A Narrative Inquiry Into Academic Experiences of Female Saudi Graduate Students at a Comprehensive Doctoral University

Abstract

Saudi student enrollment in U.S. colleges and universities has nearly tripled since 2009-2010, in large part due to the King Abdullah Scholarship Program. The representation of Saudi females is also increasing due to the loosening of Saudi Arabia’s long-standing restrictions on women’s travel and acceptable fields of study and careers. This constructivist study highlights some of the academic experiences of female Saudi graduate students at a Comprehensive Doctoral University in the western United States. Challenges related to students’ insufficient English language skills, differences in their comfort levels interacting with American and Saudi men, positive relationships with both male and female faculty members, and generally positive feelings about their experiences at their university of choice emerged as themes within the data. The participants’ varied prior experiences with mixed-gendered educational environments led to differing levels of comfort with developing relationships with men.

Keywords

gender dynamics international education Saudi students constructivist

Saudi Arabia’s government mandates strict gender segregation in all public spaces including university campuses and classrooms (AlMunajjed, 1997; Meijer, 2010; Ministry of Higher Education, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, 2010a). Within the Kingdom, female students either have female instructors or participate in classes with their male instructors and peers via video link. Outside the Kingdom, however, most Saudi students study in mixed-gender environments. Since 2007, a surge of Saudi students have enrolled in U.S. institutions due to international marketing efforts by American universities and increased financial support from the King Abdullah Scholarship Program (KASP; Chow & Bhandari, 2011). Administrators, faculty, and staff at host institutions could benefit from additional insight into the cultural challenges these students face so that they are better prepared to provide effective learning environments for this growing population.

A Growing Constituency Among International Students

Enrollment of Saudi students in U.S. colleges and universities has nearly tripled since 2009-2010 (Institute of International Education, 2013), including an increase of more than 50% in the population of Saudi graduate students between 2011-2012 and 2012-2013. According to the same report, 44,566 male and female Saudi students were studying in the United States in 2012-2013; 9,379 of them were graduate students and most of them in mixed-gender environments. Although the number of Saudi students in the United States is growing rapidly, it is modest in comparison with the total number of international students. Saudi students made up only 5.4% of a total population of 819,644 international students in 2012-2013. Saudi students’ low overall representation among the pool of international students studying in the United States may be one reason why international education literature does not frequently mention them.

Our review of literature focused on works published since 2005 when King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al Saud became the ruler of Saudi Arabia and loosened the limits on women’s participation in daily life including education and employment (Human Rights Watch, 2010). However, we found few studies focusing on female Saudi students’ experiences abroad and none investigated the cultural adjustment women face while studying in mixed-gender environments. To fill this gap, we conducted a constructivist study exploring the experiences of female Saudi graduate students who attend Comprehensive Doctoral University (CDU), a pseudonym for an institution in the western United States. We primarily focused our attention on these students’ experiences in the classroom, their interactions with classmates and faculty outside the classroom, and their introduction to both the university and its surrounding community. Using data collected from semistructured interviews of four participants, we identified four themes that may help educators at U.S. institutions reflect critically on the experiences of their female Saudi students.

Theoretical Underpinnings of the Study

Students interact with new environments by constructing knowledge and insights that are informed by their “past experiences and beliefs, as well as their cultural histories and world views” (Kamii, Manning, & Manning, 1991, as quoted in Yilmaz, 2008, p. 165). This process of accommodating and assimilating new environments and perspectives in the learning process is informed by psychological constructivism (PC), which proposes that learning is an “interpretive, recursive, building process by active learners interacting with the physical and social world” (Fosnot, 2005, p. 30). We use PC to frame both the intra- and extra-classroom learning experiences of our Saudi female graduate students and make meaning of their lived experiences in a foreign environment.

Literature Review

The rapid influx of Saudi students is largely due to the KASP. In 2006, King Abdullah renewed the scholarship program that pays all educational, living, and travel expenses for Saudi students. These scholarships allow students to earn undergraduate, graduate, and medical degrees abroad in approved disciplines and return to the Kingdom after graduation to help meet the growing needs of the government and private sectors (Ministry of Higher Education, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, 2010b). According to Advancement of Saudi Women, a brochure produced by the Saudi Arabian Cultural Mission to the United States (2010), women earned 21% of these scholarships. However, the exact number of Saudi women studying abroad does not appear in any publication we found. Even the widely cited Institute of International Education’s (2013) Open Doors report lacks gender breakdowns.

