Reflection 'on' and 'in' teacher education in the United Arab Emirates ...

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International Journal of Educational Development 26 (2006) 111–122 www.elsevier.com/locate/ijedudev

Reflection ‘on’ and ‘in’ teacher education in the United Arab Emirates M. Clarke!, D. Otaky Higher Colleges of Technology, Abu Dhabi 32092, United Arab Emirates

Abstract This article examines the uptake of reflective practice, as one of a number of educational discourses, by student teachers in a new Bachelor of Education degree in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). In a recent article, Pat Richardson [2004. International Journal of Educational Development 24(4), 429–436], argued that reflective practice is incongruent with the values of ‘Arab-Islamic’ culture and is therefore not an appropriate approach to promote in teacher education in the UAE. Here we argue that such a view relies on a limited reading of the concept of culture and reduces individuals to cultural ‘dupes’. We also present evidence from student teachers that, far from endorsing the inappropriateness of reflective practice in the UAE context, shows Emirati women wholeheartedly embracing—and doing—reflective practice. r 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Teacher education; Reflective teaching; Culture; Discourse communities; United Arab Emirates; Computer-mediated communication

1. Introduction and background Reflection and reflective practices have gained increasing prominence within teacher education, drawing on Scho¨n’s seminal works of the 1980s (Scho¨n, 1983, 1987) and on Dewey’s foundational writings (Dewey, 1933, 1938), to the point where they are now very much de rigueur within teacher education programmes across a wide range of international settings (Korthagen, 2001). This acceptance is indicative of a broad recognition !Corresponding author.

that effective teaching necessarily involves a combination of experience, thought and action (Coldron and Smith, 1995). In this paper we discuss the appropriation of reflective practices and discourses of critical reflection among student teachers in a new teacher education programme at the Higher Colleges of Technology (HCT) in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The HCT have a mandate to educate Emirati youth to enable them to play an active role in the rapidly developing UAE economic, educational and social structures. As part of this mandate, since 2000 the HCT has offered teacher education

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M. Clarke, D. Otaky / International Journal of Educational Development 26 (2006) 111–122

programmes at all six Women’s Colleges (Abu Dhabi, Al Ain, Dubai, Fujairah, Ras Al Khaimah and Sharjah) across the UAE. The programmes offered include: a four-year Bachelor of Education degree to prepare teachers of English for primary schools, which is our largest programme and the focus of our discussion in this paper; a one-year post-graduate programme in Career Guidance and Counselling; and a 1-year post-graduate programme to prepare teachers of Information Technology. Our paper is a response to the discussion in Pat Richardson’s article, ‘‘Possible influences of Arabic–Islamic culture on the reflective practices proposed for an education degree at the Higher Colleges of Technology in the UAE’’, which recently appeared in the International Journal of Educational Development (2004). In her article, Richardson discusses the development of a teacher education degree at the HCT, and conveys her concerns with regard to the appropriateness and likely effectiveness of ‘‘western’’ approaches to education and teaching. These western approaches include the reflective practices that for western curriculum developers, ‘‘are automatically included as key components of teacher education programmes’’ (Richardson, 2004, p. 430). The evidence in the following article will demonstrate that her concerns have little basis in the reality of the HCT B.Ed. programme. Specifically, Richardson argues that ythe degree to which any one teacher will actually engage in reflection depends on their individual propensities and abilities. Thus it is teachers’ underlying personal values and beliefs that effect (sic) their interpretation of the educational practices they experience, and their ability to engage in reflection is affected by their previous (and current) experiences of the schooling processes, its culture and climate. (Richardson, 2004, p. 431) Relying on an interpretation of culture derived from business literature, as ‘‘the collective programming of the mind, which distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another’’ (Hofstede 1994, p. 4 cited in Richardson 2004, p. 431), Richardson characterizes Emirati

students as programmed by ‘‘Arabic–Islamic culture’’ and thus circumscribed in a number of specific ways. Overall, she describes the HCT’s education degrees as characterized by a cultural context where ‘‘the ingredients’’ for student teachers to become ‘‘deeply engaged in critically examining the classroom experiences against their own implicit theories about learning and openly discussing their thoughts are not presenty’’ (2004, p. 434). She thus concludes that ‘‘the cultural value frameworks underpinning society and education in the UAE carry with them assumptions about the social world about teaching and learning that are not congruent with the underlying assumptions of reflective practice’’ (2004, p. 435). We argue below that such a view relies on a limited view of the notion of culture.

