Orientalism is not my opinion: Decolonial teaching and the problem of credibility in IR courses with a MENA focus

Abstract

Teaching about the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region in politics or international studies courses in ‘the West’ is challenging due to the many stereotypes that inform students’ imagination. A common pedagogical purpose is to help students recognise their biases and work through them. This often renders the classroom a controversial place and the teacher suspect of lack of objectivity. The specialised literature points at ‘cognitive dissonance’ as an intervening factor. On occasions, cognitive dissonance leads to harm on teachers’ credibility. This article evaluates the question of credibility in two activities developed in International Relations (IR) undergraduate courses with a MENA focus, where students had to identify the impact of ‘Orientalism’ in the film Argo and in analyses of the ‘Arab Spring’. The article argues that to fully grasp episodes of cognitive dissonance and attending problems of teacher credibility, the disciplinary context in which learners are socialised into needs to be considered – in this case, IR. The article advocates the articulation of a student-centred decolonial teaching pedagogy that renders subjectivity an object of learning and, at the same time, prepares students to understand the potentialities and weaknesses of different IR paradigms.

Keywords

cognitive dissonance credibility decolonial teaching international relations Orientalism

Introduction

Student imagination is ridden with stereotypes and distorted beliefs about the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. This imagination and its effects are the object of inquiry in a few works that also evaluate strategies to deal with the interference of prejudice about Middle Easterners in the classroom (Abboud, 2015; Caplan et al., 2012; Çavdar et al., 2019; Kazemzadeh, 1998; Stover, 2007; Tétrault, 1996). This stream of work shares the concern that the learning process does not fall prey to simple opinion in lieu of evidence-based argumentation.

The study by Çavdar et al. (2019: 300–301) demonstrates that beliefs such that

(1) ME societies are fundamentally and essentially different from the rest of the world; (2) that the region does not progress; (3) that Islam determines every aspect of Muslims’ lives; (4) and that culturally, the regional countries and Muslims are essentially homogeneous

are part and parcel of learners’ imagination of the region and, avowedly, might work as a ‘psychological block against the learning process’ (Çavdar et al., 2019: 300). To overcome reductionist understandings of issues like religion or gender politics in the region, ‘targeted lectures’ are advocated (Çavdar et al., 2019: 300). To tackle similar problems, Tétrault (1996) and El Shakry (2020) propose teaching styles that stress similarities between Middle East and Western states and peoples.

Analytical pluralism is the principle that guides Kazemzadeh’s (1998) teaching of Islamic fundamentalism. This scholar defends paradigmatic pluralism as guarantee of nuanced academic discussion. Stover (2007) relies on moral reasoning and exposing students to interfaith dialogue to transform attitudes towards the Arab–Israeli conflict. In Caplan et al.’s (2012) piece, various authors reflect on teaching the Arab–Israeli conflict relying on methodologies that range from more conventional to more experimental. Abboud (2015) is an ‘Arab’ teacher of the Arab World in ‘the West’ who summons students to use their subjective experiences of the Arab or Muslim world as entry points to the study of course subjects. Embracing a socio-cultural theory of learning, Abboud (2015) stresses the centrality of context(s) to learning and considers ‘disciplines’ one relevant contextual factor. Accordingly, ‘the discipline of the professor and the students can have a tremendous influence on the teaching and learning process’ (Abboud, 2015: 241). Picking up on this idea, this article pursues to elaborate further on the effect to learning of the disciplines which students are socialised into. We intend to do this with respect to International Relations (IR).

During a serendipitious conversation, we realised that a ‘psychological block’ (Çavdar et al., 2019) was standing on the way between some students sitting in our Middle East courses and their learning, when exposed for the first time to the postcolonial critique of IR via Said’s notion of Orientalism. The courses Politics and Society in the Middle East and Political Challenges in the MENA region (IE University and Deusto University, respectively)¹ are addressed to 4- or 5-year undergraduate students.² As we talked about how things had gone over the year, we discovered that (1) teaching about postcolonialism had produced unease and rendered the class a controversial place and that (2) we had been perceived by some students as lacking objectivity. This led us to pose ourselves the following questions: Why do certain issues or analytical approaches emerge as controversial? How do controversial topics and the perception of teacher bias relate? How can controversy and bias be methodically addressed in the class? And, more specifically, what elements in our course activities stirred the perception of teacher bias?

The argument developed in this article is that the controversy attached to working with a heuristic device like ‘Orientalism’ is associated with ‘cognitive dissonance’, one of whose expressions is learners’ questioning of instructors’ objectivity. When learners perceive that teachers are not neutral, the learning process might derail (Kelly-Woessner and Woessner, 2006). Since most of us would not like this, we must consider how ‘lack of neutrality’ might affect the learning process and whether it is possible to take pedagogical advantage of it. In this work, this is done by considering the peculiarities of our disciplinary environment (IR) where, while calls for decolonising the curriculum and critically inspecting IR’s subjects (Sabaratnam, 2011) have become widespread, the canon continues to exert its normative power. The article advocates that to (successfully) pursue a post- or decolonial programme at undergraduate levels, a decolonial teaching style must assist. This style drops the ideal of ‘objectivity’, while it cares for students’ necessity of certainties; and it relies on the pedagogical value of pluralism (Kazemzadeh, 1998) and subjectivity (Abboud, 2015).

The article proceeds by, first, laying out the analytical value we grant to postcolonialism and sketch out the study context in which our students are exposed to this IR critical perspective. We then review the literature on teaching and controversies, and establish the relationship between controversies, teacher credibility and objectivity. These theoretical notions, especially the category ‘objectivity’, inform the evaluative exercise we develop in the third part of the article, where two applied-theory activities (where ‘Orientalism’ was the guiding notion) and student evaluations administered at IE University are assessed. We then explain what teaching decolonially means. It is concluded that, while commitment to a decolonial IR programme might work at flagging oneself as a ‘politicised’ (ergo, non-objective teacher), it is not all lost on the credibility front if other dimensions of teaching, like caring and validation of student views, are duly nurtured.

Orientalism and post- or decolonial IR

The ideas put forward by Said (2003[1978]) in his seminal book Orientalism contributed to establishing the foundations of the postcolonial perspective within literary studies and were then exported to realms like IR (Chowdhury and Nair, 2002; Inayatullah and Blaney, 2004; Loomba, 2015; Seth, 2013). Postcolonial thinking has a place of honour in the syllabi for our Middle East courses for at least three reasons.

First, postcolonialism rejects the idea of neutral world maps. Instead, it argues that naming and ordering the world is a practice of imperial politics through which the powerful assert their power. The construction of an inferior Eastern world since the 18th century has been central to the ontological and epistemological positioning of a modern European or Western Self over inferior non-European others. The Oriental subject is the result of the systematic production of negative imaginings about all things ‘Oriental’ (politics, society, religion, culture).

The second reason is that culture is a profoundly political realm where geopolitical meanings are harshly negotiated and enduringly set (i.e. the secular West vs the religious Orient). The relocation of culture from a peripheral position within the IR agenda to a less marginal one owes a lot to Said, as well as to other postcolonial authors like Bhabha, Spivak, Fanon or Hall (Darby and Paolini, 1994: 382).

Third, postcolonialism considers that knowledge is always situated and, therefore, also political. Said (2003 [1978]: 11) writes that ‘no production of knowledge in the human sciences can ever ignore or disclaim its author’s involvement as a human subject in his own circumstances’. Students extract from this that the ‘Oriental reality’ is not graspable outside discursive formations, including hegemonic political discourses and mainstream IR narratives.

A quick perusal at widely used IR textbooks would reveal that chapters on postcolonialism and other critical perspectives to IR are nowadays not missed. Efforts at decolonising IR, including the IR instruction have long been in the making (Kamola, 2020; Sabaratnam, 2011). Thus, teaching about Said and Orientalism to IR graduates does not render us particularly subversive. In our experience though, the exposure of students to his ideas has come along with controversy related to how this perspective of analysis deviates from canonical IR. Gauging whether this is the case might be the way to take pedagogical advantage of it.

Teaching controversies and the question of credibility

Controversial topics and higher education are bedfellows to which the literature on teaching and learning in the social sciences has paid attention for decades (Deardoff, 2013; Hare, 1973; Harris, 1940; hooks, 1994; Lowe, 2015; Lusk and Weinberg, 1994; Malet, 2015). Race, gender, sexuality, religion, and class are recurrent themes in the list of ‘controversial’ issues that bring ‘conflict’ to the classroom (Davis, 1992; Downey and Torrecilha, 1994; Gill and Worley, 2010; Housee, 2010; Wahl et al., 2000). A widely discussed angle in this literature is student reactions and teachers’ decisions involving the inclusion of controversial topics in their politics, sociology, anthropology, or humanities courses. The common question that most experts seek to answer is how generally desirable the discussion of controversial topics is, providing the risks that exist for teachers of being perceived as losing their (expected) neutral stance and of learning being compromised (Hare, 1973).