Saudi Gender Segregation

Saudi cultural traditions mandate gender segregation in both public and private life. These traditions originated to preserve the Saudi female’s chastity and honor, and are based on current Wahhabi Islamic laws—a strict orthodox interpretation of the Qur’an (Abu-Ali & Reisen, 1999; Alhazmi & Nyland, 2010; AlMunajjed, 1997; Baki, 2004; Meijer, 2010; Ministry of Higher Education, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, 2010b). Even as public pressure and government policy changes made women’s education an espoused priority for the Kingdom, women’s freedoms were gained only to the limit that Wahhabi Islamic law would allow (Al-Mouhandis, 1986; Baki, 2004; Prokop, 2006). For example, although women’s career and educational opportunities widened throughout the past four decades, the expansion happened within gender-segregated facilities and predominantly within gender-segregated fields of study (Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia, 2011). The gender separation was so complete that even the administration of women’s education differed from that of men’s until the early 21st century, falling under the Department of Religious Guidance rather than the Ministry of Education until 2002 (Hamdan, 2005). This helped ensure that women’s education “did not deviate from the original purpose of female education, which was to make women good wives and mothers” (Hamdan, 2005, p. 44). In Saudi Arabia, a lack of qualified teachers, textbooks, and transportation for women enrolled in institutions of higher education still exists (Al-Mouhandis, 1986; Hashimilion, 2011).

Recent Educational Opportunities for Women

King Abdullah loosened, but did not remove altogether, the restrictions on which disciplines women could study (Ministry of Higher Education, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, 2010b). He also supported the creation of the all-female Princess Nora Bint Abdul Rahman University with academic programs in the traditional disciplines of nursing and elementary education, as well as previously restricted fields of study including pharmacy, physiotherapy, computer science, and business (Princess Nora University, 2012). Even with the highly anticipated and touted university, long-standing issues regarding qualification of teachers and inferior learning resources such as textbooks arose. Within 4 years of opening in 2007, students broke Saudi cultural tradition by publicly protesting that their English instructors were not qualified, learning resources were inappropriate both culturally and educationally, and the management team was incompetent (Hashimilion, 2011). In addition, questions remained about how women would get to and around the university’s newest campus (AlRiyadh Municipality, 2012) and the dean of the nursing college resigned over the gender mixing of faculty and students (Al Arabiya, 2012). These ongoing issues may provide additional incentive for Saudi women to study outside the Kingdom.

Our Study

Our research team became interested in exploring the experiences of female Saudi students after observing a noticeable increase in the number of Saudi women on our campus and in our classes. Particularly interesting to us was how Saudi women navigate the transition from “the most gender-segregated environment in the world” (Alhazmi & Nyland, 2010, p. 2) to a Western coeducational university. Discussions of female Saudi students have been largely absent within the existing literature until the past few years (Alhazmi & Nyland, 2010; Al-Sheikhly, 2012), and gender-disaggregated data are difficult to find. Moreover, few studies exist that focus on female Saudi students’ experiences dealing with the cultural adjustment from their strictly imposed gender-segregated academic environment in Saudi Arabia to the mixed-gender classrooms and study groups they experience within the United States. To start to fill that gap, our study posed the following research questions:

Research Question 1: How do female Saudi graduate students describe their academic and lived experiences while studying in the United States?

Research Question 2: How do female Saudi graduate students compare their current educational environment to their previous experiences, specifically with respect to their traditional Saudi culture?

To answer these research questions, we conducted this constructivist study using narrative analysis (Riessman, 2008) to explore the lived experiences of female Saudi graduate students at CDU.