2. Reflections on ‘culture’ As Raymond Williams and others have pointed out, ‘culture’ is one of the most complex words in the English language in terms of its history and etymology, so it is not surprising to find it used in a range of disparate senses (Williams, 1983; Eagleton, 2000). ‘‘Within this single term, questions of freedom and determinism, agency and endurance, change and identity, the given and the created come dimly into focus’’ (Eagleton 2000, p. 2). In common usage, culture is variously defined as a way of life, a network of meanings, or a system of values and beliefs. The problem with these attempts at defining culture is that they convey the impression that culture is a static, synoptic ‘thing’. Such a conceptualization of culture lends itself to a compartmentalized worldview where different cultures are each self-contained and separate. Within this model individuals are seen as belonging to a particular culture. From here it is a small step to see culture as the main exegetic tool in understanding individuals and comprehending all social, educational and political issues. In discussing the UAE, Richardson employs expressions like ‘‘Arab-Islamic values’’ and defines the country as a ‘‘stronghold’’ of such values. The term ‘‘stronghold’’ implies a refuge or fort, both of

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which carry overtones of being under siege or in a state of combat. Moreover, while religious awareness implicitly underpins all aspects of social policy in the UAE, to talk about ‘‘Arabic–Islamic values’’ as if these can be taken as given, ignores the fact that the relationship between Islamic and Arab identities is ‘‘associative’’ and not ‘‘intrinsic’’ (Findlow, 2000; Halliday, 2003). It also in no way does justice to the complexity of history and society in the UAE and ignores past and present contestations over the meaning of these ‘‘values’’ (see, for example, Halliday, 2003 and Safi, 2003 for deconstructions of the constructs ‘‘Arabic’’ and ‘‘Islamic’’). As Findlow points out in relation to nationalism and Arab–Islamic identity in the UAE, ‘‘There is a wide diversity of identity constructs in the Muslim world and within the Arab-Muslim world’’ (Findlow, 2000, p. 1). As teacher educators we believe that while it is valuable for us to reflect on the assumptions and values that we bring to any context we work in, to engage in this reflective work within an essentialized, dichotomous conceptual framework is both reductive and limiting. The consequences of such reductionism is the sort of formulaic stereotyping and over generalizing that Richardson falls in to with comments like ‘‘Arab students prefer prescriptive learning environments where they are told exactly what to do and directed along a single pathy’’ (Richardson, 2004, p. 432). As Holliday points out, criticism based on such a dichotomous framework works towards ‘‘an other-isation or tribalisation of the victim ‘cultures’ by reducing them to peripheral, non-thinking automata’’ (Holliday, 1997, p. 214). What we hope to demonstrate here, with data derived from focus groups in 2002–2003 and Web CT discussions in 2003–2004, as well as excerpts from the students’ journals, included in their teaching portfolios in 2003–2004, is the ability of teacher education students in the UAE to take a range of discourses and populate them with their own voices. This presentation of data reflects our continued close involvement with the HCT’s Emirati student teachers both at college and in schools and enables us to discuss the students’ interpretation of their experience with far more confidence than Richardson.

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One of the most interesting aspects of the HCT B.Ed. degree is that the social identities being constructed in discourse are being created as part of a new and evolving ‘‘community of practice’’ (Wenger, 1998). Within this community, the students are at the confluence of multiple discourses—of Emiratization (nationalization of the workforce), of global English, of ‘traditional’ and ‘progressive’ teaching philosophies—and are having to configure these different discursive strands into a new pattern with no single model to follow. In the following section we offer further insight into the context within which the students’ community of practice is evolving, utilizing the notion of discourse as part of a richer theorization of culture that enables a more nuanced reading of UAE history and society than that underpinning Richardson’s argument.