When a topic is regarded as controversial, it has been shown that students become reluctant to speak their minds for fear of the negative consequences. Housee (2010) notes that students ‘remain silent’ due to the anger, fear or anxiety produced by the controversial issue. Lusk and Weinberg (1994: 301) argue that students ‘are uncomfortable about conflict in general, in or outside the classroom’. Such discomfort is related to the consequences on peer relations and on course assessment. On one hand, learners ‘are concerned with how their peers will perceive them if they voice anything but “middle-of-the-road” views on controversial topics’ (Lusk and Weinberg, 1994: 301; see also Lowe, 2015). On the other hand, students will refrain from participating in the discussion of controversial issues out of fear that their grading will be affected if they oppose the lecturer’s perceived views (Lusk and Weinberg, 1994: 301). Deardoff (2013) corroborates that, in the student mind, the teacher holds absolute power.

Despite this, the dominant stance is that ‘coverage of controversial issues benefits students and creates a more engaging learning and teaching experience’ (Malet, 2015: 245). After all, higher education settings are places where pre-existing ideas on socially or politically contentious topics are expected to be challenged and transformed. Considering the risks of student paralysis or unease, one must nevertheless find solid ‘pedagogical reason[s]’ that justify the introduction of controversial topics in the course syllabus (Malet, 2015: 253). The question remains what in essence makes an issue controversial.

In early writing, a controversial issue was defined as involving ‘a problem about which different individuals or groups urge different courses of action’ (the words are originally Dorothy Fraser’s; quoted in Hare, 1973: 51). Controversy fades away once an agreed-upon course of action is found. However, when political discussions are concerned ‘it is difficult to imagine many issues in which there is complete unanimity’ (Malet, 2015: 246). From a critical pedagogical viewpoint (hooks, 1994, 2010), the question of controversies cannot be narrowed down to a discussion about competing courses of action without more-encompassing questions being formulated. Influenced by Freire’s philosophy, critical pedagogy scholars argue that controversy or conflict in the classroom must be put in relation with the broader contexts in which learning occurs. The social, cultural, political, and economic contexts forge the identities of classroom participants (Lattuca, 2002).

The intersection between teacher–students identity and controversy has been largely examined in multicultural or multiracial settings, of which higher education in the United States provides manifold case studies. On this issue, hooks (1994, 2010) compellingly argues that one does not learn about gender, race, or class as if they were not positioned somewhere in these social structures, or as if they were untouched by the social meanings attached to positions like woman or man, Black or White, working class or Muslim (no matter how complex, multi-layered and intersected these positions might be). Some authors establish an explicit link between controversial issues and the eruption of emotionality among classroom participants (Lowe and Jones, 2010).

We concur with hooks (1994: 136) that conceiving education as a matter of (only) minds at work obscures the fact that learning and teaching are embodied, so much so that the positions both teachers and students incarnate inform what happens in the classroom and learning outcomes in various manners. In fact, how students perceive instructors’ identities impacts learning in the sense that, if students perceive that the instructor is ‘one of them’ (Gill and Worley, 2010; Housee, 2010), they will be more open to discuss sensitive issues and will report more satisfaction with the course and the teacher. By contrast, ‘[W]henever the professor represents a different socioeconomic segment of society, political perspective, cultural or racial group, or other relevant characteristic than the majority of students in the class, there is the clear possibility that learning will be compromised’ (Deardoff, 2013: 368).

The literature has also pointed at the relationship between controversy and cognitive dissonance (Festinger 1957; quoted in Kelly-Woessner and Woessner, 2006: 495). Cognitive dissonance has been defined as ‘a profound disorientation that occurs when our foundational modes of thinking are directly challenged or our lived experiences fail to conform to deeply ingrained beliefs and assumptions’ (Floyd, 2008: 189; quoted in Gill and Worley, 2010: 14).

Kelly-Woessner and Woessner (2006, 2008) list a number of strategies engaged in by students whenever they are faced with ideas that do not conform to their knowledge or beliefs on a subject matter; namely, when they experience cognitive dissonance. These strategies are defined as ‘rather elaborate thought processes’ whose aim is ‘to discredit information and sources that challenge previously held beliefs’ (Johnson 1996; Jonas et al. 2001; Lundgren and Prislin 1998; quoted in Kelly-Woessner and Woessner, 2006: 495). Strategies include the rejection of counterarguments, the search for information that confirms their pre-existing beliefs and the subjection of ‘dissonant arguments to an unusually high level of scrutiny’ (Savitsky, Epley, and Gilovich, 2001; Lord et al., 1979; quoted in Kelly-Woessner and Woessner, 2006: 495). Accordingly, instructors and the role they play in providing students with the information and viewpoints that produce dissonance also become a target of the reactive student. In their capacity as ‘message source’, ‘negative attributes’ are easily ascribed to instructors whose overall credibility might end up harmed (Kelly-Woessner and Woessner, 2008: 266).

