Instructor Aimee Samara Krouskop, an alum of the “Sustainability at the Margins” faculty development seminar (jointly coordinated by ACOR and CAORC in January 2020), discusses an in-person study-abroad program she has developed and is offering for students through Portland Community College in the coming academic year: Peace and Conflict in Jordan: Peace-building and Conflict Transformation through a Humanitarian Lens.

While working in the international humanitarian arena, I organized tours and delegations for supporters, often quite seasoned travelers with a breadth of cross-cultural experience. As a result of the participants’ worldliness, these programs were rich with meaning and initiative for social change. However, I have since realized the unique joys and momentum gained from launching study-abroad programs for community-college students who have never traveled beyond North America.

In 2020, while attending the “Sustainability at the Margins” ACOR-CAORC Faculty Development Seminar in Jordan, I became heart-set on developing such a study-abroad program anchored by my experience during the seminar. Here I will share my process and inspiration, and, as travel re-emerges in this vaccine era of COVID-19, I’m delighted to be moving forward with a fall course offering called “Peace and Conflict in Jordan: Peace-building and Conflict Transformation through a Humanitarian Lens.”

I teach sociology at the community-college level, primarily with an applied and cultural-diversity lens. My students are eager to explore real solutions to current, complex problems. I rely on case studies from my international work addressing issues across multiple sectors, and my students readily take a fresh—and sometimes critical—view of U.S. society from a cultural-comparison perspective. I am regularly inspired by their ability to surmount life challenges to accomplish their coursework. Completing their associate degrees and readying themselves for transfer to a focused degree program of their choice often occurs alongside juggling multiple jobs and financial instability, health-care insecurity, and eldercare or childcare challenges. As a result, most have not yet had the opportunity to explore the world and see the solutions we discuss firsthand. Explorative travel is rarely an option for my students, financially or logistically.

Imagine the power of such a learner—perhaps the first in their family to attend college—stepping into a passport office to become ready to leave the United States for the first time. Further, imagine the world made more reachable to them through key interactions abroad: intellectual epiphanies, physical and sensory contact, opportunities for adventitious and intimate exchange of perspectives, connections made between their own lives and that of broader human existence.

I led my first study-abroad program, Introduction to Sociology, to Bolivia in 2018. Through it, I witnessed participants’ intense sense of discovery and became “hooked” on assisting students of the community-college sector to gain more world access. Then, while in Jordan, I chose to work out a way to bring my introductory Peace and Conflict course to the country. The course explores peace and conflict at three levels: interpersonal, nation-state, and intergroup. With such a sweeping take on the content, I was posed with a challenge: to develop an academically sound experience for a program in Jordan that addresses the three levels of peace and conflict analysis and also offers authentic, meaningful interactions with local residents.

Before the seminar’s end, I arranged a consultation with a staff member from the Jordan field office of the School for International Training (SIT), a study-abroad provider. Once home, I drafted a curriculum and then began to work with Portland Community College and SIT to develop plans to implement the course. The program features a focus on USAID’s Sustainable Cultural Heritage Through Engagement of Local Communities Project (SCHEP), implemented by ACOR, and our “campus” in Amman will be the ACOR hostel. I am already grateful for the support that SCHEP and other ACOR staff have provided in these early stages of program development.

Peace and Conflict in Jordan: Peace-building and Conflict Transformation through a Humanitarian Lens will be delivered as a split program. The first five weeks will be delivered online during the end of the fall 2021 term. During this initial segment, students will explore worldviews, tools, and perspectives for understanding conflict and will apply these concepts through the three aforementioned levels of analysis (interpersonal, nation-state, intergroup). By week five, we will shift focus to foundational requirements for peacebuilding and the application of conflict transformation strategies that hinge on the acknowledgement and protection of human needs and human rights. Then, we will begin a solutions-oriented track and explore initiatives and ideologies that support these foundational requirements. We will address global peace institutions and state interventions with a human rights perspective, truth and reconciliation projects, healthy civil society initiatives, ideologies and practices such as multiculturalism and democratic pluralism, and interpersonal strategies, such as nonviolent communication and the techniques of the Compassionate Listening Project.