3. The United Arab Emirates Kazim (2000) presents a reading of UAE history and society in which successive ‘‘sociodiscursive formations’’ (Kazim identifies the Islamic, Transformational, Colonial and Contemporary formations) have involved both continuities and discontinuities with the preceding formation(s) as society in each period strives to reproduce itself. Thus in the contemporary period elements of earlier periods continue into the present but in altered form. Examples of such continuities are the political structures of hereditary rule, the economic structures of agriculturalism, mercantilism and industrialism and the sociocultural structures of language, art, food, dress and religious beliefs. Other aspects of earlier periods are reconstructed within the contemporary formation to serve its reproduction, for example, camel racing (for a discussion of the reconstruction of the ‘‘tradition’’ of camel racing, see Khalaf, 2000; see Hobsbawm and Ranger (1992), for a wider discussion of ‘‘invented traditions’’), urban sculptures of coffee pots, pearl shells and sailing dhows, and traditional Bedouin ‘‘tents’’ located in the marbled atria of hotels and shopping malls. At the same time the contemporary period has its own constructions in each of these areas, for example, a Federal



government which develops foreign policy and issues passports in the political sphere, sophisticated oil, tourism and banking industries linked to globalization in the economic sphere as well as the development of multiculturalism and consumerism in the socio-cultural sphere. Reflecting the thrusts of these continuities, changing patterns and new constructions, Kazim identifies three discourses operating in the contemporary UAE. These comprise what Kazim describes as ‘‘conservative’’, ‘‘progressive’’ and ‘‘moderate’’ discourses; the first seeking to preserve past patterns, the second embracing globalization while the third seeks a balance between the first two (Kazim, 2000, p. 434). All three discourses are accommodated by UAE policy makers as each contributes in different ways to the sociodiscursive reproduction of the contemporary UAE social formation (Kazim, 2000, pp. 452–456). As will be evident in the discussion below, this sociodiscursive model provides an insightful explanatory tool that accommodates complexity and is well suited to understanding the multiple and dynamic realities of the contemporary UAE. 3.1. The United Arab Emirates: education The UAE as a relatively new ‘nation-state’ has made remarkable strides in a number of areas. One of the areas where considerable scope for further improvement exists is school education. Increasingly in recent years local commentators, such as those cited below, have called for radical improvements in UAE schools. The UAE thus far has been a successful model and a leading force in Arabic politics and economy. It’s about time for schools to follow suit. (Taha-Thomure, 2003) This call has been echoed in academic discussions of the needs of UAE education generally and of UAE government schools in particular: Due to dramatic changes that are taking place in the world, particularly in the UAE, the role of the education system has become the focus of critical analysis. This has resulted in a series of rather severe criticisms of the educa-

tion system in the UAE. Some of these criticisms include:

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inappropriate methods of teaching and learning inflexible curricula and programmes which lead to high drop out rates and long duration of study (Mograby, 1999)

The need for significant improvements has been accepted by the UAE Ministry of Education and Youth and led to the development of Vision 2020; an ambitious plan to reform education in the Emirates by embedding continuous quality improvement as a ‘‘strategic pillar’’ in the practices of UAE schools, reflected in increasingly effective teaching, appropriate methodologies and rigorous evaluation processes (UAE Ministry of Education and Youth, 2000). More specifically, Vision 2020 states: Radical change in teaching/learning concepts, practices, means and styles will be effectedy The focus will shift from teaching to learning, from the teacher to the learner, from memorization to creativity, reflection, imagination and innovation: To attain this objective, continuous training for teachers and supervisors will be provided to change the traditional roles they play into more effective roles to promote, develop and instill the culture of innovation which is a societal ambition. (UAE Ministry of Education and Youth, 2000, p. 87) It was this widespread recognition of the need for change and improvement in UAE schools and classrooms that led to the development of the HCT B.Ed. degree, which is the focus of Section. 3.3 below. However, first we discuss the role of women in the UAE since her views on this form the core of Richardson’s argument against the appropriateness of reflective practice in the cultural context of the UAE. 3.2. The United Arab Emirates: the role of women In producing a cadre of excellent national teachers, the HCT’s B.Ed. degree offers an opportunity to further the twin agendas of Emiratization and Educational Reform, as well


