Abstract
Published in Researching Multilingually
In the area of academia, it is rare to find a book that is both filled with investigative rigor and emotionally powerful content. This is undoubtedly one such piece. The authors refer to it as a “multivocal book,” which is quite accurate, given the 17 contributors whose research spans four continents throughout the work’s nine chapters. With the humble priority of highlighting the impact that both the internet and the English language have had on populations in areas of the world that struggle to access basic needs, let alone educational resources, the authors remind us of our own academic privilege, noting that the finished, published, printed form of the book itself may ‘remain invisible’ (5) to many involved in creating it. We are reminded at the outset of each chapter just how “global” knowledge-sharing has become, and how many aspects of our own lives as academics we have likely grown to take for granted: participation in international conferences and collaborations, access to databases of countless international journals, or even just connection to a steady supply of electricity. Dually, we are reminded, or perhaps learning for the first time, of the harrowing obstacles of infrastructure and human suffering that some of the world’s most disenfranchised populations must overcome in order to attain the globally-shared resources that comprise what we now simply refer to as “education.”
Throughout the collection of nine distinct studies, all chapters feature collaboration with the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG). The book begins with a necessary and human prologue that provides the university’s context, illustrating the reality of life in the Gaza Strip—an area suffering from high rates of unemployment and poverty resulting from an Israeli blockade that chokes the population, where ‘just about everybody has to survive on humanitarian aid’ and electricity runs intermittently, unpredictably, for just four hours per day on estimate (6). The dire statistics gathered from reputable organizations such as the UN regarding Gaza’s extreme desperation for food and other basic living supplies illustrate the traumatic humanitarian tolls that the Israeli army’s unrelenting bombing has had on both infrastructure, human life, and the psychological wellness of survivors, and serve as the foundation for several research pieces in the book. Initially, this may seem somewhat cold on the part of the researchers. The contributors make it clear, however, that ethics were at the forefront of decision-making processes, and that Palestinian input was present throughout the development of all projects.
This input was facilitated through the use of English as a lingua franca and the web-based technologies that, given the impassibility of Gaza’s borders, reappear throughout the collection as the primary means of overcoming literal and figurative barriers to education and collaboration with the rest of the world. Perhaps even more inspiringly, however, this input personifies the commitment, determination, and resilience (‘sumud,’ as they say in Arabic, (17)) shown by the undeterred contributors based in Gaza. These three themes—the use of English, virtual spaces, and Gazan resolve—comprise the underpinnings of each of the studies, aimed at defining essentials in overcoming impassable barriers to access multinational academic collaboration, though the authors only explicitly attribute English and online technologies as such. Perhaps they themselves did not initially anticipate and only grew to understand the degree of sumud they would witness throughout the years; perhaps they did not realize early on—though they do acknowledge the Palestinians’ efforts throughout—that even the English language and the internet would only go so far if such willpower were absent.
Nonetheless, the contributors describe the opportunities that both of these commodities have provided the Gazans, both in education but also in cultural connection to the outside world and in projecting Gazan voices internationally despite the siege. Though methodology and theory are not the foci of the book, notably, the data supporting the authors’ claims are gathered in a variety of approaches (i.e., interviews, art-based methods, analysis of secondary media sources) and are then presented using what feels like human voice and jargon-free language that extends the book’s reach beyond researchers in education and makes the information accessible to a wider audience—one of the book’s most understated accomplishments, given the relative lack of first-hand, research-based, objective resources that would readily be recognized as such by international readership.
The book is divided into nine chapters that comprise four larger parts. In fact, Part I, ‘English as an Additional Language and Online Technologies,’ begins with a chapter that outlines the findings of an ESL program (EAST) that utilizes Gaza’s unique and extreme tribulations as the object of its collaborative learning approaches. The program connects international students at the University of Glasgow (UofG) with English language learners at IUG. The aim is to encourage academic discipline-specific (i.e., engineering, Bio-med) English language practice in teams through problem-solving by navigating potential solutions to authentic issues, often involving infrastructure, in Gaza. The chapter effectively explores the successes and challenges of the cross-cultural collaborations between two groups in vastly different environments that reflectively traverses serious ethical concerns and imbalances along the way. Chapter 2 focuses on the IUG’s growth in internationalization efforts of its postgraduate programs in spite of its location within some of the world’s most impassable borders: a combination of English language requirements and online technologies have made international cooperation and course credit mobility possible. The third and final chapter in this part of the book investigates the educational situation faced by Syrian refugees living in Jordan. The importance of English to ‘strengthen resilience and hope and create more opportunities for employment’ (68) is highlighted along with the value of collaboration between Jordanian formal teachers, Syrian refugee teachers, NGOs, and project leaders from IUG, UofG, etc., who created a variety of resources, including a mobile application of lesson materials, that can be utilized by educators fortunate enough to have access to the internet.