With those building blocks in place from the first five weeks online, completing the course in person in Jordan will expose students to a unique set of case studies and practices relevant to these foundational aspects of peacekeeping and conflict resolution. We will also continue our focus on the three levels of analysis introduced online. These are:

Interpersonal

My inspiration for a program viewing Jordan through an interpersonal lens first began to fall into place during a lecture offered by Dr. ‘Alladein Adawi (associate professor of Islamic studies and hadith at the University of Jordan) during the ACOR-CAORC Faculty Development Seminar in January 2020. His presentation on “Sustainability from an Islamic Perspective” provided insight into how Islamic tenets such as trustworthiness, cooperation, humility, virtuous deeds, and hospitality, all of which are woven into dominant Jordanian culture, play a significant role in creating a relatively peaceful and inclusive society, especially in this ethnically and religiously diverse country.

During the pre-departure phase of this course, students will receive survival Arabic lessons that incorporate phrases and other communications that express these Islamic tenets supportive of the health of Jordan’s society. My hope is that students will be able to better identify, “hear,” and engage with these expressions and lived principles while interacting with locals during their time in Jordan.

Nation-State

Speakers will provide an introduction to historical and current state conflicts and peace initiatives in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Through lectures by local scholars, insights received from United Nations staff, and visits to NGOs that run initiatives such as refugee support projects, students will have a chance to learn the role that policy and organizations in Jordan play in supporting peace and reconciliation in the region. They will also learn how challenges to sustainability (such as water scarcity) and the opportunities those challenges present intersect with social and economic realities locally and in region.

Inter-group

Through field visits to places across Jordan, we will explore the intergroup level through a project I was introduced to during the faculty seminar: the Sustainable Cultural Heritage Through Engagement of Local Communities Project (SCHEP, funded by USAID and implemented by ACOR). SCHEP’s “community-first approach” to sustainable tourism is designed to preserve, manage, and promote cultural heritage resources while providing education, employment, and economic development to communities with high poverty and unemployment rates, often in populations that also have a large refugee presence. SCHEP activities offer technical training and micro-enterprise support to local communities so they can take part in the management and hosting of UNESCO heritage sites and take advantage of the momentum of Jordan’s tourism sector.

In addition to learning about the participatory engagement methods implemented by SCHEP, students will directly experience the community-led, cultural, natural, and gastronomic heritage tourism projects offered by partnering docents. We will visit the Community-Based Rock Art and Epigraphic Recording Project (CBRAER) at Wadi Rum, the Umm el-Jimal Archaeological Project (UJAP), and the Madaba Regional Archaeological Museum Project (MRAMP). Supplementing these projects, we’ll also visit the USAID-funded Nabatean Life Project in Petra.

Each of these projects exists within the broader landscape of Jordan’s stressed economic and resource infrastructure, exacerbated by Jordan’s significant humanitarian commitment to refugees. This will give us a chance to examine how the SCHEP model—which provides income, security, and avenues of cultural expression for people living in Jordan’s “poverty pockets” and experiencing these local pressures—might support intergroup well-being. As HRH Prince Feisal Al Hussein, contributor, founder, and chairman of Generations For Peace, writes,

In all, I see Jordan as a peace and conflict-resolution laboratory for this introductory course. My intent for our time in country is that students will become enabled to observe conflict as the natural and unavoidable phenomenon that Prince Feisal Al Hussein describes; interact with a lens that acknowledges connections between peace, conflict, diversity, and cultural expression; and gain first-hand understanding of how government and international support, alongside the initiative of local and refugee communities, can create well-considered projects that provide the foundations necessary for peace.