as promoting professional opportunities for women at the same time. However, as part of her critique of the validity of the notion of ‘reflective practice’ for ‘Arabic–Islamic culture’ in general, and specifically for the UAE, Richardson (2004) questions the cultural and contextual appropriateness of the notion of student teachers acting as ‘change agents’. She believes ‘‘it would contradict their own view of their ‘place’ in the school hierarchy’’ (2004 p. 435). Yet Emirati student teachers are not shy about criticizing the UAE school system. As one student commented in a focus group discussion: What we havey is just failingya failing system of educating students and they are missingyI feel that here, the people who are working in the Ministry of Education are missing the point of what is essential knowledge that they have to teach their studentsy Everyday I discover this when I go to the schools. Aysha, Year 4 student, Ras Al Khaimah WC Another reason Richardson offers to support her contention that reflective practice may be inappropriate for Emirati female student teachers is the traditional role of women in a ‘‘male dominated society [that] still resists the idea of women thinking for themselves’’ (Richardson, 2004, p. 433). She describes the typical Emirati woman as one who is ‘‘protected from public display and not often involved in the public arena’’ (Richardson, 2004, p. 432). However, as one recent commentator, while noting that the continued male domination of society ‘‘remains a stumbling block to true equality’’, remarks: Women are encouraged to become highly educatedyThey are taking on new roles as teachers, doctors and leaders. One out of every three doctors, pharmacists, technicians and administrators is a woman. About 20 per cent of the total work force are now women. However, in government the percentage is much higher. In this sector, the country’s women form 40 per cent of the labour forceyOver 80 percent of the UAE employees within each of the Ministries of Health and Education are women. Many are heads of departments–at par

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with many Western countries. Strangely, when one thinks of how writers in The West portray Arab women as meek and servile, many UAE women are joining the military and police forces. (Salloum, 2003) There is active involvement of women in many sectors of the workforce in the UAE, and education is perhaps the most prominent and highly significant. With kindergartens, primary schools and girls’ preparatory and secondary schools in the UAE staffed by females—and with women starting to play a greater role as tertiary educators—the key role of women in education cannot be overlooked or underrated. With this in mind, in the next section we discuss the nature and scope of the HCT’s teacher education degree. 3.3. The United Arab Emirates: teacher education One way of incorporating the sort of sociohistorical complexity that we have outlined above into thinking about teacher education is to view teaching as an ‘‘amalgam’’ of discourses (Coldron and Smith, 1995) that are appropriated and synthesized in the process of learning to teach. As Miller Marsh notes, ‘‘From this perspective, teacher thinking is a me´lange of past, present, and future meanings that are continually being renegotiated through social interactiony In order to attain membership in a given group, an individual must appropriate one or more of the discourses that flows through the community and become proficient at negotiating meaning and actions within the genres’ borders’’ (Miller Marsh, 2003, pp. 6–7). In this view the task of learning to teach is to create, through this process of discursive appropriation and synthesis, a philosophy of education, an ‘orientation to teaching’ (see Freeman and Freeman, 2001), in the broadest terms. What the students are accomplishing in weaving these discourses into a coherent and meaningful pattern is a work of imagination leading towards the creation of new ‘‘teaching selves’’ (Danielewicz, 2001) as part of an evolving community of practice in the UAE. This dynamic model of the ongoing mutual co-construction of



the individual and the social serves to ‘‘belie any simplistic notion that identities are internalized in a sort of faxing process that unproblematically reproduces the collective upon the individual’’ (Holland et al., 1998, p. 169). Building on notions of teaching as an amalgam of discourses, after briefly outlining our research methodology below, we go on to look at reflective practice as one of the educational discourses available to education students in the UAE to appropriate as part of their own self-fashioning as teachers.

