School textbooks are inevitable players in the process of constructing and defining the elusive nation. They help to rhetorically circumscribe the community of persons who are imagined to possess a shared history and identity. Religion frequently plays an important role in this process, as religion is so often critical to the construction of a national identity, as is the case in Jordan. How textbook authors represent (or leave out) minority religions in particular often reifies the position of these minorities within society, and further substantiates the status of religious identity or identities more generally. In recent years in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, there has been an increase in rhetoric around offering inter-religious education in schools. In this research project, I analyze efforts to effect change in Jordanian religion curriculum by examining both the processes of change and mechanisms of control in Jordanian textbook reform. This paper specifically examines the processes through which the religion content in textbooks has undergone reform in the Jordanian context since 2005. I look at recent discussions between UNESCO and the Jordanian Royal Institute for Interfaith Studies around changing the religion content in Jordanian textbooks to reflect a commitment to more tolerant, inter-religious education. Additionally, I consider the ways in which various individual and institutional actors configure and understand the “inter-religious” by looking into the linguistic and qualitative differences in how these actors utilize this term. Through this research, I embed efforts to reform religious education within the Jordanian political-cultural context and thereby uncover the larger political and social barriers to and meanings of such efforts to shift religious education. This study offers insight into the larger issue of ways in which the education system plays a key role in delineating the role of religious minorities within the nation.

This paper investigates the privatization of higher education in MENA. Higher education is an important topic in the contemporary MENA region –many have expressed concern over the inability of higher education institutions to prepare graduates for professional work. Unfortunately, reforms to MENA higher education are often suggested in line with global models of privatization, with little understanding of why privatization does or does not achieve its intended goals. Since the 1980s, most Middle Eastern countries have created or expanded their private higher education (PHE) sectors, often in response to pressure from international donors. This turn to PHE is relatively new in countries such as Jordan, Tunisia and Morocco, where publicly funded higher education was a core commitment of nation-building in the post-independence era. Despite common rationales of decreasing government funding while expanding access to higher education, the implementation of PHE has taken very different paths in each country. In Jordan, private higher education now serves a full fourth of all Jordanian students, while private universities remain small and marginalized in Tunisia, accounting for less than 2% of all students. In Morocco, private higher education emerged through a non-profit elite university, Al-Akhawayn, based on the American liberal arts model. Although serving but a small percentage of students, private higher education in Morocco today retains an elite character, shaped by the history and status of Al-Akhawayn. This paper asks why PHE has taken such different paths in each country, and examines the factors that have shaped the policies and politics of PHE in these three MENA-region nations. It draws on nine months of fieldwork in Jordan, Tunisia, and Morocco, including roughly 40 interviews with policymakers, academics and development professionals, and analysis of newspapers and policy documents. Findings suggest that privatization policies are not determined by historical accidents or internal political negotiations alone. Rather, specific socio-political, cultural, and geographic factors affect the implementation of PHE policies in the region, including: economic links to international governmental organizations (i.e., the World Bank and International Monetary Fund), tuition rates at public universities, expatriate demand for access to national higher education, colonial legacies and their resulting opportunities for higher education abroad, regional (cultural and religious) politics, and geographic location. Given the various factors affecting implementation, the paper argues that PHE alone cannot be a policy proscription for improving higher education in the region, and concludes with policy suggestions for creating dynamic higher education sectors in Arab nations.

In the town of Ksar El Kebir Morocco, there is a growing concern about youth violence and community violence, which poses a threat to both individual and community well-being. The goal of this study was to determine the effectiveness of a peace education intervention to address social issues of youth violence in Morocco. Peace education programs often seek to address the multiple manifestations of violence and to explore alternatives to violence in order to transcend and transform conflict (Kester, 2008). The literature that framed this study outlines peace education as operating in three distinct social contexts; areas of intractable conflict, areas of inter-ethnic tension and areas of tranquility (Salomon, 2007). Communities like Ksar El Kebir have been ignored by these categories and as such there was a need to evaluate the potential for peace education to reduce community violence in situations that do not fit neatly into the three categories of peace education. Given this, Ksar El Kebir was an ideal location to implement a peace education approach to address social issues the town is facing and research its effects and appropriateness to add to the body of knowledge on peace education programs. To accomplish the goal of this study, the researcher implemented a six week peace education intervention with youth between the ages of 15 and 19 who were selected based on a set of criteria developed with educators and community members from Ksar El Kebir. In order to understand the impact of the intervention on both the students and the community, a mixed methods approach was utilized, which has been identified as an appropriate research method to investigate the processes of youth development work. Community interviews coupled with daily reflection sheets from students in the intervention program and observation sheets from the researcher were part of the qualitative data collection process. A pre- and post-survey was used to collect quantitative information directly related to the intervention program and its process. Early results illustrate that both youth and the community believe in the value of a peace education program, especially when it incorporates the culture and norms of the society/community. Further analysis shows that youth in Ksar El Kebir are more inclined to feel part of a connected community if they understand their roles and agency within the community, thereby, possibly reducing ill behaviors among themselves and within the larger society.

This paper explores questions about knowledge production, institutional power, and the contributions of educational anthropology to social theory of reform and cultural change. It investigates gender and development in Jordan, where many women avoid formal employment because of its public and gender-mixed nature. Teaching is often considered the “best” career choice for a woman because she will be around children at work, at home during school breaks, able to flexibly enter and exit the profession, and in limited contact with men in public. However, female teachers are uniquely empowered to influence changing cultural norms because of the explicitly transformative “Education Reform for a Knowledge Economy”(ERfKE) in Jordan over the past decade. Teachers dynamically negotiate what it means to be a woman in Jordanian society by presenting the values embedded in education reforms and making decisions about what to teach, how, and why. Though the mandated teaching goals now include teaching for critical thinking, cooperation and teamwork, technological fluency, multilingualism, democratic participation, and entrepreneurship, it is difficult for teachers to figure out how to do this. Based on eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork with public school teachers predominately in a girls’ public K-12 school in the capital Amman, this paper examines how teachers engage in the everyday definition and implementation of national education reforms. This paper follows five selected teachers from different genders, neighborhoods, and subjects across the curriculum in order to critically analyze how Jordanian educators respond, challenge, adapt, and mediate transformational education reforms. Their lived experiences illustrate agency within structure, from impromptu visits from the queen to voluntary teacher training workshops on using mobile devices in the classroom. Drawing on theories of social emergence, performativity, and practice, I argue that teachers are active participants in the social construction of knowledge and the knowledge economy. This paper proposes a framework of empirical practices and repertoires of justification that teachers employ in order to teach for social transformation within culturally acceptable boundaries. The research focuses on instances of improvisation, decision making, and other examples of agency within structure such as personalization of the curriculum. Thus, this paper shows that teacher participation in the ERfKE reforms is a context in which they model, articulate, challenge, and transform gender roles in society.