Visit the Portland Community College website to learn more about Aimee’s course, Peace and Conflict in Jordan: Peace-building and Conflict Transformation through a Humanitarian Lens.

To learn more about the faculty development seminar program, please see our recap article from spring 2020. For articles written by other seminar participants, see the FDS tag on Insights.

1. HRH Prince Feisal Al Hussein, “Tolerance Is Not Enough: Why ‘Active’ Tolerance Is Needed Now More Than Ever,” HuffPost, 16 November 2016.

The post Faculty Development Seminar Alumna Aimee Samara on “Peace-building and Conflict Transformation through a Humanitarian Lens” (Forthcoming Study-Abroad Program in Jordan) appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

What can ethnography contribute to our understandings of health and disability in Jordan and elsewhere? In this roundtable event, Morgen Chalmiers (University of California San Diego), Timothy Loh (MIT), and I offered provisional responses by drawing on fieldwork in Jordan and the United States while reflecting on broader research trends in the Middle East and North Africa region. Here, I (Christine Sargent, University of Colorado Denver) write primarily in the first person to recap our event and provide additional reflections.

Frameworks and landscapes

Carole McGranahan (2018, 2) describes “an ethnographic sensibility” as:

“a culturally-grounded way of both being in and seeing the world… It is all that goes without saying in terms of what is considered normative or natural, and yet it is also the very rules and proclaimed truths — about the way things are, and the way they should be — that underlie both everyday and ritual beliefs and practices.”

Building on this generative description, I’d like to suggest that ethnography can offer three significant contributions to studies on health and disability. First and foremost, ethnographic approaches work from the ground up. This means ethnography can center the perspectives and projects of diverse communities as they attempt to survive and thrive in unequal conditions of prosperity and precarity​. Second, ethnographers understand biomedicine, global health, and rehabilitative therapies as politically and historically particular institutions rather than universal truths. An ethnographic orientation focuses on the actors, practices, and technologies that enable powerful institutions to function, revealing their tangible but often surprisingly fragile day-day-day operations. It also allows us to trace how these institutions rely on and reproduce — but are not reducible to — (post)colonial relations of value and labor. Finally, ethnography embraces the messiness and multiplicity of lived experience, attending to the macro- and microstructures of power that shape how people to make their way through the world and the world makes its way through them. While biomedicine and biomedically adjacent fields are increasingly hegemonic, they remain entangled in other frameworks for understanding and feeling fundamentally human experiences of health and illness.

From the outset of our event, the timeliness of the topic weighed heavily on speakers and audience members alike. We began by mourning and honoring longtime ACOR staff member Cesar Octavo, who had succumbed to COVID-19 just days earlier, on March 15. His passing occurred during the peak of the pandemic’s second wave in Jordan, as the country grappled with then-rising infection and mortality rates. Three months later, we continue to live through the uneven ebbs and flows of a global pandemic whose impacts underscore how biological, environmental, material, social, cultural, and political dimensions of health and illness are fundamentally interconnected. Only by thinking about these categories together and recognizing how each is deeply embedded in the others can we begin to imagine effective, ethical responses to the world being remade in the pandemic’s wake. Globally and locally, exposure and vulnerability to COVID-19 reflect pre-existing racialized and classed inequities, and these familiar patterns remind us “how certain social and cultural norms around health disparities, values about differences between certain bodies and social groups, and health and welfare structures were in existence long before COVID-19” (Sangaramoorthy 2020).

ACOR’s speaker series and fellowships offer platforms for generating collaboration and criticism — across disciplines, institutions, and continents. As enduring colonial inequities shape contemporary (research) worlds, the production of knowledge and distribution of its benefits do not occur randomly or equally. All three panelists acknowledged the institutional, financial, and geographic mobilities afforded by U.S. institutional affiliations. Additionally, our positionalities (gender, race, ethnicity, class, citizenship status, disability) shape our everyday interactions as early-career researchers conducting fieldwork in Jordan, and they locate us in broader structures of racial capitalism, underdevelopment, and “North-South” geopolitics. Attuned to these inequities, we are eager to cultivate models to build better research, where “better” means research driven by local agendas and priorities and grounded in materially transparent partnerships and exchange, rather than extraction.