4. Research methodology The data for the study that forms the basis of this paper was gathered over a two-year period (2002–2004) of working with the first cohort of students to complete the HCT’s Bachelor of Education degree. Building on the notion of conversation as ‘‘the social justification of belief’’ Kvale, 1996, p. 37), the majority of the data was collected through two forms of ‘conversation’, neither of which was linked to assessment. These included corporeal, face-to-face conversations in the form of researcher-led focus groups and virtual, online Web CT conversations in which the researchers were not present. Additionally, some data comes from students’ journals, which are part of their teaching practice portfolios. This data, which reflects our continued close involvement with the HCT’s Emirati student teachers both at college and in schools, was coded using NVIVO’s NUD!IST qualitative analysis software to identify key lexical items or ‘nodes’ which structured the students’ discourse. Reflective practice was one such node. It is important to stress, however, that we as researchers, the students as research ‘subjects’, and indeed the whole research process in this study, are all institutionally situated. This increased the likelihood of particular educational discourses being evident in the data, while excluding, or at least diminishing the likelihood of, other discourses, such as a Marxist inspired critique of schooling as a conservative force of social reproduction, being represented. Yet the alternative of writing/representing subjects’ ‘true’ voices is something of a chimera.

Indeed, sensitivity to the potential problem of ‘othering’ research participants, by imposing the researcher’s agenda, can be taken to patronizing extremes—in effect another form of ‘othering’— where people are perceived as passive cultural dupes rather than skilled users of culture. As Adrian Holliday argues, The setting culture is not the untouched place imagined by naturalists in which an ‘active’ researcher tramples on a ‘passive’ virgin culture, but a resource which enables a group of people to respond to a multiplicity of influences from other groupsythe research participants may be as culturally skilled as the researcher, and have the potential, if they wish, to be as much involved as the researcher in negotiating the research event. Indeed, both researcher and research participants enter into a relationship of culture making. (Holliday, 2002, p. 149) Concern for potential ‘othering’ of research subjects by researchers has prompted practices that actively seek to empower participants, practices such as member checking, co-editing and collaborative writing. A powerful example of this genre is the work of Lather and Smithies (Lather and Smithies, 1997; Lather, 1993), who submitted the whole body of their work to the participants for feedback before publication. At a less ambitious level, we gave students copies of the focus group transcriptions. While not being intended as indicative of co-authorship or guarantee of coownership, this step was an expression of good faith, which might have assisted in fostering mutual trust. Holliday (2002, p. 160) cites Jenkins on this topic (Jenkins, 1986, pp. 223–226), who argues that such attempts may just be a ‘‘rhetorical con trick’’ and amount to ‘‘bogus co-authorship’’ when in reality ‘‘everything is in the hands of the researcher’’, while Phillips and Jorgensen (2002) emphasize the inescapable asymmetric nature of the researcher–researched relationship and urge us to embrace authority and responsibility as researchers. Similarly, Susan Krieger, in her book Social Science and the Self, refers to the hesitancy we may feel in asserting ourselves, our vision and our voices in social science writing:


I think we often feel we do not have that right in social science, or we feel it is a right we have to earn. I think such attitudes towards the individual authorial perspective, while appealingly modest, are not very helpful. They encourage us to deny that we will speak of things in terms that reflect how we see them. (Krieger, 1991, p. 166) Acknowledging authority and authorial responsibility raises the need to be mindful that discursive construction does not mean that all discourses are equally good or valid. While reiterating the emphasis in our study that seeks more to explore rather than evaluate the discursive construction of the students’ teaching identities, still, this focus on discursive construction does not mean that we are operating within a relativist free-for-all. We still have ethical responsibilities to strive for honesty and epistemic loyalty (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999), while recognizing that, as Mouffe argues: We can never be completely satisfied that we have made a good choice since a decision in favour of some alternative is always at the detriment of another oneysocial division is constitutivey[therefore we need] to come to terms with the never ending interrogation of the political by the ethicaly (Mouffe, 2000, pp. 136–140) This never-ending interrogation requires us as researchers to continually strive to balance modesty with an awareness of responsibility and authority; awareness of others with self-awareness; and critical, non-innocence with a capacity for open-mindedness and engagement. Specifically, as merited by our genuine interest in, and indeed admiration for, the student teachers who are our research subjects, we have striven to propose a line of argument that is substantive and coherent. Yet at the same time, in light of the recognition that we cannot know everything about our subjects and need to remain respectful of them as complex individuals, we have tried to ground the claims that we make in the words and arguments of the students.