Being perceived as a credible message source by the classroom is something all instructors wish. When discussing the credibility of message sources, as mentioned earlier, some authors have underlined structural factors such as race, gender, class, or religion. A widely held point is that White males have a condition of privilege (Lusk and Weinberg, 1994: 303). But credibility is also context specific (see Deardoff, 2013 for an insightful account of credibility challenges as a White female teaching about the civil rights movement in a majority Black university class vs in a multiracial class).

Kelly-Woessner and Woessner (2006, 2008) relate instructors’ credibility to students’ perception of teachers’ ideology. To understand how much instruction by a ‘politically disagreeable source’ (Kelly-Woessner and Woessner, 2008: 265) affects students’ commitment with learning, the authors conducted a vast survey administered to more than 1000 students across 29 colleges and universities in the United States. One general conclusion to the study was that ‘students who believe their professor to be a political ally report more learning, higher levels of effort, and greater interest in the subject than those who believe their professor to be a political foe’ (Kelly-Woessner and Woessner, 2008: 265). Defined in the study as an independent variable, source credibility is broken into the following three measures: expertise, caring, and objectivity. Expertise refers to the perception of instructor’s knowledge of the subject matter. Objectivity refers to the perception that the materials selected by the teacher are not ‘biased’. Caring refers to the perception that the teacher pays close attention to students and the conditions of their learning. Of these three measures, the study shows that professors’ credibility is highly dependent on objectivity and caring, while the perception of expertise does not report statistically relevant data.

The study also looks at the influence of the learning environment on the relationship between partisanship and learning outcomes. Four indicators are considered relevant to measure the learning environment: whether teachers facilitate heated debate, whether they contribute to a comfortable learning environment, whether they show interest, and whether their grading is perceived as fair. One notable finding is that ‘a comfortable learning environment is highly correlated with every measure of overall satisfaction’ (Kelly-Woessner and Woessner, 2008: 277). For defenders of an engaged critical pedagogy, the creation of a safe space for learning is a ‘must’, and that includes to ‘genuinely value every-one’s presence’ (hooks, 1994: 8).

Prior work has not specifically pondered over the nature of controversies in the IR-Middle East classroom and how cognitive dissonance might impeach the learning process in this particular setting. To rightly contextualise the evaluation of activities following next, it is important to mention that, on a general note, the students sitting in our Middle East courses had not been exposed to the postcolonial contribution to IR in any great length in previous semesters, while they are usually familiar with ‘thin’ constructivism (vs the ‘thick’ constructivist and/or poststructuralist approaches prevalent in the postcolonial programme).³

Case selection and method

The measure of ‘objectivity’ is used as a heuristic device to assess two activities developed in two different courses (Politics and Society in the Middle East and Political Challenges in the MENA region) in two different universities (IE University and Deusto University) by two different instructors (Lucía Ferreiro and Marina Díaz). The activities are similar in that they were run in courses that have a Middle East focus and with IR undergraduate students. Content-wise, the activities are also similar in that they sought the application of Said’s notion of Orientalism, yet to different cases. One of the activities was run in the 2019 Fall semester; the other was run in the 2020 Spring semester. In their specific form (described in the next section), the activities have been developed only once. Case selection is restricted by this limited availability of experiences. This evaluative exercise motivates us to improve our teaching practices and build up more effective strategies to attaining our courses’ learning outcomes (Cerbin, 1995; Hutchings, 1993).

The type of research pursued here is qualitative-exploratory, particularly useful when researchers seek to address a ‘what’ question (Neuman, 2014: 7). Our ‘what’ question is the following: ‘what elements in the activity design or the activity development processes contributed to the perception of teacher bias by some students?’ Creating a mental picture of the conditions surrounding the ‘controversial’ and allegedly ‘non-neutral’ learning experiences addressed in this article is a first step to generating new hypotheses to be tested in the future (Neuman, 2014: 38) and for course development purposes (Ertl and Wright, 2008). Hence, this article must be read as a piece located in the intersection between the scholarship of teaching and the function of education (Hyman et al., 2001).

To identify the activities’ elements or contextual factors that might have contributed to the perception of teacher bias (that is, objectivity problems), the next section offers a detailed account of the activities. The activities’ purpose and plan, and the actual development of the work with students is used to discuss the question of objectivity. Further evidence of objectivity problems is retrieved from course satisfaction evaluations administered to the students sitting in the Politics and Society in the Middle East course at IE. No such evaluations are available from students sitting in the Political Challenges in the MENA region course at Deusto. The self-report of evidence from students in standard course evaluations is a commonly used device in small studies (Ertl and Wright, 2008: 203).