Inspired by feminist scholars such as Sarah Ahmed and collectives such as the Cite Black Women movement, I began by mapping the citational landscape that has converged around questions of health in Jordan, along with more nascent research on disability. Citations, Ahmed reminds us, work as “screening techniques,” shaping the creation of knowledge that comes to build disciplinary “canons” through inclusion and exclusion. And as Seteney Shami pointed out in her recent (May 2021) ACOR presentation, the gaps between research conducted on Jordan and research conducted in Jordan remain troubling (and index deeper questions about research for whom and by whom). Indicative of Jordan’s highly developed healthcare system and geopolitical location, research outputs dealing with health are robust; those concerning disability remain emergent. While ethnography and ethnographic methods remain less commonly cited among qualitative researchers, an array of methodological companions, such as “critical phenomenology” and “interpretive phenomenology,” appear increasingly popular (Bawadi and Al-Hamdan 2017; Obeidat and Lally 2014; Nabolsi and Carson 2011; Nazzal and AL-Rawajfah 2018). Ethnography’s muted presence in an otherwise dynamic qualitative landscape invites further opportunities for discussion and collaboration. Beyond conventional academic publications, however, multimedia, open-access, and bilingual outlets including Kohl: A Journal for Gender and Body Research, Eib (part of the Sowt podcast platform), and 7iber bring ethnographic commitments and methods to their explorations of health and disability. These platforms mobilize ethnography’s most transgressive and generative qualities, centering the expertise of local knowledge makers while refusing to be limited by academic paywalls.

Building from fieldwork

We began our individual presentations with doctoral candidate Morgen Chalmiers, a feminist ethnographer and physician in training who has been conducting multi-sited fieldwork on Syrian refugee women’s reproductive experiences in San Diego and Amman. In her work, Chalmiers brings together the paradigms of reproductive justice and critical refugee studies. As articulated by the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, reproductive justice centers the “human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.” Key for Chalmiers’s work is putting this framework in conversation with the interdisciplinary field of critical refugee studies. The Critical Refugee Studies Collective defines the latter as “a humane and ethical site of inquiry that re-conceptualizes refugee lifeworlds not as a problem to be solved by global elites but as a site of social, political and historical critiques that, when carefully traced, make transparent processes of colonization, war, and displacement.” Accompanying Syrian refugees seeking reproductive healthcare, Chalmiers is studying clinical interactions — in the U.S. and Jordan — “as sites where macrosocial structures of power, privilege, and inequity are manifest, challenged, and negotiated through everyday interactions.”

Next, I offered an overview of my research on the experiences of mothers raising children with Down syndrome in greater Amman. Anthropology recognizes disability as a form of human diversity present across time and space. Ethnographic methods allow us to explore how people make sense of normative and non-normative bodyminds (Price 2015, Schalk 2018) while attending to the historical and material conditions that inform these processes. Jordan is home to dynamic and engaged disability activist and ally communities. It also boasts some of the most progressive laws in the region and was one of the first signatories to the United Nations Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD). Materializing the cultural, political, economic, and infrastructural transformations required to build an accessible and inclusive Jordan, however, remain an ongoing struggle. My fieldwork took place during a period of significant legislative development (2013–2015), but many families struggled with the gaps between progressive policy and practical implementation. I spoke with activists, advocates, educators, therapists, kin, and neighbors about the complexities of disability stigma, which continues to shape the lives of individuals with Down syndrome and their families. At the same time, I documented diverse strategies that family- and community-based organizations have developed to challenge stereotypes and assumptions about what Down syndrome is and what living with Down syndrome entails. These strategies weave together different resources, including transnational Down syndrome advocacy networks, human- and disability-rights vocabularies, Islamic and Christian visions of humanity, and biomedical or biogenetic models of heredity. Ultimately, I argue that centering disability as an analytic and dimension of lived experience can illuminate broader dynamics of change and struggle in Jordan today.