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5. Reflective practice in the Emirates Following Roberts (1998) we recognize a Deweyan philosophy as one perspective on reflection that is appropriate to language teacher education (Roberts, 1998, p. 55). Zeichner and Liston (1996) similarly endorse Dewey’s notion of reflection which he defined as ‘‘that which involves active, persistent and careful consideration of any belief or practice in light of the reasons that support it and the further consequences to which it leads’’ (Zeichner and Liston, 1996, p. 9). Zeichner and Liston also make the point that reflection is not so much a series of steps or a procedure but rather, a holistic orientation to teaching, a way of being a teacher that entails open-mindedness, responsibility and wholeheartedness (Zeichner and Liston, 1996, pp. 9–10). With a similar emphasis on broad approach rather than procedure, Roberts sees the Deweyan reflective paradigm as concerned primarily with self-awareness, deliberative thought and a problem-solving orientation (Roberts, 1998, p. 53). Given the critical role of women in UAE education that we noted above, the teacher educator has two options with regard to reflection: either making the choice on their behalf ‘‘that reflection may not be appropriate to use with Arab women trainee teachers’’ (Richardson, 2004, p. 431), hence, potentially reinforcing and replicating their teacher-centered learning experiences at school; or affording students opportunities to engage with and appropriate a range of approaches, styles and discourses, including ones involving notions of critical and reflective thinking, thus enabling them to make their own choices about what would or would not be appropriate in their own cultural context. We now examine some of the ways Emirati women have taken ownership of discourses of reflective practice within education as part of the work of authoring their identities as teachers. What follows are examples from Web CT discussions in which student teachers discuss and reflect on their growth and development as teachers over the 4 four years of their degree. Despite Richardson’s claims about the incongruence of UAE ‘‘cultural value frameworks’’ with the



underlying assumptions of reflective practice, the students here embrace critical thinking and reflective practice, demonstrating considerable selfawareness of their capacity for growth, development and change: Teaching has changed my life completely. I don’t know what would become of me if I chose another specializationy Teaching made me realize that I have qualities I never thought I have and developed others. I BECAME A CRITICAL THINKER and a reflective one. I learnt how to reflect on my teaching and the methods I use. I loved being able to use my imagination in teaching because I thought that I would not be able to. I also realized that children are different, with different abilities and different ways of thinking. I used to think that children are children, yes they are funny and you can laugh with them but they also think about things you never give a second look. After all what I’ve gone through these four years, I learnt that no matter how long I learn I will never get enough. I will always be a student. I will always be a learner. (Fakhra, Year 4 student, Fujairah WC, emphasis in original.) This student’s linking of reflection and critical thinking skills was echoed by other student teachers: Teaching enhanced my critical thinking skills. It made me a reflective person who reflects constantly on everything, not only on the incidents that take place in school but also on every article I read or programme I watch. I just feel that reflection deepens my understanding of certain things and strengthens my beliefs about teaching. I know that what I am going to say might seem odd to some of you, but I feel that reflection, somehow, makes me a better person! Yes, teaching has changed my life and when I look back on the things I have learned in the last four years, I realize it’s been a positive change. (Nada, Year 4 student, Sharjah WC) The students in the above postings not only recognize the value of reflection but link this to their overall development as effective teachers. In