Research Design

In qualitative research, “The researcher is the primary instrument for data collection and analysis” (Merriam, 1998, p. 7, emphasis in original). We approached our study from a constructivist framework that views knowledge as generated, developed, and transmitted within socially interactive contexts and stresses the importance of viewing the world “through lenses bestowed upon us by our culture” (Crotty, 1998, p. 54), or in other words, “actors are shaped by the social milieu in which they live” (Finnemore & Sikkink, 2001, p. 394). In their home society, Saudi women are protected so that they remain pure in thought and deed (Abu-Ali & Reisen, 1999; Alhazmi & Nyland, 2010; AlMunajjed, 1997) and the purpose of education is to help women to become good wives and mothers (Hamdan, 2005). Contrasting this is the perspective in the United States that “education, especially for women, [is] a force for social and economic development” and that educated women are likely to marry later and have fewer children (United Nations Population Fund, 2008, p. 1). Constructivism provides an approach to delve into the challenges our participants face while constantly negotiating how to fulfill the socially constructed norms and roles from their home society with those of their temporarily adopted society in the United States and at CDU.

Female Saudi graduate students are of particular interest to us because of the stark contrasts between their restricted lives at home and their freedoms while in the United States. As academic peers of the participants, we wanted to focus on sharing knowledge between us and remain open to our participants’ culturally situated views of education in the United States. Narrative inquiry provides a way of understanding others’ actions, of organizing events and objects into a meaningful whole, and of connecting and seeing the consequences of actions and events over time (Chase, 2005) by studying participants’ stories to determine “how individuals or groups make sense of events and actions in their lives” (Mitchell & Egudo, 2003, p. 1). It is an appropriate methodology to study real-world situations (Giovannoli, 2006) and for “capturing the detailed stories or life experiences of a single life or the lives of a small number of individuals” (Creswell, 2006, p. 55). Narrative inquiry is appropriate for this small-scale study because it “is more concerned with individual truths than identifying generalisable and repeatable events” (Mertova, 2011, p. 8). The method called for the collection and organization of rich, descriptive stories of our participants and provided us with a strategy to interpret their stories to detail what life is like for them at CDU. Through a biographical style of narrative inquiry (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990), we aspired to tell these women’s stories situated within the context of their current educational environment in the United States as compared with their homeland. In sharing the voices of these particular women, we intended to describe their lived experiences in a trustworthy manner that would ring true to others who share similar experiences. We also sought to provide critical insights for student service practitioners and faculty who serve these women and their Saudi peers, and contribute to the research literature.

Participants

Staff within CDU’s Office of International Education provided us with a list of all 23 female Saudi graduate students studying at CDU during spring semester 2012. We emailed an invitation to participate and two reminder requests to each potential participant. Between May 2012 and September 2012, four women scheduled and completed interviews. Fatima, Sarah, Ami, and Amani revealed information regarding their varied educational experiences both before and after arriving at CDU including prior experiences, if any, with gender integrated academic environments.

For instance, Fatima had never visited the United States prior to enrolling at CDU, but “it was [her] dream to speak English.” She recognized that while she could use her scholarship in Asia or Europe, a graduate degree from America would “help [her to succeed] in any country.” Her government-selected major was computer science, but she was not accepted to a graduate program in that field because she lacked the undergraduate background—her baccalaureate degree was in early childhood education from the coeducational American University of Bahrain. Instead, she was given a scholarship to study special education, which led her to enroll at CDU. After arriving in the United States, she realized that she did not have the desire to work with special needs students. She petitioned the Saudi Arabian Cultural Mission to allow her to change her major to educational technology because she felt that it would more closely match her interests and would still be useful in developing a new area of study in Saudi Arabia.

By comparison, Sarah had lived and attended school in both Saudi Arabia and the United States. In the United States, she attended a public elementary school alongside boys. She was in middle school when her family returned to Saudi Arabia, and she continued her schooling there in a gender-segregated environment. As an undergraduate, she attended a private university in Saudi Arabia where she completed a discipline-specific internship with an American male supervisor. The internship provided her with her first opportunity to work directly with a man in a one-on-one environment. Sarah noted that she “felt like she wanted to come back [to the United States] because . . . this is where [she] belonged. When an opportunity arose to return after receiving a scholarship from [her] government, [she] jumped at it right away.” Sarah writes and speaks English proficiently because she has studied the language since she was 8 years old. At the time of her interview, Sarah was in her fourth year of study at CDU.