Finally, doctoral candidate Timothy Loh connected theoretical frameworks on language in medicine and disability to his dissertation research examining deaf Jordanians’ engagements with new assistive technologies that have recently emerged in the country, including the cochlear implant, a surgically implanted device that provides its users with some electronic access to sound. Taking an anthropological approach to language, which emphasizes the multifunctionality of language rather than merely its capacity to describe things in the world, Loh’s research builds on recent conversations between medical and linguistic anthropologists about how language is constituted in medicine and vice versa. Loh asks how language ideologies influence the ways that medical professionals provide biomedical interventions for deaf children and how deaf people and their families engage with these technologies. The question of which technologies deaf people should use is bound up in the question of which language and languages they should learn (Friedner and Kusters 2020). In fact, Loh argued that this question takes on salience in the Middle East, a site of intense language ideologies where both scholars and the public actively debate the relationships between modern standard Arabic and colloquial dialects, indigenous languages such as Tamazight, colonial languages including French and Spanish, and English as a global language. The fact that Arabic is the both the language of the Quran as well as of the nation-state in Jordan, Loh pointed out, has implications for what languages deaf Jordanians are expected to know and to learn. 

Collectively, our research and data (re)emphasize the centrality of caregiving and care-seeking practices to projects of health and wellbeing in Jordan. We have lived through different stages of the pandemic across our different countries of residence, research, and the places we call home, raising new questions about anthropology, fieldwork, and what ethnography has to offer. We hope that our panel (and this summary) invite further discussion and new relationships that further ethnographic approaches to health and disability in Jordan and beyond.

Citations and Resources

Bawadi, H.A., and Z. Al-Hamdan. 2017. “The Cultural Beliefs of Jordanian Women during Childbearing: Implications for Nursing Care.” International Nursing Review 64 (2): 187–194.

Cite Black Women Collective.

Critical Refugee Studies Collective.

Eib. Sowt Podcasts.

Friedner, Michele and Anneliese Kusters. 2020. “Deaf Anthropology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 49:31–46.

Kohl: A Journal for Gender and Body Research.

McGranahan, Carole. 2018. “Ethnography Beyond Method: The Importance of an Ethnographic Sensibility.” Sites: A Journal of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies 15 (1): 1–10.

Moghnieh, Lamia, Mustafa Abdalla, Suhad Daher-Nashaf, Abdelhadi Elhalhouli. 2021.
 العيش والموت في زمن الكورونا: مقاربات من الأنثروبولوجيا الطبيّة في مجتمعات المنطقة العربيّة. Arab Council for Social Sciences.

Nabolsi, Manar M., and Alexander M. Carson. 2011. “Spirituality, Illness and Personal Responsibility: The Experience of Jordanian Muslim Men with Coronary Artery Disease.” Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences 25 (4): 716–724.

Nazzal, Mohammad S., and Omar M. AL-Rawajfah. 2018. “Lived Experiences of Jordanian Mothers Caring for a Child with Disability.” Disability and Rehabilitation 40 (23): 2723–2733.

Obeidat, Rana F., and Robin M. Lally. 2014. “Health-Related Information Exchange Experiences of Jordanian Women at Breast Cancer Diagnosis.” Journal of Cancer Education 29 (3): 548–554.

Price, Margaret. 2015. ” The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain.” Hypatia 30 (1): 268-284.

Sangaramoorthy, Thurka. 2020. “From HIV to COVID19: Anthropology, Urgency, and the Politics of Engagement.” Somatosphere, 1 May 2020.

Schalk, Sami. 2018. Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction. Durham: Duke University Press.

SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Network. “What is Reproductive Justice?”

United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. “Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD).”