Our study relies on a small sample of student evaluations (15) consisting of four questions related to syllabus and professor evaluation, overall learning, and programme evaluation.⁴ A space for comments was provided. From the 15 students that filled in the evaluation form, 11 students wrote comments. Five comments were directly related to teacher credibility. A very basic thematic analysis grounded on a deductive perspective around the category ‘objectivity’ was performed (Boyatzis, 1998). Findings show that the five negative comments contain ‘bias’ claims concerning the professor, the course material, or the course as a whole (c1–5). Two more comments, one addressed to Ferreiro in a previous evaluation on another Middle East course (c6) and one more addressed to Díaz (c7) have also been included in our evaluation to illuminate our ‘what’ question.

Orientalism and the analysis of culture: A film activity

Activity design

Films have become an increasingly popular teaching tool in IR courses (Lobasz and Valeriano, 2015; Saltzman, 2019; Valeriano, 2013) and a common methodology in race relations courses in US colleges, where it is assumed that films encourage students to see things from a different point of view and buffer their reactions when exposed to the workings of racial discrimination (Downey and Torrecilha, 1994). In our courses, analysing films serves to inspect the productive power of Orientalist discourse in cinema.

The thrust of the film activity devised for the Politics and Society in the Middle East course at IE (Fall 2019) was to apply postcolonial analysis to the Oscar-winning production directed by Ben Affleck, Argo (2012).⁵ Argo narrates a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-rescue operation to liberate American hostages from Iran after their capture in 1979. Following Bloom’s taxonomy, the purpose of the overall activity was not only to understand the concept but to be able to use it in the critical analysis of a cultural product. Students were assisted with a grid of Orientalist tropes elaborated and tested by Tomé and Ferreiro (2019).

The film exercise was planned as an active learning activity where there was a combination of home and in-class work. As individual work, students were asked to read the ‘Introduction’ to Orientalism as it contains the gist of Said’s thinking on the matter. The text is not easy to navigate alone. For this reason, one 80-minute class was planned to discuss in more detail some key ideas. Then, students were asked to watch Argo at home having the grid as a guide. This was set as a preparation for the debate on the film on the following day. To properly wrap-up the activity, a debriefing was planned at the end of session 2.

Materials and teacher

Even though statistically not representative of the students in the class, evaluations of the Politics and Society in the Middle East course provide relevant information concerning some students’ perception of the teacher’s pedagogy and the materials presented in the class.

Two students complain about the professor. One student considers ‘she is quite biased’ (c1), whereas a second one observes, ‘obvious favoritism towards certain students’ (c2).⁶

Based on the course evaluation of the seminar Gender in the Middle East taught in Spring 2019, we think that non-verbal cues might have played a role in precipitating the image of teacher bias. While no specific comment in this regard was made in the Politics and Society in the Middle East course evaluations, the instructor’s being perceived as ‘quite biased’ (c1) brings to mind a point raised by one student sitting in the gender seminar: ‘the only thing I didn’t like of this professor was her tone of voice. Sometimes, it sounded biased’ (c6).

In a study conducted with high school students, Harris (1940: 53) found that 54% of students could discern professors’ opinion based on non-verbal cues such as inflection of the voice or facial expression or by the way the instructor handles a discussion, the questions raised or the emphasis on certain points. It is not to be dismissed that any of these factors played a role in nurturing the perception that the teacher did not approach work with students objectively. Non-verbal cues would accentuate the ‘legitimation by inclusion’ (Malet, 2015: 248) effect, associated with the student-held belief that some choice of content, authors or perspectives of analysis is done on the basis of teacher’s personal preference and with the aim of persuading students to buy into their opinions.

Three other respondents addressed criticism to the material. One respondent referred to the ‘questionable content’ (c3) without any further elaboration. A second student complained about the film quizzes, as the respondent found them ‘more based on judgement, rather than facts about the movies’ (c4). Probably, the most interesting comment that questioned the course material is pointed out by this student who finds that ‘It would have been interesting to focus on actual Middle Eastern countries’ stances on different issues of national and international importance. We were introduced to many theories but didn’t get to take a look at politics’ (c5).

hooks (1994) shares an experience that helps us interpret the point that politics was not discussed in the course. In Teaching to Transgress, she writes:

[T]eaching in a traditional discipline [literature] from the perspective of critical pedagogy means that I often encounter students who make complaints like, ‘I thought this was supposed to be an English class, why are we talking so much about feminism?’ (Or, they might add, race or class). (hooks, 1994: 42)

hooks (1994) shows that students are not always open to look critically at the structures that generate social imbalances (patriarchy, racism, capitalism). This attitude is more common among students who belong to historically privileged groups (male, White, and middle- and upper-class). In their view, a literature class should just be a literature class, and not a political or politicised space.