this, they directly challenge Richardson’s claim as to the appropriateness of reflective practice within the UAE context. The real test of their appropriation of reflective practice, however, is their ability to not just talk about, but to ‘do’ reflection. Below are some sample entries from student teachers’ journals, which are one element of their teaching practice portfolios. In the first excerpt below a student teacher is engaging in what Scho¨n (1983, 1987) calls ‘reflection-on-action’. That is the student is reflecting after the event about what worked, what didn’t work and why it did not work. ‘Zoo animals’ was the third lesson in the unit. Materials were clear and supported the aims and content of the lesson. Despite the fact that the lesson met its objectives, the pair work did not work well. The task was complicated and students did not understand what they have to do. Even though I gave them example, it didn’t suit the learners’ level. The content was appropriate for grade one students and the stages were well timed. The sequence of activities worked well, but the pair work too long time, hence I didn’t have time to do the reflection stage. (Roweya, Year 4 student, Sharjah WC) The student is working with her students using a ‘teaching-learning cycle’ (Love et al., 2000) that includes stages of ‘tuning-in’, ‘knowledge building’, ‘transformation’, ‘presentation’, and ‘reflection’. In the latter stage the teacher encourages students to consider what they have accomplished during the lesson or unit. Using this cycle as a tool for scaffolding her thinking the student teacher is able to identify precisely where the main problem in her lesson arose. She recognizes that her expectations for the transformation stage—–when the students work with the ‘knowledge’ in order to transform it into personal understanding—–was in effect, beyond the students’ zone of proximal development. As a result of these difficulties no time was left for students and teacher to reflect on the experience. In the excerpt below another student teacher reflects on the critical importance of allowing time and space in the classroom for constructive, formative feedback.


Now as I become more experienced, I’m more aware of the importance of providing the students with constructive feedback. Providing the students with constructive feedback is an essential aspect of the teaching and learning cycle. It allows the students to have a clear picture of how well they are performing and if they need to put extra effort. Providing the students with positive feedback is considered as a vital tool to increase students’ self-esteem and learning motivation. It also one of the important components of social interaction patterns between the teacher and her students. Through this interaction pattern the teacher provides her students with the guidance and modeling to help them meet the potentials and move through their zone of proximal development (Cameron, 2001, p. 219) either individually or as a whole class. (Fethiya, Year 4 student, Sharjah WC) Note that the student teacher is advocating for her own students the very same reflective practices that we, as teacher educators have been encouraging and modeling in the college classroom. The student teacher refers to the need for her own students to be able to stand back from their efforts and achievement, in order to ‘‘have a clear picture of how well they are performing’’. In this way, through externalization and deliberation, the students’ progress becomes an object of their consciousness and hence more amenable to direction and control. When distilled to this core essence, which also underlies human language, (Vygotsky, 1986), it is difficult to understand how or why we might want to claim such a fundamental human capacity as inappropriate to, or incongruent with, any one group or culture. Theorizing broader principles from one’s experience is a form of engaging one’s reflective capacities (Britzman, 1991). Whereas the student in the excerpt above does this based on her general beliefs and experiences, the student in the excerpt below employs a process of induction to draw a theoretical principle from a specific incident. In this she echoes Dewey’s core notion of reflection as ‘‘educative’’, as opposed to ‘‘routine’’, experience (Zeichner and Liston, 1996):

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I feel that I was using a variety of strategies appropriate to children needs. For example, the learning centers cater to different learning style and multiple intelligences. I was pleased to see students guessing the taste of the food, the sound of different things, the smell of items, and the shape of objects. In addition, I was delighted to listen to them repeating the sentences related to the five senses and applying their knowledge to writing by working individually and completing the puzzley My experience lead me to think that when students are immersed in discovery learning, they are more engaged and there is a bigger chance for them to remember the concept because they discovered it themselves. (Afra, Year 4 student, Abu Dhabi WC) We have discussed our belief that reflection is an intellectual and emotional orientation, rather than a series of steps. Often reflection will be triggered by an uncomfortable experience or one where expectations and reality did not match (Zeichner and Liston, 1996): yI would have also changed other things as I was challenged by their behavior. They needed lots of time to sit on the carpet and become settled. Throughout the story students moved form their places and talked. I should have then asked them to go back to their seats but I was worried that it might make things worse. Another solution could be that I could ask them to do TPR in their place, for example stand or breathe in and out. Because I spent a lot of time on getting students attention while telling the story students did not get to play the game, which was when students would be asked to be active and go back to their seats. Therefore, students spent a longer time on the carpet listening to me, which made things worsey (Shaikha, Year 4 student, Abu Dhabi WC) Here the student teacher presents the key elements of reflection as we have discussed it. She is clearly self-aware: ‘‘yI was challenged by their behaviour.’’; she engages in deliberative thought: ‘‘yI was worried that it might make