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Morgen, can you tell us a little more about yourself and what brings you to Jordan?

I’m a student in the joint MD/PhD program at the University of California, San Diego, specializing in medical anthropology. My larger dissertation project examines systems of reproductive healthcare provision for displaced populations and considers how experiences of forced migration influence reproductive subjectivity and decision-making. My research in Jordan builds upon prior work with the Syrian refugee community in San Diego while also focusing on communicative processes and interactions facilitated by and within the humanitarian healthcare sector.

More generally, my ethnographic fieldwork and clinical practice are informed by the paradigm of reproductive justice and a commitment to addressing health disparities through an intersectional feminist framework. I’m especially passionate about integrating anthropological insights into clinical practice and health policy through interdisciplinary collaboration. After completing my PhD and MD, I plan to pursue a residency in obstetrics and gynecology and seek a joint appointment at a research university as a practicing physician and professor in the social sciences.

What is one thing someone might not know about your area of study?

The birth of anthropology as a discipline was deeply linked to Euro-American colonialism and imperial rule, a history that has shaped both our methodological approaches and some of the most foundational assumptions of our scholarship—even basic questions like who or what is appropriate for an anthropologist to study. Over the last several decades, feminist ethnographers have sought to radically transform and decolonize anthropology by integrating insights and methods developed by critical theorists in their study of race, gender, and social structures. It’s a very exciting time to be a student and witness these innovative efforts to reinvent the discipline.

Do you have a favorite cultural place in Jordan? If so, what is special about it?

When traveling, there’s a tendency to seek out “authentic” cultural experiences, whether this means consuming “exotic” foods or watching a “traditional” dance performance. However, my graduate work in anthropology and critical gender studies has emphasized that “culture” encompasses much more than symbols, practices, and performances—it’s equally present (and reproduced) within everyday interactions. So I think my favorite cultural activity would be chatting and sharing a meal with friends at one of our favorite restaurants (Khal is always a popular choice).

Morgen A. Chalmiers is a Ph.D. candidate in psychological and medical anthropology at the University of California, San Diego and an M.D. student in the Medical Scientist Training Program at UC San Diego School of Medicine. She is the recipient of an ACOR-CAORC Pre-Doctoral Fellowship 2020–2021. Her anthropological research broadly examines women’s experiences of reproductive healthcare using the tools and theoretical lens of psychological anthropology. She works with a collaborative team across the UC campuses to conduct community-engaged, multi-sited research on resettled refugee women’s access to reproductive healthcare. She is passionate about integrating anthropological insights into clinical practice and health policy through interdisciplinary collaboration. To read more about her work and publications, visit morgenchalmiers.com.

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In January 2020, ACOR kicked off the new decade in the company of twelve faculty members visiting Jordan from the U.S. They were joining us for just over two weeks through a program put on in partnership with the Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC) under the theme of “Sustainability at the Margins.”

This program was just one of a broader series of Faculty Development Seminars CAORC has held in recent years; other seminars have taken place in India, Pakistan, and Senegal. Planned and executed in partnership with American Overseas Research Centers like ACOR, these courses are specifically designed for faculty from U.S. community colleges and minority-serving institutions (“MSIs”).* The goal is provide a more global perspective to students from these campuses, which have historically been left out of the experience of undergraduate study abroad, even as millions of students turn to these institutions each year for opportunities in higher learning.  In the case of “Sustainability at the Margins” at ACOR, none of the dozen faculty participants had ever been to Jordan before, and most had never been anywhere in the Middle East or Global South at all. Thus, this was an opportunity not only to explore Jordan but also to immerse themselves in discussion about regional and global issues from a totally new perspective.

