By Britt Leake, Political Science
Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2024
Teaching Middle Eastern politics to students is difficult in the best of times. Teaching a class entitled War in the Middle East recently at UC Berkeley is perhaps uniquely challenging. Our students have to learn about a dizzying array of historical topics—the rise of Islam, the legacies of Ottoman imperial and European colonial rule, the regional swing from secular nationalisms towards Islamism after the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the implications of American foreign policy for conflict in the region since WWII, among others—while simultaneously learning to explain how to fit historical events together and make sense of them using the theories and ideas of political science.
Within the first couple of weeks of my discussion sections, it became abundantly clear, given some student comments and questions, that there was a risk of my sections turning into zones of confrontation instead of conversation. This was not surprising. Teaching at UC Berkeley is a joy because we have students from different backgrounds, and many have deep personal connections to the places and events we discussed in class. Our university’s long history of activism meant that many students came in with strong opinions about some of the events (particularly the Arab-Israeli conflict) we discussed in class. I did not want the tenor of some of the protests on campus—where people often talk past each other rather than with each other—to define my discussion sections.
In the face of a class dealing with a sensitive topic and a wide range of historical events and theories crammed into a few months, there was a temptation to try to skirt around controversy. Instead, I leaned into the controversial issues in two different ways. First, I—an Arabic speaker who had once lived with a family of Palestinian refugees in Jordan—was working as a GSI with a professor who had once served in the Israeli military. Although the two of us approached the course topic from different worldviews, we decided to use parts of class lectures to debate controversial issues in front of the students. Our hope was to demonstrate that different, reasonable interpretations of social phenomena can be derived from the same set of facts and also to model what it looked like for people with deep disagreements to engage with one another respectfully. As my discussion sections focused on a different country each week, I assigned news articles about political developments in each country from various perspectives. I also introduced short weekly assignments to make them compare and engage with those competing viewpoints. Including news articles not only made some of the countries we discussed a little more approachable for students, but it also forced them to grapple with the fact that there is not always one unquestionably correct interpretation of historical events.
I noticed an improvement in two main ways. First, I watched the students develop more nuanced responses over the three exams they completed over the semester, each of which asked them to take positions on major controversial questions in contemporary Middle Eastern politics. This was true even of students with deep emotional ties to some of the issues they were asked to write about. I also noticed that the tone of conversations in the sections improved over the semester, and students developed enough mutual trust that by the time we reached the last discussion section of the semester, which I had dedicated to the Arab-Israeli conflict, I was able to help facilitate a conversation in which many of the students still profoundly disagreed with one another but were still able to engage with each other with mutual respect.