things worse.’’; and she reframes the situation as part of a problem-solving orientation: ‘‘Another solution could be that I ask them to do a TPRy’’ (total physical response). It would be difficult to persuade a student teacher like this that reflection is not an appropriate approach to teaching for her because her cultural values are incongruent with the underlying principles of reflection. Finally, as noted in Section. 4 above, we as researchers and our students are institutionally situated. We were thus reassured when our view of the students’ capacity for engaging in reflection and reflective practices was shared by an independent external examiner for the Bachelor of Education students’ final year portfolios, who, writing from the perspective of a UK university teacher education department, commented specifically on the students’ reflective capacities: ‘‘In many ways students’ work exceeded the international standard in terms of breadth of understanding and degree of reflection evidenced’’ (HCT Bachelor of Education: External Examiner’s Report, 2004, emphasis added). Similar affirmation has come from the Faculty of Education at the Australian university which has been extensively involved in the design and international certification of the degree. The Department Head, who oversees the certification process, noted in a recent report that the student teachers ‘‘are a remarkable group of women-confident, articulate and intelligent–and potentially a major intellectual resource in the future development of education in the Emirates’’ (HCT Bachelor of Education: University of Melbourne Certification Report, 2004).

6. Conclusion We argue, in contrast to Richardson (2004) who sees the assumptions of reflective practice as incongruent with the beliefs and values of ‘‘Arab– Islamic culture’’, that culture can be usefully understood as a never-finished site of competing historical and social discourses, rather than as a received set of beliefs and values. We wish to emphasize ‘‘the given and the possible’’ rather than just the ‘‘given’’ (Britzman, 1991) in order to resist what we see as another form of cultural imperial-

ism. We advocate a view of reflection as a ‘‘human’’ capacity akin to our abilities to create and use language and other ‘‘tools of the mind’’, even though the particular forms it takes will inevitably be shaped by historical, cultural and social factors. In a similar fashion, we view learning to teach as the situated appropriation and re-construction of social and educational discourses, which forms part of an ongoing process of self-authoring an identity as a teacher. Within this framework, we view reflective practice as an educational discourse available for student appropriation as part of their ongoing identity construction. This discourse emphasizes qualities of deliberation, self-awareness and a problem solving orientation to the classroom as valuable and appropriate for teachers. We have presented evidence of Emirati student teachers discussing, reflecting on, and engaging in reflective practices, both for themselves and with their own students. We hope our discussion and in particular our students’ words have offered food for thought to those who see ‘‘culture’’ as a hindering constraint and an obstacle to Emirati students’ engagement with reflective practices. In conclusion, we argue that if the HCT is to fulfill the call for improving the country’s education system, we cannot rule out the reflective practice paradigm, i.e. a concern with deliberative thought, self-awareness, and the reframing of problems (Roberts, 1998), for teacher education in the UAE. We believe that this is particularly the case within a framework that views students as full participants in an ongoing process of co-constructing and re-negotiating their teaching knowledge within their existing experience and understandings. Our examples of Emirati student teachers demonstrate that they see themselves as both critical, reflective thinkers and as much needed agents of change in UAE education. We leave you with the vision of one of the B.Ed. students conveying her strong desire to be an agent of change at the individual student, the classroom and the national level: I dream of the day when everyone around me point at me saying: ‘‘this teacher is the one that


made a change’’. I want to implement everything I’ve learnt and to utilize everything I’ve revealed throughout my academic years. I want to be part in changing the teaching vision in the UAE and to be one of those who will draw this vision appropriately. Adding to that, I dream to make a change with my students. I want them to love English as a language that might help them in their life, not because they are forced to learn it. I dream to see my students speak English fluently as a proof that I taught them differently. Simply, I want to make a change! Hamda, Year 4 student, Al Ain WC

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