Educators from these particular educational institutions—community colleges and MSIs, including, in this cohort, schools serving historically Black, Latino, and Native American student groups—face a unique set of challenges and opportunities in the classroom. As regards “global perspectives,” students at these schools often have first-hand experiences of internationalism, coming from communities in which migration and multiculturalism are personal realities as much as academic subjects. At the same time, community colleges and MSIs are tasked with teaching historically under-represented and under-resourced populations of students, many of whom, in the words of one ACOR Seminar participant, “have never set foot on a plane.” Furthermore, across the hundreds of thousands of U.S. students studying abroad for academic credit in a given year, the MENA region only attracts a tiny fraction.** So, what will it mean to bring a taste of Jordan to community colleges and MSIs? How would traditional study-abroad models of global learning have to be adapted to reach more socioeconomically and ethnically diverse learning institutions?

“Sustainability at the Margins” participants were here with us in Jordan in order to lay the foundation for solutions to these questions, particularly as pertains to topics of academic interest in the Middle East. The twelve participants were chosen from more than 80 total applicants and represented a wide array of academic and professional expertise. With our local partners from various sectors opening the space for collaborative learning and dialogue, participants in this seminar deepened their knowledge of local history and culture while also taking on issues that are common the world over.

LOCAL EXPERTISE, GLOBAL KNOWLEDGE

Through this program, ACOR was certainly true to its mission to “advance knowledge of Jordan, past and present.” Though some readers may wonder if this focus is highly specific, in fact what ACOR’s geographic commitment means in practice is that we hold a deep awareness of local issues, an awareness that is necessarily complex and interdisciplinary in nature. Thus, throughout seminar activities, ACOR could ensure that the many interests and specializations of each faculty participant were brought to the table for discussion.

Topics addressed were manifold, including but not limited to: belonging and identity, environmental sustainability, political systems, urban development, religious studies, refugees and migration, gender, tourism, economic development, archaeology and ancient history, higher education, and more. “ACOR organized an array of lectures in such a way that local experts were able to help us appreciate and understand the country…. [E]ven if we were non-specialists in their particular field, they communicated in a way that we could make links to our own field of research,” commented Elizabeth Ursic of Arizona’s Mesa Community College. “We’ve had the opportunity to see things and do things that we would never normally get to do if we just came to Jordan on our own,” observed Marjolein Schat, who teaches biology at Tompkins Cortland Community College in New York, as well as through the Cornell Prison Education Program.

Seminar activities were not only lectures but also hands-on learning opportunities, including literally breaking bread with Jordanians in their residences. The theme of sustainability returned again and again, whether in conversations about long-term refugee assistance strategy or local cultural heritage preservation. Dialogue was open and critical questions encouraged; the ultimate goal was to facilitate exchange. “We were not led down a path, and no clear agenda was being expressed,” said Joylin Namie, an anthropologist at Truckee Meadows Community College in Nevada.

The diversity of subjects addressed was a strength, even in ways that surprised participants, most of whom had preconceived expectations about which sessions would prove most useful to their learning needs. For example, Laura Penman, of Monroe Community College in New York, was particularly eager to learn about contemporary water management. She was pleasantly surprised to find that engagement with the ancient world during the seminar provided meaningful lessons on such current affairs. “One of the most fascinating parts for me is to see how culture and technology work together to help create solutions to problems,” she commented, reflecting on the use of ancient water management techniques by present-day local communities near Petra and Umm al-Jimal.

Much of the program took advantage of ACOR’s center of operations being located in the capital city, Amman. However, trips to other regions of Jordan were also useful for putting topics of learning into a wider context. Visits to Ghawr As-Safi, Umm al-Jimal, Aqaba, and Wadi Rum allowed participants to connect with distinctive local communities across the country, their uniqueness reflected in the diversity of present-day customs on top of a varied archaeological record apparent in each location. Overall, the geographic breadth of program activities added a sense of dynamism that kept participants agile in their approach to a plethora of academic subjects.