Part II focuses on motivation; its first piece (Chapter 4) explores the crucial question Are Palestinian ESL university students in the Gaza Strip empowered to be bilingual? Noting the political role of several English-language nations in the conditions that Gazans find themselves in, along with the disconnection to the world and hopelessness for travel that the population faces, this is exactly the question to ask. The researcher utilizes semi-structured interviews to gather data from six students and six faculty members at IUG. The study identifies and presents a number of motivating factors for learning English in the Gazan context; essentially, the majority are quite similar to what one may expect them to be in most academic settings. However, with respect to the point of global connection, findings are slightly poignant for the Gazan context, as one faculty members explains: ‘As Palestinians, we need to bridge ourselves with the outside world. If you want your voice to be heard as… someone with a cause, you have to speak (English) because everyone speaks it’ (81). Perhaps the most Palestinian-specific motivator is a drive to learn English in order to bypass the siege. Part II of the book concludes with a chapter that revisits the EAST project, this time viewing the program through an active learning conceptual lens, analyzing the end-of-project survey responses as a basis for two case studies that assess the project’s long-term impacts using theories of transformational learning.
Part III centers around the Arabic language through two research studies. The first outlines a case study on the development of an online Teaching Arabic to Speakers of Other Languages (TASOL) program in the hopes of providing a source of income for Gazans using resources they could fairly easily access. Due to a lack of accredited TASOL programs, graduate degrees, or certificate programs in Palestine (similar to other Arab nations), a UK-sponsored training program on transitioning language teaching to virtual platforms and adapting TASOL materials to be Palestine-specific helped in preparing the IUG graduates for their new role. The case follows eight IUG TASOL instructors and their 15 online Arabic learners from all over the world for a six-week course. The chapter concludes with a somber yet honest message regarding the challenges brought by power cuts and unstable internet along with the looming costs involved in fostering a plausible future for it as a sustainable, successful, globally competitive TASOL program, but celebrates the high teaching evaluation scores and praises lauded by the students. Chapter seven investigates expressions of distress, resilience, and wellbeing from Zimbabwe, Ghana, Uganda, and Gaza, combining adoption of linguistic ethnographies with artistic representations of linguistic data in an effort to promote intercultural understanding and to develop training materials on mental health in intercultural contexts. As the idioms of distress of the Ghanaian, Zimbabwean, and Ugandan contributions are expressed and documented using dance representations and story-telling approaches in conjunction with linguistic translation, Gaza’s data are instead gathered using secondary data from Arabic-language media reports on the 2014 Israeli military operation against Gaza due to ethical concerns: ‘One of the two (Palestinian) Master’s students clearly stated that it would have been better not… to make people who had lived the traumatic experience of war, relive it by re-telling their experience just for a research project’ (137). Standing as perhaps the most raw and moving chapter of the book, the authors have little option but to detail the horrific circumstances of trauma that serve as the emotional grounds for the linguistic data, which supports the authors’ argument for contextual consideration in translating idioms of distress and highlights the importance of ethical considerations in the design stages of research project development.
The primary focus of the last two chapters—part IV—is on building long-standing connections between Gaza and the “outside world” of education. Chapter eight outlines IUG’s role in a 17-nation initiative aimed at aligning curricula and standards in accordance with the Bologna Process. The idea is that maintaining academic programs that are internationally comparable may someday serve as a step in overcoming mobility restrictions and the blockade. The ninth and final chapter of the book gives voice to the book’s US-based collaborators as they reflect on their experiences during the research process and recognizing Gaza as it relates to their own populations’ struggles with injustice and land “ownership.” Their candid discussion of both the common misunderstandings that Americans often hold with regard to Palestine along with the geopolitical privilege afforded to the ‘predominantly White and global North/West participants’ (169) compared to their Gaza- and Ghana-based colleagues serves as evidence of the impact that the collaboration has left on them.
Each study within the collection is honest and inspiring. If I had to note a criticism, it would be that the chapters read as individual, stand-alone pieces that lack transition between them despite their obvious relatedness. This results in a significant amount of redundant information. Furthermore, the book’s “parts” further divide discussion of a number of the projects described by the authors. For example, the EAST project introduced in chapter one is revisited in chapter five. Though the approach taken in chapter five is unique from that of chapter one, interjecting a discussion of three other projects feels like an interruption to the book’s flow more than an ‘aid’ (8) to the reader.
Naturally, some of the book’s chapters and conclusions are stronger than others. However, the book is eye-opening, inspiring, and energizing throughout in a way that typical academic literature rarely is. It stands as a model of ethicality in research resulting in print that effectively gives volume to human voice.
