Institutional Background
The six American branch campuses in Education City, the multi-varsity project in
Doha, Qatar, have a variety of approaches to building academic writing skills in their
international student body. This discussion will offer two case studies, one from
Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar (VCUQatar) and Northwestern
University in Qatar (NU-Q), to examine how trends in American pedagogy of writing
are being modified, translated and adapted for use with a diverse student population.
VCUQatar carries over the curricular requirements for writing from the main campus
in Richmond, Virginia. Students across the fashion, graphic, and interior design
majors, are required to take a two part sequence for first year writing. This is followed
by a writing and research workshop, devoted to examination of research principles.
The faculty in Qatar are required to use the core syllabus of assignments, objectives,
citation style, and outcomes as the faculty on the main campus. The readings and
individual assignments are determined by the instructor of record. This approach
ensures curricular congruency and leaves the individual faculty with the task of
modifying course content for the needs of his/her students.
The First Year Writing program at NU-Q arose out of a concerted focus on the types
of writing experiences students were having at the onset of their university experience
and was developed by faculty in Qatar. The two part course sequence was developed
to introduce students to the process of research and writing by breaking down the
various steps incrementally. In the syllabus for the first semester of the course, the
pedagogical framework is set out: “The writing process is intensely personal and will
be treated as such in this course. To that end, multiple phases of the writing process
will be carried out in class, such as workshop time and one-on-one conferences with
the instructor.” Such a focus allows students to gain confidence in the development of
their personal voice.
This process based, personal approach is based on the strategies of Peter Elbow, along
with the idea of scaffolding with assignments. Building on an established skill set
occurs both within the individual assignments as well across the two semesters. The
second part of the course is themed around research writing: “course to meet students
where they currently are with respect to their academic writing and communication
skills and to give them tools and support which they can continue to develop as they
conduct research in coursework throughout their undergraduate study.” The NU-Q
approach to first year writing is still being tried and tested, but after one semester, the
strongest student writing has been in response to the Memoir assignment. The course
has helped students in generating content, and creating meaningful messages in
adherence with the conventions of academic writing. Comparing student responses to
a New Student Orientation prompt with writing at the end of the semester provides
evidence of this skill development.
Elbow, P. (1994). Will the virtues of portfolios blind us to their potential dangers? In
L. Black, D. Daiker, J. Somners, and G. Stygall (Eds.), New Directions in
Portfolio Assessment: Reflective Practice, Critical Theory, and Large Scale
Scoring (40-55). Portsmouth, NH: Heineman/Boynton-Cook.
Rajakumar, Mohanalakshmi. 2014. Liberal Arts, Northwestern University in Qatar,
Doha, Qatar. Microsoft Word file.
Rajakumar, Mohanalakshmi. 2015. Liberal Arts, Northwestern University in Qatar,
Doha, Qatar. Microsoft Word file.
From “Good Design is Good Writing”
By Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar
Forthcoming: Writing Research and Pedagogy in the MENA Region
VCUQatar, the oldest campus at Education City, recently celebrated its
fifteen-year anniversary. The university offers majors in graphic, interior and fashion
design, to students from the Middle East and South Asia. The VCUQatar focus on the
liberal arts, inherited from VCU degree requirements, is indicative of standard North
American training practices for art programs. The humanities and social science
courses present foundational concepts key to the American higher educational
experience (Salmon & Gritzer, 1990, p.60). These core curriculum requirements
accompany the expectation that students will demonstrate a certain standard of
academic writing. What most campuses don’t know, however, is how to support the
development of writing without the benefit of the full-scale version of their home
institutions.
The broad variety of the students’ secondary experiences means that their first
year at university is a calibrating opportunity; students from scientific schools,
government schools, and international schools, with varying levels of English
language and knowledge of critical thinking skills, find themselves in a classroom
together. The curriculum of VCU main campus offers many instances in which
students may focus on their academic skills and writing is one such common focus.
The Focused Inquiry sequence, a two-part course taken in the first year, is a
requirement in the common core curriculum across the majors. Students often resist
this course and others like it, wondering why they have to take writing courses or read
literature; both skills are required in the Focused Inquiry sequence as well as the other
six writing intensive courses, which are part of their liberal arts requirements.