Ami earned both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Saudi Arabia. During her undergraduate career, she had only a few classes with male professors. She noted, however, that “It was [an] indirect class through the TV where we could see the professor but he could not see us and we contacted [each other] through the special phone to share ideas, discussion, questions, etc.” She did not study with male students directly until she came to the United States and enrolled in an intensive English preparatory course. Once enrolled in regular coursework, she eventually became used to contact with the American male students. However, it was still difficult for her to communicate with Saudi male classmates. According to Ami, “Communication with Saudi male students depend[s] on them. If I feel they seem willing to contact me, I will do it. But if they don’t, I will not begin communication with them.”

Amani, our final participant, never had a male professor or male classmates prior to attending CDU. Now she actually prefers male professors, believing that they “understand” and “can deal better” with female students. Initially, she was shy about speaking to male classmates, but she now has good working relationships with her American male classmates. She believes that they “understand my tradition, understand me, and [they are] really respectful with me.” Conversely, she is hesitant to take classes with Saudi men because in the first class she took alongside a Saudi male, he made her uncomfortable and tried to control her interactions with her professor.

Data Collection and Analysis

Using a semistructured format, we interviewed each woman to gain a deeper understanding and appreciation of her classroom-related experiences, particularly from cross-cultural and gendered perspectives. The semistructured interview format gave participants multiple opportunities to discuss what was important to them rather than limiting their responses to areas that we had identified as likely concerns based on our literature review. We developed open-ended questions designed to encourage discussions about our participants’ decisions to enroll in a graduate program in the United States, their perspectives about the most significant differences between attending classes in the United States and at home, their experiences with feeling welcome or unwelcome in classes, and their reactions to having male professors or classmates. We also provided participants with an opportunity to tell us about any other experiences that they felt were significant and asked for their suggestions regarding how to improve the overall experience of students like themselves.

We scheduled 60-min, face-to-face semistructured interviews at CDU’s international education office to provide a familiar location for the participants. The actual interviews ranged in duration from less than 30 min to 65 min because some participants provided rich, descriptive answers whereas others were less expansive. After obtaining informed consent, we asked participants to provide a pseudonym for use in publications.We transcribed the interviews using a hybrid between the naturalized and denaturalized approaches. Naturalized transcription includes grammatical features of written expression, such as “commas, full stops (periods), and paragraphing,” whereas denaturalized transcription is true to the spoken word, including space fillers such as “ums” and “ers” (Davidson, 2009, pp. 38-39). We transcribed filler words and speech patterns such as pauses, stops/starts, and self-correction because of the varying English proficiency levels among our participants. Whereas we believed that those linguistic idiosyncrasies were mainly unintentional for Ami, Amani, and Fatima, Sarah’s spoken English was advanced enough that using a purely naturalized or denaturalized approach would have led to the loss of meaningful nuance in her speech.

We used researcher triangulation (Guion, Diehl, & McDonald, 2011) by reading each of the four transcripts and individually developing initial codes and themes. Only afterward did we reconvene to compare and contrast our work. Next, we engaged peers, participants, and other Saudi students from CDU in critical analysis of our preliminary findings to ensure that our proposed themes seemed reasonable based on our data (Merriam, 1998). Our research team met multiple times to discuss and negotiate the meaning of our codes, which involved identifying and agreeing upon emergent and recurrent themes from the coding process. Next, we determined which open codes were interrelated and then produced a series of synthesized axial and selective codes. We frequently referred back to the interview transcripts for confirmation during the thematic development process (Gibbs, 2007).

During the process of identifying, organizing, and synthesizing our emergent themes, we used PC (Fosnot, 2005) as a framework for interpreting the axial and selective codes. Her theory views learning as an active, generative, and adaptive process. Upon reflection, we found this theoretical scaffolding useful for interrelating several of our selective codes, including “CDU a good fit,” “supportive but ignorant of Saudi ways,” “culture matters more than gender,” “reduce the white noise,” and “more on how to learn than what to learn,” under the general organizing principle of “proactively adapting to and critically reflecting upon educational experience within foreign contexts.”

