Reflections on education and transformation by a Jordanian-American scholar

Abstract

I was raised in the United States (New York) by parents who had recently emigrated from Jordan. Like many immigrants they intended to return home but never did. My parents eventually decided that we were better off in the United States, particularly because of the educational opportunities. Whether we were better off in the United States is a futile question—one in which I am not particularly interested although it concerned me often in my youth as I struggled to negotiate what I experienced then as drastically distinct and competing cultural demands. As a teenager in the United States, my parents’ rules and constraints seemed foreign and even oppressive. From their perspective, many dimensions of American culture seemed frightening—a threat to their efforts to maintain links to their own culture and community in Jordan, and to keep their children within this fold. When they spoke about ‘our culture’ I thought about this culture in general terms as ‘Arab culture’. However, my parents had each come from villages in Jordan, and had lived largely rural lives; thus, their views were also about these experiences. At that time, living in a large city in New York, it was difficult for me to understand the world from their perspective. Until I had spent significant time in Jordan, I did not have a grasp of the contexts—historical and material—for their cultural perspectives. The cultural clash was perhaps best epitomized for me by my parents’ determination to have a son. My mother gave birth to six girls before the birth of my brother when I was the age of twenty-one. After giving birth to four girls (I was the oldest) my parents made it known that they would have no more children. However, two more girls were born when I was in my early teens. My siblings and I all assumed that after giving birth to six girls, that the efforts to produce a son would cease. When my mother announced her seventh pregnancy we were all a bit shocked. My parents made every effort to emphasize that this had nothing to do with us—that they loved us and felt blessed by their daughters. However, all around me, since the time of my mother’s fifth pregnancy I heard, ‘God willing a son’, ‘May God grant you a son.’ I also had less pleasant encounters with distant relatives in Jordan who insisted that to have only girls was like not having children at all. The obsession with male-children made little sense to me then. It seemed to me to be purely crass sexism. Since that time, I have learned much about Jordan that enables me to better understand the historical basis of the need for sons. Although many of the immediate material realities that made many male offspring critical to the survival of the family no longer exist, the ideological preference persists. I have only come to understand this more deeply by living in and studying about Jordan. At the age of nineteen, with the support of a travel grant from my university (Fordham University) I spent three months travelling throughout the Levant. The grant was made possible through the generosity of the Tobin family, whose son Mark was a Fordham graduate killed in the Pan Am Flight over Lockerbie. It was during this trip that I began to see the region beyond the scope of family and friends. I also began to consider gender issues in a new light and, at the suggestion of my adviser, I went on to write an Honour’s thesis on the political significance of debates about women in Egypt and Algeria. Since that time gender issues have been central to my work. I returned to Jordan shortly after completing my undergraduate degree and lived there for two years. Today I go back and forth to the region frequently. I am a bit reluctant to speak of ‘noteworthy’ achievements because as a scholar I am still in the early phases of my career. My most important achievement was completing a Ph.D. with two children and a full time job. My family (my spouse, parents and siblings) of course deserves as much credit for this as I do. Neither of my parents was able to complete their education; however, their support for my education has been unwavering throughout my life. My doctoral research examines the significance of day-to-day experiences of schooling for girls in a Jordanian public high school in a city about an hour from the capital. In my doctoral thesis, I consider the significance of schooling at three levels. Schools function simultaneously as local spaces for girls (spaces of significant deliberations), as state socializing institutions, and as contemporary discursive projects of modernization and international development. Building from this framework, and my extensive ethnographic evidence, I argue that the effects of schooling for young women have been mixed. The spread of public education in Jordan—which began as early as the 1920s and proceeded with full force after independence in 1946—may not have produced all of the outcomes that development narratives assume, but nor has it left Jordan unchanged. Schooling in Jordan as elsewhere produces new struggles by generating new expectations and presenting new possibilities. By virtue of its institutional form and pedagogical methods, schools also model new ways of conceiving of the world and acting on it, putting into motion forces and principles outside the control of these state authorities (Stambach, 2001; Starrett, 1998). To date I have published two articles based on this doctoral research (2007; 2010), and am currently working on a third piece that builds on this research. I also look forward to the release of my forthcoming book, Gendered Paradoxes: Educating Jordanian Women in Nation, Faith and Progress (Adely, n.d.) which draws on this research. In addition, I am quite proud of an article that was inspired by my doctoral research in Jordan, and by the hopes and expectations of Jordanian families I came to know in the course of this work, entitled ‘Educating women for development: The Arab Human Development Report 2005 and the problem with women’s choices’ (Adely, 2009). Finally, I must say that I feel privileged to be a part of a vibrant academic community at Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies.