In 1879, June 17th, School Loving Ladies Association stated its own purpose in the letter was addressed to Patriarchy of Constantinople; “The main purpose of the Association is to open a college and provide free education to poor and uneducated ladies, as well as preparing them as teaches for province.”1 Women’s engagement in civic activities in the Middle East have largely ignored in historiography writing. Female non-governmental organizations have been assumed to pursue either charitable or trivial activities not requiring further research. Furthermore, as a result of the neglect of female organizations, Armenian schools have been studied only as a subsection of Christian or missionary school activities in the Ottoman Empire.2 This paper presents the developments in the education of girls and women through the activities of one of the main Armenian female organization of School Loving Armenian Ladies Association (1879-1914), which is one of the largest and long-lived Ottoman-Women’s associations in the Empire. It began its activities by founding a girl college in a small house in the middle of Ortaköy district, Constantinople with 20 students in 1879. This organization lasted longer than 30 years and acted as agents of the bodies, minds, and interests of Ottoman-Armenian girls and women. In 1892, at the end of its 12-year’s operation, the Association’s college had 110 students, 60 of which were free of charge, 12 are boarding students, established 10 colleges in various provinces of the Ottoman Empire and the students of School-Loving Ladies college were accepted as teachers and lecturers, who delivered the skills and knowledge of their own education throughout the Empire. This paper will try to answer the questions about the management, curriculum development and teaching aims of this association's schools; and the impact of vocational education on women's employment; moreover, the means by which how this association raised money, hired teachers, provided classroom materials (books, tables, sewing machines), and whether girls could seek a wider variety of employment, after completing their education at schools that opened by the associations. 1Masis in 1879 August. 2Selcuk Aksin Somel’a article of Christian community schools during the Ottoman reforms period, Mutlu ?amil’s missionary schools in the Empire and Adnan ?i?man’s Foreign countries cultural and social enterprice in the Ottoman Empire.

Since the late 1970s, austerity policies across the so-called population-rich countries of the Middle East and North Africa have had a profound impact on the provision of universal education. State schooling—once invested with weighty aspirations of nationalist and anti-colonial rhetoric—has with few exceptions been undermined by deteriorating conditions and the growth of privatized education. Scholars of the region—and Morocco in particular—have documented how this mix of policies has exacerbated economic and social inequalities, in large part by creating vastly divergent educational experiences for students of different class backgrounds (e.g. Boum, 2008; Boutieri, 2016). While most of this scholarship has focused on the implications of austerity for getting an education, this paper examines its effects on doing education, highlighting on the experience of teachers in Morocco. The Moroccan state’s recent decision to replace tenure with a contract model for K-12 teachers has accelerated a long-perceived decline of the profession’s prestige. This paper documents how this increasing precarity of state-employed teachers has paralleled the growth of markets for alternative, more marginal types of education labor: like tutors, clowns, and trainers. Drawing on long-term ethnography of a state-funded extracurricular school in a small city in Morocco’s Middle Atlas, I analyze encounters between tenured teachers and these other forms of educational labor. Teachers themselves sometimes engage in things like tutoring or facilitating trainings, and other times provide commentary from a distance, like for example evaluating the performances of clowns invited to their schools. Using linguistic anthropological theories of identity performance, I demonstrate how teachers double-down on enacting the prestige of their profession—through language and textual references—even as they point to these alternate forms of educational labor as evidence of its decline. My analysis thus qualifies contemporary accounts that overwhelmingly focus on schooling with a view to its imagined outcomes, positioning it instead as a site of sensemaking about class and cultural politics. Boum, A. (2008). The Political Coherence of Educational Incoherence: The Consequences of Educational Specialization in a Southern Moroccan Community. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 39(2), 205–223. Boutieri, C. (2016). Learning in Morocco: Language Politics and the Abandoned Educational Dream. Indiana University Press.

Private language schools in Iran are sites of unfavorable employment conditions and complex power relations between between teachers and higher ranking administrators.I investigate this situation in the case of one English teacher in Mashhad, Iran. I was acquainted with him from the time we were colleagues there in 2015. In 2018 I interviewed him a short time after he had resigned from one private school and then started work at another. Case study method is used to explore his experience in-depth, allowing us to view this process through a close-up lense while in a contextualized condition. In a broader context, Butler’s (1997) concept of subjection enabled this study to view the daily experiences of teachers in the private language schools of Iran. In The Psychic Life of Power, Butler considers the way psychic life is generated by the social operation of power, and how that social operation of power is concealed and fortified by the psyche that it produces. In her critique to the Foucauldian account, she asserts that the subject cannot be reduced to the power by which it is occasioned, nor can this power be reducible to the subject. Subordination, however, is the very entity which allows the existence of the subject (to be something in order to not be something else). Butler’s concept of subjection enabled this ethnography to explore the daily experiences of these teachers. The current analysis focuses on how this teacher went through the resignation process, and how the context of private language schools in Mashhad, provided the grounds for that series of events. Regarding the participant observation in the context of private language schools in Mashhad, this study reveals that the relationship between language school and teacher is that of the power and subject relation, i.e. language teachers are both subject to and the subject of power. Regarding the context, the example of the language teacher's resignation demonstrates the period he had been undergoing subordination. Further, the data from the interview with him indicated both his subjection and the relation between power and psyche.

Once settling in the United States, refugees are entitled to many services, such as literacy programs, which are aimed at teaching them the English language and helping them develop the necessary skills to find employment and function in their everyday life. For a long time, schools and resettlement agencies designed ESL classes on the assumption that adult students had the basic education and literacy skills in their native language to learn another language. However, many refugees do not have the strong educational foundations upon which literacy is built; therefore, many struggle to learn English and become so frustrated that they ended up withdrawing. These programs are not necessarily designed with consideration to refugees’ prior literacy experiences or the cultural expectations and ideologies that refugees, especially women refugees, bring with them. For instance, due to cultural pressure, assumed gender roles (most women are stay-at-home mothers and housewives), and the need to work at an early age, especially in rural areas, literacy for many refugees, particularly women, in their native language is basic, so learning a second language can be challenging for them. In this presentation, I discuss the different struggles Syrian refugee women currently living in the United States, a country that has different cultural values, encounter. I explore the intersections of narrative, literacy, and refugee experience, more specifically gendered refugee experiences to examine the tension these women face between growing up in Syria and living in the United States. I unpack the kind of literacy work that is happening in these Syrian refugee women’s experiences and the ways the different kinds of literacy they practice affect their participation in public discourse. I show how the types of literacy these women engage with defy the Western definition of literacy and bring these women and their literacy practices to the forefront. I hope to challenge the dominant narrative, particularly Western cultures’ definition of refugee literacy and show refugee women’s experiences and voices that have been absent from the larger conversation in several fields. By creating spaces for refugee women’s narratives and stories to emerge and for their experiences and voices to be valued, resettlement agencies and literacy scholars can better serve the needs of these groups that were marginalized in their countries, through their journeys to asylum, and in the host countries where they resettle.