Findings

Our participants want to make the most of their educational opportunities at CDU for personal fulfillment, possible future employment, and as a means to give back to their communities and government. At the same time, they are keenly aware that their male family members and government representatives oversee their studies. For example, the KASP requires that a male guardian accompany any woman who studies abroad (Ministry of Higher Education, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, 2010b) and the Saudi Ministry of Education maintains authority over their choice of school and major. From this cultural and educational lens, four primary themes appeared within their stories including language challenges, interactions with men, interactions with faculty, and feelings about their academic and lived experiences at CDU.

Language Challenges

All four participants discussed frustrations resulting from their limited language skills and the manner in which faculty members or peers spoke. When asked about ways to improve their classroom experience, even Sarah, who had the strongest English language skills among our participants, explained that her main challenge in completing graduate work was the extra effort required to read, write, and speak English proficiently. However, the participants contradicted each other, and sometimes themselves, regarding their desire for faculty to give them extra consideration based on their language skills.

Sarah said her professors “never cut [her] slack” when it came to academic work. However, a few moments later, she noted that some faculty seemed to take into account that English was her second language while others were “picky” about word choice and grammar. Often, she felt that her written content was fine, but her word choice and grammar could have used revision. Part of Sarah’s frustration was her belief that instructors should provide feedback on her written work and allow her to resubmit assignments before assigning a grade. For example, when Sarah received instructor feedback on her program capstone assignment, she learned that her instructor reduced her grade because of grammatical mistakes. Sarah noted, somewhat exasperated, that she earned a “B” on the assignment mainly because of issues with her grammar. However, she felt that her content was “perfect,” and therefore her instructor should have given her the opportunity to resubmit another draft and earn the “A” that she felt she deserved.

In contrast, Fatima conveyed an anecdote about one of the few times that she was unable to complete an assignment on time because “we [Saudis] are very slow.” She felt embarrassed to go to class because her assignment was not complete, but she planned to provide the professor with a detailed explanation as to her reasons. Although she feared her professor would give her a zero on the assignment, as she believed would have been the case in Saudi Arabia, he allowed her to submit it late. The instructor told her that he recognized the extra challenge she faced linguistically and he had observed how well she had done on all prior assignments. This interaction cemented her perception that faculty at CDU cared about her academic success and were willing to make accommodations as necessary. Still, she recognizes that, “sometimes I have trouble writing and reading because [I] didn’t learn as much as [I] have to” during her preparatory writing course.

Ami also indicated that understanding English was the greatest challenge she faced in school. Although she felt that professors and classmates welcomed her in class, they frequently spoke too quickly, or used vocabulary and idioms that she did not understand. She noted that she “feels depressed when the classmates and the teacher discuss about something and I didn’t understand most of the discussion.” When asked what would make her classroom learning experience more successful, Ami said that it would help if the instructors could spend more time explaining concepts. She also would have preferred to study English in the United States for at least 2 years rather than the single year allowed by her scholarship.

Interactions With Men

Due to Saudi Arabia’s gender-segregated culture, the research team expected that our participants’ greatest challenge at CDU would be their interactions with men in academic and social situations. However, our participants’ experiences differed depending on their previous familiarity with mixed-gender environments.

American men

Interacting with male classmates was not a concern for Fatima because she had attended a mixed-gender American school in Bahrain. In her words, “When I came here, it wasn’t hard because I had experience.” Amani, on the other hand, felt shy at first about speaking with her male research teammate, but she quickly relaxed because he “was really respectful with me” and demonstrated that he wanted to understand her traditions. In contrast, Sarah laughingly explained that American men do not seem interested in speaking with her. However, Sarah did share that she had developed a good friendship with an American male student during her early days at CDU. She met him through a mutual friend in their program, and recounted that, “he’s an older guy . . . and so maybe there is something about older men that makes me feel more comfortable.” Ami felt comfortable interacting with her American male classmates, but not the Saudis because, “We bring our traditions with us. We are not used to [having] contact with Saudi men. It would be difficult to [have] contact with them in the classroom; but [with] American men [it] is normal.” Our participants were understandably negotiating their new social freedoms. Whereas the strict gender segregation within Saudi Arabia limited their interactions with men in any venue, at CDU, they had opportunities to expand their culturally imposed boundaries and develop relationships within their own comfort levels.