THE CLASS CONTINUES: TEACHING AND LEARNING

Though seminar participants may have been playing the role of student while at ACOR, they have since returned to their campuses in the U.S. to teach. Now they bear a unique responsibility to carry the torch of global learning on their campuses, sharing what insights they have gleaned about their subject matter’s connections with phenomena in Jordan. Each will report back with the lesson plans they develop and implement, and they will also be composing reflection essays on the ideas that stick with them most. They will have this experience at ACOR to lean on in the semesters ahead.

“I know the value of study abroad,” said De’Etra Young of Tennessee State University. “International opportunities better prepare students for the global workforce.” Young was particularly excited to use her observations in Jordan as a starting point to spark conversations with students about environmental justice and agritourism, topics salient in her local community. Similarly, faculty from New Mexico and Nevada were excited to bring back international comparison points related to tourism and water management.

As observed by Bryan Shuler of Hillsborough Community College in Florida, an experience like this can inspire reflection on a philosophical as well as practical level. “What I’m taking away from this is the term fluidity—fluidity in terms of people, in terms of culture, in terms of society, in terms of history…. [In Jordan] people are related to each other by business, by family, by culture, by language, by society…. [T]herefore we need to be aware that things can be affected by an action in another place.”

Some faculty participants were eager to enact cultural exchange in their classrooms in a more literal fashion. While in Jordan, they exchanged contact information with local professionals and educators so as to facilitate virtual exchanges later on and even explore opportunities to build study abroad options for their students. Bryan Shuler’s application of his newfound knowledge was going to be almost immediate. “I am working right now with the IREX Global Solutions Sustainability Challenge with my students and students from Jordan this coming semester,” he explained. The initiative will entail his bringing together of a binational team of students to research and present solutions for a particular global sustainability problem. His time with ACOR, therefore, was invaluable: “I want to have a good basis!”

For teaching support, participants ultimately have each other to rely on, as well as ACOR. Since returning home, WhatsApp and email have served as lively forums for crowdsourcing multimedia classroom materials and addressing pedagogical challenges as they arise; these twelve educators, with shared goals and environments, are thankfully able to provide nuanced mutual support. ACOR also has many digital resources that can be of use in their classrooms, even at a distance. Such electronic learning resources will be especially crucial this year, due to the outbreak of COVID-19 and its impacts on global travel and academic programming.

Ultimately, ACOR is eager to learn from these educators just as much as they learned from their time with us. How will the ideas and experiences they had in Jordan translate to diverse educational contexts in the U.S.? How can ACOR better serve the upcoming generation of study-abroad students and researchers, the demographics of which will undoubtedly be different from the past as American society grows more and more ethnically diverse? On top of supporting the development of these faculty members as global educators, we at ACOR greatly value this incredible opportunity for our team to see Jordan through their eyes.

Please check back soon for further blogs on this topic, written by program participants for publishing on the ACOR and CAORC websites. ACOR would like to extend its gratitude to the partnering organizations who helped bring about the success of this initiative, as led by former ACOR Director Barbara Porter, Associate Director Jack Green, and Glenn Corbett, Program Director of the Council of American Overseas Research Centers. We would also like to extend our gratitude to the support of the Petra Moon company in Jordan and the many implementing partners of the SCHEP team.

The ACOR-CAORC faculty development seminar to Jordan was generously supported by funding through the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. 

For more on trip activities conducted during this Seminar, please click here to be taken to the corresponding Facebook photo album.

* Minority-Serving Institutions are institutions of higher education in the U.S. that serve historically underrepresented populations. This includes Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic-Serving Institutions, Tribal Colleges and Universities, and Asian American and Pacific Islander Serving Institutions. To learn more about MSIs, explore a summary article from the U.S. Federal Government at https://www.doi.gov/pmb/eeo/doi-minority-serving-institutions-program

** Just 2.7% of all Americans study abroad for academic credit do so in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), according to 2019 data from International Education Evaluators.

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The post “Jordan: Sustainability at the Margins” | Looking back at the 2020 ACOR-CAORC Faculty Development Seminar appeared first on ACOR Jordan.