In a similar vein, for the average IR student sitting in a Middle East course, the expectation goes that ‘real’ politics is discussed. Socialised into the idea that culture is not politics, it is ‘questionable’ that analysing films through a postcolonial lens is anything related with the ‘hard’ issues of international politics.

Debate and debriefing

Based on the lively discussion held by students regarding Orientalism in Argo, one could safely say that the debate worked quite well. Peer-to-peer interaction ran smoothly, though there were strong differences of opinion. A minority group of students (mostly three) opposed the film was Orientalist. The depiction of women wearing chadors when demonstrating in front of the US Embassy was mentioned as an example of everyday life ‘reality’ in Iran in post-revolutionary times. Students contended that even if not all Iranian women wore chador back then, the kind of women who joined anti-American demonstrations did. Another example referred to the scenes in the airport when the US escapees are making the last strides to run away. The minority group contended that Iranian authorities were depicted as acting foolishly, almost as buffoons, but they insisted that these particular scenes must be contextualised for what the film is, a Hollywood production.

Contrary to this standpoint, most students generally found Argo Orientalist. This makes sense because the assignment was to detect Orientalist tropes in the film. In other words, students had been predisposed to find the film Orientalist. Interestingly, the majority group argued that selecting specific scenes of the film was not an accurate way to pursue the analysis as there was a need to conceive Argo as a whole. A sound analysis should look at the overall sense of the film and the story line, and focus on who is portrayed as a hero, who is depicted as villain, and so on. They highlighted that the film cherry-picked Orientalist features to match the needs of the script and that Argo should be considered within the overall general approach of Hollywood to Arabs, as it is the cumulative effect that counts.⁷ Their point was that access to a pluralistic representation of ‘Arabs’ is difficult to obtain in the West because most fictions are made in Hollywood.

In sum, while the minority group took elements such as female clothing as simply a faithful depiction of reality, the majority group underscored the film’s Orientalism and denounced media’s excessive influence on people’s worldviews.

The claims made by both contending groups clearly illustrated that students had read and understood Said, watched the film and were actively participating in the debate giving sound arguments for or against the proposed question: ‘To what extent is Argo Orientalist?’ Course evaluations evinced that some students valued positively this kind of learning methodology. One student pointed out, ‘I found the approach to use films in the course very refreshing, as they gave a lot of input to the debate (on controversial topics)’; another student rated, ‘Very interactive class. Learnt a lot’. Despite these positive remarks, the fact that some other students had issues with the materials and the teacher urges us to reconsider the activity design and the strategies staged to attain learning outcomes, including the activity’s guiding question.

The film analysis activity was set up around a closed-ended question: ‘To what extent is Argo Orientalist?’ Yet, ‘close-ended questions only go so far’ (Marks, 2015: 446). They do not encourage students to think outside very rigid parameters; which is why ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions are better suited to orient class debates. Where ‘how’ questions ‘demand lengthier and more and more thoughtful elaboration’, ‘why’ questions ‘encourage students to explain issues in terms of theories, analytical concepts and frameworks’ (Marks, 2015: 446).

However, the activity should have been properly closed with a debriefing session. Debriefing is a critical requirement in active learning methodologies for several reasons: (1) they push students to think in metacognitive terms, (2) they help demystify the idea that what instructors have to say is more important than peer discussions, (3) they give closure to activities as they open room for highlighting the activity’s main take-aways, and (4) foster evaluation of the group’s interaction during, as in our case, a debate.

While debriefing time was initially planned to take place after the film debate, last-minute time constraints prevented it. Instead, some concluding remarks were offered by the instructor, yet without student involvement.

In hindsight, cancelling the debriefing time was not a good idea. Questions such as the potency of the postcolonial programme to probe the politics in cultural representations like a Hollywood film could have been further fleshed out. The teacher could have learnt that, for some students, this work did not seem ‘political’ and could have recalled the pedagogical purpose of the activity and its significance to the broader course syllabus. If properly done, our contention is that debriefing would have helped boost the teacher’s credibility.

Orientalism and the ‘Arab Spring’: A reading activity

Activity design

At the Political challenges in the MENA region course (Spring 2020), a week (i.e. 3 hours) was devoted to discussing the ‘Arab Spring’. The goal was to partly demystify Western narratives on the issue by providing students with explanations that draw on international political economy (IPE) arguments. To this end, a rather conventional activity design was followed based on lecturing and reading. For 1 hour, students were lectured on the critical importance of the ‘Arab social contract’ in the configuration of state-society relations in post-independence Arab states. This served to establish correlations between changes in the global economy starting in the late 1970s (enhanced liberalisation and deregulation), the crisis of the ‘Arab social contract’ and the outbreak of the ‘Arab Spring’ (Hinnebusch, 2020). Throughout the lecture, data illustrating the interplay between global economy and state-society relations in the region were shown as a key to understand the outbreak of protests starting late 2010.