VCUQatar students are not alone in this “lack of interest” as art students in the liberal
arts as Salmon and Gritzer (1990) note in their survey of art students. An ongoing
conversation among art educators is how to ensure that both art courses and the social
sciences are “meaningfully integrated into the undergraduate education of design
students” (Salmon & Grizer, 1992, p.78). In other words, faculty need to strategically
think about how to make liberal arts courses these spaces in which students can
understand view their education as a complete system rather than vocational
preparation.
One of the most interesting aspects of an integrated liberal arts and studies
(LAS) core curriculum is the students’ reactions to the presentation of writing and
textual material. “I don’t think as designers we need to read a novel,” a student wrote
in a course evaluation for Focused Inquiry II after reading a novel as part of the
fiction unit. “All of the assignments in this course were valid except for the case
study,” noted another in response to the Writing in the Workplace unit on case
studies. Students’ reactions to the intensive writing and reading requirements in these
core classes demonstrates their lack of familiarity with the premise of a broad-based
liberal arts approach to learning, which is systemic at American universities.
Many strategies to overcome the liberal arts bias consider how the humanities
methodology might be worked into design curriculum (Salmon & Gritzer, 1992, p.
78); the case of study of the first year writing courses at VCUQatar work the
discussion the opposite way. How can design pedagogy and writing research work
together to create more holistic writers and thinkers?
From “Designers Have to Take Writing Classes”
By Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar
Published in Going Global: Transnational Perspectives on Globalization, Language,
and Education Cambridge Scholars Publishing. October 2014. Pgs 154-168.
Of particular interest to EFL research and pedagogy is how the second language
context affects students in classrooms where more than half the learners are
studying in their second language. Indeed, many students have three or more
languages, with English among them. The insistence and contractual obligation
of the universities to offer the same degree, and presumably the same
pedagogical approaches, leave the individual faculty member to grapple with the
variances in language abilities among their students. Some faculty members
mimic the attitudes of American-based colleagues who feel that language ability
is the responsibility of the English courses. Others make accommodation for
students’ abilities, or encourage students to utilize resources on campus, such as
writing centers. Educators are choosing strategies that are unique to the
parameters of the Education City project, which provide new angles to the
existing landscape of EFL teaching. While there are many nationalities enrolled
in the various disciplines, classrooms are filled with a majority of students from
across the Middle East. Nationality in the Arabian Gulf context is simultaneously
multi-layered and yet flat as nationality is passed on from the father to the child,
no matter the place of the birth. Therefore, an Indian student who has lived in
Qatar all her life will remain Indian, rather than become Qatari. There is no
naturalization process for anyone without a Qatari father. The social structures
of the various nationalities living in the country can be preserved within one’s
ethnic identity; parents can send children to schools with the curriculum from
their home country, attend functions organized by their embassy or cultural
group, shop at stores carrying their products, and in the case of the various
Christian denominations, worship in structures dedicated to their faith. Despite
this holistic approach to identity, there are exceptions, and one of these is
primary and secondary schooling. (Another is privatized health care.)
Many Arab, even Qatari, families send their children to international
primary and secondary schools instead of the independent or government
schools overseen by the Supreme Education Council. These students are
educated by expatriate teachers with an expatriate curriculum that is often more
similar to the expectations/materials of the universities in Education City. That
they are in classrooms with students who have attended an ethnically identified
school, such as the Modern Indian School, or Middle East Technical School,
further diversifies the university setting. Perhaps more than in most cases, a
students’ secondary school preparation can affect their university success, at
least in the first year. Faculty comment that while students may enter the branch
campus at different levels, after four years, each cohort leaves with the skills
expected of graduates from a North American environment.
The varied level of the secondary experience is a cause of academic
intervention by the various institutions. Weill Cornell Medical College, for
example, has instituted an intensive two-year pre-medical program with a
considerable liberal arts requirement in an effort to standardize student abilities
prior to beginning the medical program. Some argue this disadvantages the
students as they are completing four years of a standard North American
bachelors program in two; on the other hand, these students can transfer after
two years to another university, as do Biology majors at Carnegie Mellon
University in Qatar, and have been well prepared with solid academic
credentials. The addition of Biology at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar is an
example of the ongoing curricular negotiation and adaptation happening across
Education City as the entire project continues to mature and develop.
The secondary school backgrounds, academic abilities, and language
capacities of students in Education City vary widely across the various branch
campuses. The model is very much a vocational training approach to higher
education where students enroll in a specific degree with a specific type of
major: when applying they make a conscious choice toward either engineering
or design, international studies or business administration.