecting oral histories has been recognized as an effective teaching strategy in the West. Although it is rare in Gulf Cooperative Council (GCC) countries, the authors adopted it to bridge knowledge gaps they observed in their Saudi Arabian students. The reclamation of familial stories and tribal information using oral history methodologies reconnected students to their past while facilitating a unique learning experience. This paper describes how an oral history project was created for female undergraduate students in Saudi Arabia to help them move beyond the hard science approach supported in the Arabian world to one that embraces a narrative-based methodology. Historically, oral histories – an important pillar of Arabian society – were used to transfer significant tribal information, customs, traditions, and stories from one generation to the next. Since the discovery of oil, the kingdom has undergone dramatic societal and lifestyle transformations resulting in the loss of some traditions. The fundamental goal for this project was to improve the students’ comprehension of humanities and social science courses by reconnecting them to their past using historical methods.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank the students and their family members who helped us to know them better.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Glen S. Aikenhead and J. Jegede Olugbemiro, “Cross‐cultural science education: A cognitive explanation of a cultural phenomenon,” Journal of Research in Science Teaching 36, no. 3 (1999): 269-87.
2. Muhammad Riaz Khan, Shehla Riaz Khan, and Saeed Ahmad, “Students’ Perceptions about the Importance of Communication Skills: A Case Study of EFL Learners at Jazan University, Saudi Arabia,” International Journal of English Language Education 4, no. 1 (2015): 63-78.
3. Robert Vitalis, America’s kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi oil frontier (Redwood: Stanford University Press, 2007).
4. The focus on STEM programming emerged out of studies conducted by private universities that evaluated job market needs and developed programs to attract students and prepare them for professional employment. Madawi Al-Rasheed, and Robert Vitalis, eds. Counter-narratives: History, contemporary society, and politics in Saudi Arabia and Yemen (New York: Springer, 2004); Frank Jungers, The caravan goes on: How Aramco and Saudi Arabia grew up together (Newport: Medina Publishing, 2013).
5. Fatima B. Jamjoom and Philippa Kelly, “Higher education for women in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” In Higher Education in Saudi Arabia, eds. Larry Smith and Abdulrahman Abouammoh (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013), 117-25; Amani Hamdan, “Women and education in Saudi Arabia: Challenges and achievements,” International Education Journal 6, no. 1 (2005): 42-64; Mohammad A. Alkhazim, “Higher education in Saudi Arabia: Challenges, solutions, and opportunities missed,” Higher Education Policy 16, no. 4 (2003): 479-86.
6. Nick Forster, “Why are there so few world-class universities in the Middle East and North Africa?” Journal of Further and Higher Education 42, no. 8 (2018): 1029-30.
7. Larry Smith and Abdulrahman Abouammoh, “Higher education in Saudi Arabia: Reforms, challenges and priorities.” In Higher Education in Saudi Arabia, eds. Larry Smith and Abdulrahman Abouammoh (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013), 1-12. Nick Forster, “Why are there so few world-class universities in the Middle East and North Africa?” Journal of Further and Higher Education 42, no. 8 (2018): 1025-39.
8. James Wynbrandt, A brief history of Saudi Arabia (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2010): 15; Dawn Chatty, Mobile Pastoralists: Development Planning and Social Change in Oman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Dawn Chatty, From camel to truck: the Bedouin in the modern world (New York: Vantage Press, 1986).
9. It is important to note that while there are clear differences between oral history and folklore, the two fields share many similar traits. As scholar Dwight Reynolds argues, the two are both locally grounded, performed in colloquial dialects, and orally communicated, and both serve to solidify familial connections and identity over time.” As Reynolds writes, “the Arab culture is permeated and held together in many different ways by its folklore.” Dwight Fletcher Reynolds, Arab folklore: A handbook (Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007): 18.
10. Based on the authors’ students’ commentaries from January 2017 through May 2019. In particular, newer modes of communication are increasingly replacing one-on-one interactions. Technology has become the main source of information and communication usurping established customs. Arabia is foregoing oral history practices for the convenience of cell phones and the Internet. Texting, emailing, Twitter, Facebook, and other methods of social media are growing in popularity lifting the veil on once taboo practices amid guarded societies.