Saudi men

In some cases, our participants’ experiences with Saudi men at CDU differed significantly from their experiences with American men. For example, when asked whether she had any advice or additional comments, Amani noted that she does not like to take classes with Saudi men. She said that she feels like they watch and judge her, and if she tries to participate in class discussions, “the Saudi man . . . talk in front of us . . . and try to make us [not] talk with any man.” She went on to say that it did not matter whether the two Saudi students had any prior relationship. In other words, even if they did not know each other prior to being classmates, the male Saudi students would interrupt and try to stop her from speaking to male students or instructors. This was especially true if the topic was culturally sensitive like women’s rights or “something we didn’t like in our education, our roles, our life. Sometimes, the Saudi man interrupts even the professor” when he or she is speaking with a female Saudi student.

Fatima described one especially frustrating situation she faced with her male Saudi peers while in the intensive language program. Her instructor paired her with a Saudi male to complete an in-class assignment. However, when she took her materials and went to sit next to him, he said, “No, I don’t want to have [you as my partner].” Even though she was willing to accept the arrangement, he was not. “I accept that because I feel he is . . . my classmate. But two times it happened to me, they [her male peers] didn’t accept” her as an in-class study partner. She went on to say that it was typical of Saudi culture. Women are expected to make accommodations; men are not. Ami had a similar experience in the same program.

Amani noted that some Saudi women at CDU suggest that their peers avoid classes that have Saudi men enrolled in them because of these attempts to control the Saudi women’s interactions in the classroom. Avoidance of male Saudi students in classes was not difficult for our participants because men are underrepresented in most of the disciplines that they were studying. In fact, during their individual interviews, three of the four participants stated that they typically do not have male classmates of any nationality.

Outside of the classroom, Sarah noted that she sometimes felt more comfortable interacting with Saudi men as opposed to other Saudi women or Americans. For example, she mentioned that as far as interacting with American men, “I don’t want to say it’s awkward, but I feel a lot more comfortable when I’m with Saudi guys because we [both] speak Arabic and we have a lot in common.” Ever cognizant of public perception and cultural expectations, Sarah was careful to develop friendships only with single Saudi males. With married men, she maintained a purely professional manner. This is another example of a participant stretching her culturally imposed boundaries concerning acceptable relationships with men. In this case, Sarah broke tradition by engaging with Saudi men from outside her immediate family.

Even though these women came from a nation that expressly forbids direct male–female interaction throughout their educational system and society-at-large, none of our interviewees seemed pre-occupied with having male professors or classmates. Indeed, we found that after an initial adjustment period of varying length based on their prior academic experiences with men, each of our participants enjoyed having male instructors and considered the occasional American male classmate to be benign. The only times gender appeared to be a problem for our participants was when they attended classes that included Saudi males. The presence of Saudi males was generally inhibiting because our participants felt that their co-nationals constantly watched and judged them. In effect, the only substantive issue our female participants seemed to have with males in the classroom was the one that literally accompanied them from their home country.

Interactions With Faculty

Our participants welcomed the opportunity to have male instructors in their classrooms. They also mentioned that CDU instructors were better qualified than those they encountered in Saudi Arabia, although none of the participants specified the criteria leading to this impression. In general, our participants believed that most CDU faculty were kind, caring, and appeared genuinely interested in their well-being. Fatima mentioned how her professors were “very supportive and attentive” while Ami said she felt welcomed by her professors. Sarah’s professors “have always been sensitive to her cultural and religious needs.”

The participants appreciated faculty members’ use of varied teaching styles including group work and in-class interactions that led to less-rigid separation between faculty and students. However, each shared that she wished for more customized instruction that took into account her cultural differences from pedagogical and second language perspectives. For example, Ami wished for deeper explanations from the professors and less of an expectation that she could gain the same understanding from written materials. Fatima expressed a desire for “fewer acronyms” and idioms in class that made it difficult for her to follow discussions between professors and students, and among students during group discussions. With regard to group activities, Sarah said she would have liked group work that was not based on the assumption that she would be able to keep up with the give-and-take of discussion at a pace comfortable to many native English speakers. Even though her English proficiency was strong, sometimes she needed extra time to provide answers—and that proved challenging in group-work situations. Sarah also mentioned that certain types of evaluations, such as pop quizzes on long reading assignments, were particularly difficult because even if she and her peers complete the reading, they may not be able to “tell you what it means.”