On the following day, a 2-hour seminar was organised to discuss a text (Salamey, 2015) which, not contradicting the foregoing arguments, pitted postcolonial analysis of the Arab Spring’s outcomes against Orientalist analysis. The article argued against the culturalist explanations regarding the limited ‘success’ of the Arab Spring in advancing democratisation processes. By prioritising the explanatory capacity of economic and structuralist analysis, Salamey (2015) presented the thesis that, if democratisation agendas had not succeeded across the Arab countries (with the notable exception of Tunisia), it was because the economic-structural conditions and inefficiencies that had stirred popular discontent were still in place in spite of superficial regime changes after 2011. The text showed the scarce analytical capacity of frames linking failed democratisation processes to the argument of cultural backwardness or ‘Arab’ unpreparedness to embrace democracy.

Teacher and materials

During the seminar, the discussion had run ostensibly well, and the instructor had the feeling she had succeeded in offering a solid argument that would help students navigate the issue, when something unexpected happened. A student takes the floor and asserts, ‘I have the feeling that you are telling us Orientalism is wrong’ (c7).⁸ The student was sceptical about the article’s stance on the relationship between culture and democracy. Despite the display of IPE artillery, the belief that democracy is the flagship of culturally advanced societies fit the student’s picture of politics in the Middle East better than what structural-economic approaches offered. Here, we can see how a deep-seated belief (those who are culturally backward are not ready to embrace democracy) interfered the learning process and triggered denial.

Rather than aiming to caricature student failings, our aim here is to underline that ‘cognitive dissonance’ was not rightly handled; and this might have accentuated the student’s feeling that the ‘authority’ in the class was trying to brainwash her. The instructor’s reaction was content- and teacher-centred; she insisted on repeating the point of view already explained and in referring back to the economic data and opinion polls used in the previous lecture (i.e. the evidence). A student-centred reaction should have sought to recognise the roots of the student’s belief (deeply buried in the conventional understandings of issues like progress, development, or civilisation) and validate her scepticism. Validating students’ views or reactions, however, is not equivalent to prove them right without further criticism, or wrong without alternative explanations, but arguing that there are more or less solid explanations to what happens in the world. Validation entails caring for students’ ideas and contributing to generate a class environment where they feel safe to speak their minds, but where arguments take precedence over opinion.

From decolonising IR to decolonising IR teaching

In the previous section, we have assessed two class activities developed in our Middle East courses for IR undergraduates where ‘cognitive dissonance’ episodes had come to view, and teacher credibility suffered. Following Kelly-Woessner and Woessner (2006), special attention has been paid to the measure of objectivity, given that the trigger to this article was our shared necessity to jointly think up the problem of bias. Our respective experiences teaching about Orientalism indicate that the teacher and/or the materials used to develop two applied-theory activities had been, in the eyes of some students, lacking neutrality. Both of us registered this genre of reaction on the part of some students, while the activities were carried out or afterwards (as the student evaluations from IE University attest to). Quantitatively, the number of students that resisted what we were offering them in terms of assignment or analytical perspective was few. Yet, the few deserve to be listened to and their comments have been stuck in our minds for some reason. Our final argument is that much cannot be learnt from these ‘objectivity failures’ unless the disciplinary context in which the learning occurred is duly attended to.

IR is quite a peculiar disciplinary context shaped by some great debates across major paradigms. The IR student is a person that receives instruction in the theories, the schools, the great fathers, and the modes of doing IR. While the exact shape of this instruction might vary greatly across institutions, learning IR usually means getting familiar with the coming to life of this ‘thing’ (Kamola, 2020) following the end of the First World War, constituted as a mainstream over subsequent decades and contested by dissenting voices. Together with others, the dissenting voices gathered around the banner of postcolonialism have revolted against the IR canon to denounce IR’s manifold pitfalls; hence, initiating the move to ‘decolonise IR’. Understood as a set of academic and militant practices, decolonising IR has entailed the examination of IR coming to being as a discipline that enshrines a modern onto-epistemology that predicates Western superiority and places ‘the West’ in an epistemically superior position (Sabaratnam, 2011).