11. Our use of oral history also grew out of our disciplinary expertise and a long tradition of oral history as a teaching tool. For more on the scholarly and pedagogical uses of oral history, see, e.g., Abdullah H. Masry, “Traditions of archeological research in the Near East,” World Archaeology 13 (1981): 222-39; Mary Jo Maynes, Jennifer L. Pierce, and Barbara Laslett, Telling stories: The use of personal narratives in the social sciences and history (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), 12; Jennifer Clary-Lemon and Lynne Williams, “Teaching and Learning Oral History/Theory/Performance: A Case Study of the Scholarship of Discovery, Integration, Application, and Teaching,” Oral History Forum d’histoire orale 32 (2012): 6; Erin Jessee, “The limits of oral history: Ethics and methodology amid highly politicized research settings,” Oral History Review 38, no. 2 (2011): 287-307; Ebru Demircioğlu, “Teacher candidates’ attitudes to using oral history in history education,” Journal of Education and Training Studies 4, no. 6 (2016): 184-91; Frances Vitali, “Teaching with Stories as the Content and Context for Learning,” Global Education Review 3, no. 1 (2016): 27-44; Ruth Stewart Busby, “Learning through doing: Preservice teacher training in historical inquiry through oral history projects,” Oral History Review 38, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 2011): 175-84.
12. In anthropology a key informant interview describes a qualitative in-depth interview with people from a certain community who have extensive knowledge about the respective topic.
13. Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrzycki, eds., Oral history off the record: toward an ethnography of practice (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013): xxi.
14. Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrzycki, eds., Oral history off the record: toward an ethnography of practice (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013): 16.
15. Dwight Fletcher Reynolds, Arab folklore: A handbook (Santa Barbara: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007): 25.
16. Al-Ahsa is the largest oasis in Saudi Arabia located approximately 1.5-hour drive from Al-Khobar. Makkah, or Mecca, is the religious capital of the Islamic religion.
17. All of the quotes and examples used in this document are from The Oral History Project, which was conducted at Prince Mohammad Bin Fahd University between 2016 and 2019 in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The authors are in the process of creating an archive to store the transcripts and other research material associated with The Oral History Project.
18. The student most likely was referring to the Eastern Province in Saudi Arabia. There is no Western Province in the Kingdom. The Eastern Province is, until today, the most developed region in Saudi Arabia because of the presence of Aramco and the big oil fields. The province is also the most industrialized part of the Kingdom.
19. “Saudi Vision 2030,” https://vision2030.gov.sa/en, accessed June 27, 2020.
20. In 2018, the assignment was extended to include student reflections about what they had learned from their interviews, this excerpt is from a student in a 2019 World History class.
21. We did not edit any of the students’ responses namely because we felt it was disrespectful and unprofessional. We wanted to showcase their English writing skills as is, remembering that they are all second language learners.
22. Bernard Haykel, Thomas Hegghammer, and Stéphane Lacroix, eds., Saudi Arabia in Transition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 6.
23. Some older studies were conducted in the 1970s and 1980s: Katakura Motoko, Bedouin village: a study of a Saudi Arabian people in transition. No. 8 (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1977); Ibrahim Saad Eddin and Donald P. Cole, Saudi Arabian Bedouin: an assessment of their needs (Cairo: The American University in Cairo, 1978); Donald P. Cole, “Bedouin and social change in Saudi Arabia,” Change and development in nomadic pastoral societies 33 (1981): 128-49; Eleanor Nicholson, In the footsteps of the camel: a portrait of the Bedouins of eastern Saudi Arabia in mid-century (New York: Stacey Intl, 1984).
24. Alexei Vassiliev, The History of Saudi Arabia (Beirut: Saqi, 2013); Madawi Al-Rasheed, A history of Saudi Arabia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Laura Strachan
Laura Strachan is a Canadian socio-cultural anthropologist with a Ph.D. from McMaster University, Canada. She has twenty years of experience in the Arabian Peninsula specializing in environmental protection, international development, Bedouin tribes and sustainability. Her research interests include female Bedouin tattooing, Arabian oral histories and petroglyphs in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, the Sultanate of Oman, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. She is currently an Assistant Professor at Prince Mohammed Bin Fahd University, KSA. Email: [email protected]
Carmen Winkel
Carmen Winkel earned her Ph.D. from the University of Potsdam, Germany, researching the 18th century Prussian Army. University positions in Germany and China preceded her current post at Prince Mohammad Bin Fahd University in Saudi Arabia. During and after the completion of her Ph.D., she worked for the Military History Research Institute of the Armed Forces in Germany and was the Coordinator for the Master Program “Military Studies” at the University of Potsdam. In 2017, Dr. Winkel was awarded the Advancement Award for Military History and Military Technology by the German Ministry of Defense and the Department of Military Technology and Procurement for her book about Networks in the Prussian Army. Email: [email protected]