The decolonial IR programme has gone great lengths (Kamola, 2020; Sabaratnam, 2011) and the spaces of instruction have not been untouched by these ‘high-level’ discussions. For instance, the aim of decolonising IR curricula has grown out as a natural extension of the broader project of decolonising IR. Actions such as balancing the number of Western and non-Western, and White and non-White authors in reading lists, or the quest for decentring historical accounts to include non-Western voices exemplify decolonising strategies (Sabaratnam, 2011). However, the intersection between decolonial IR and pedagogy including the micro-level of class planning, activity design or the assessment of competences like critical thinking in IR needs to be further fleshed out. Here, we would like to argue that teaching decolonially demands much more than pursuing tokenism (hooks, 1994); that is, including some ‘Middle Eastern’ author to season an otherwise ‘Western-predominant’ reading list in our Middle East courses. It requires the articulation of a socio-cultural approach to teaching and learning which considers the opportunities and constraints of the IR disciplinary context.

This approach acquires a specific significance when it is wedded to decolonising IR and the notions of subjectivity and positionality. Constructivist learning theories privilege learner-centred styles of teaching that value students’ subjective involvement in the process of learning. However, the decolonial programme to IR is about unveiling the subjective points of view and illuminating the positions ‘we’ occupy in the world of IR. Applied to the IR classroom, this means encouraging student recognition of themselves as ‘part of the story of global politics’ (Abboud, 2015: 233) and, therefore, not exterior to the matters that theories of IR speak to. A too overpowering recognition perhaps that might explain why the schools that encourage this line of reasoning are met with scepticism or rejected (by some learners), especially considering that ‘students are socialized to believe that their society is equal and fair’ (Hedley and Markowitz, quoted in Malet, 2015: 248).

Thus, ultimately, a reconsideration of our teaching methods is due if, first, learning outcomes are to be met and, second, teachers want to be credible. The lessons that we gather from our evaluative exercise is that the limitations of the theoretical instruments we work with need to be stressed,⁹ and theoretical pluralism and active learning (to its ultimate consequences, that is, debriefing) encouraged. If we ask students to identify the Orientalism in a film, we should work with them on the premises of this type of analysis and establish comparisons with other genres of analysis they are more familiar with or prefer. If, however, we want them to identify how the discourses of secularism, modernisation, democratisation, or development distribute subject positions (in the context of West-MENA relations, or elsewhere), they should be encouraged to identify their positions within these frameworks, work with their own thoughts on why we have come to think the way we do about the world and how other more conventional schools have thought these issues up.

Conclusion

In the future, assessing teachers’ credibility in the eyes of the students will continue to be important (certainly, for instructors, and possibly also for institutions). To be sure, as we set out to evaluate our Orientalism activities, we wanted to know what had gone wrong with our ‘objectivity’ according to students. Teaching decolonially notwithstanding is essentially at odds with objectivity, if this is understood as ‘gazing from nowhere’, selecting texts and films that do not set certain entry points into ‘reality’. If objectivity is unattainable, then the project of credibility must acquire a different direction, one in which instructors stay critical with their expertise, place their energy in caring and in helping students considering the potentialities and weaknesses of theories.

Likewise, higher education should probably cease to exist if it was not for the possibility of cognitive dissonance. If we were not capable of disclosing novel ideas and unexpected points of view on the matters of the world; if we were not able to disorient our students (and let ourselves be disoriented by their curiosity and inconformity; also by their passivity before subjects we might find absolutely fascinating), faculties would be duller places. Cognitive dissonance is not the malaise we must do away with, as if it were even possible to envisage the classroom as a difference-less space. Nothing could be more incongruent with, however, the goal of teaching IR courses that fundamentally dwell on the significance of difference and subjectivity formation in or for global politics. Other than being inherent to any human group pulled together for the purpose of learning, cognitive dissonance might be turned into a great pedagogical ally if nobody expects the classroom to be the realm of Truth.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors sincerely thank the two anonymous reviewers contacted by Politics for their excellent feedback.

Author Note

A previous version of this article was presented at the fourth Teaching and Learning Conference organised by ECPR, 18–19 June 2020.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Marina Díaz Sanz

Notes

Author biographies

Marina Díaz Sanz, PhD, is assistant teacher of International Relations at Deusto University, Bilbao, Spain. Her doctoral thesis (unpublished, 2018) deals with the place of Iran in Spanish geopolitical imagination. In this work, she examines the constitution of Iran within practical (diplomatic) and popular geopolitical discourse (humour and travel writing) in Spain. She teaches courses on the Middle East, globalisation, and security. She is interested in difference and IR, interpretivism, and critical pedagogy.

Lucía Ferreiro Prado, PhD, is adjunct lecturer of Political Science at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain) and International Relations at IE University (Spain). Her doctoral dissertation (2011) delved into the intercultural relations of Spaniards and Moroccans and was published by Dykinson (2014). In the last 2 years, she is specialising in the scholarship of teaching learning focusing on the use of active methodologies in Political Science and has edited the book (in Spanish): Active Methodologies in the class of Political Science and IR. Political simulations of international and national organizations (Tirant lo Blanch, 2020).

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