Academic and Lived Experiences

We were curious to learn how our participants perceived academic as well as nonacademic life in the United States and specifically at CDU. Did they find it more generally positive and supportive, or more negative and unduly challenging? The seemingly daunting challenge facing these four women piqued our curiosity. How does someone negotiate leaving one of the most conservative, gender-segregated, and orthodox Muslim societies in the world (Clark, 2007) to live and study in one that is notably more liberal and secular?

Our interviews revealed that our participants generally found their academic and nonacademic experiences to be positive at CDU. Amani spoke of “feeling comfortable” living within the campus and surrounding community. Fatima said that she “really enjoyed” her overall experience at CDU, including the formal learning and the campus setting. Sarah shared that she “really liked” living in a nearby community years ago while her father studied engineering, and “always wanted to return to live in this area.” Meanwhile, Ami expressed that she “likes the life” here, as well as the educational system she has experienced in the United States.

Language difficulties and the academic classroom focus of this article limited inquiry regarding why our participants generally enjoyed their experience at CDU and beyond, but the positive support and encouragement provided by faculty, academic advisors, and some local students may be a contributing factor. Sarah also specifically mentioned how her CDU professors “have always been sensitive to [her] cultural and religious needs” and how she has not “personally experienced intolerance from fellow CDU students on account of her race, nationality, or religion” in this “post-9/11” era.

Not every lived experience shared by our participants was positive. Fatima shared how “some, but not all” students were welcoming to her within and outside of class. Sarah discussed how she occasionally felt talked-down to and “made to feel stupid” by a few of her partners in class, when she was unable to contribute to group discussions at a pace demanded by her native language-speaking group members. Ami spoke of how “her tutors are nice, but don’t always understand what she means” due to language and cultural gaps. Meanwhile, Sarah also mentioned how much she “misses [the holy month] of Ramadan back home in Saudi Arabia” and how “difficult” it has been to find a satisfying religious community in the local area near CDU. When asked why she thought this was so, Sarah responded that her dissatisfaction was not caused so much by sectarian or cultural differences she found with local Muslims but rather a perceived lack of “liveliness” within the local mosque. Fortunately, Sarah has discovered mosques in adjacent communities that are more to her liking.

It is worth noting here that familial circumstances were not mentioned as challenges to personal academic success by any of our participants. Only Ami mentioned having a child (whom she brought to her interview location), and none of the four were chaperoned to our interviews by husbands or male guardians, as they might have been back home. It is also significant to point out that all four participants fully intended to complete their respective master’s degree programs at CDU, with Ami and Fatima planning to transition into doctoral programs at CDU thereafter, if possible. This finding was surprising to our research team given the strong focus on women as wives and mothers that appeared in the literature (Hamdan, 2005).

Participant Suggestions to Improve the Experience of Other International Students

After the participants answered our initial questions about their academic experiences, we asked them whether anything could have improved their experience to date. Although participants were hesitant to complain, which was likely a holdover from societal expectations in Saudi Arabia, Amani said that “three-hour classes were too long; 90-minute classes would be better” as far as being able to maintain concentration. Sarah suggested that the university provide general life-skills information in Arabic for academic and nonacademic tasks including registering for classes, finding support services on and off campus, and finding places of worship. In addition, she would like the university to facilitate the identification of Arabic-speaking tutors in specific disciplines, if possible. Along the same lines, Sarah also recommended that the university provide written orientation materials in Arabic so that students could refer back to university policies as needed throughout their academic careers. Another suggestion was allowing more time during class to translate, reflect upon, and respond to instructor and classmate questions and comments. Neither Ami nor Fatima offered any suggestions for improvement.

Study Limitations

This study has several limitations that readers should consider. None of the researchers was Saudi or spoke Arabic, and only one of our participants was truly fluent in English. This made it difficult to explore cultural nuances or use the type of culturally situated expressions that often help guide conversations. We tried to address these challenges by paraphrasing responses and asking participants whether what we heard was accurate. It is also difficult to know how comfortable our participants were with being interviewed by Westerners, although this did not seem to be an issue. Readers should also be careful about generalizing our findings. Constructivist studies are generally interested in exploring a situated phenomenon and it is likely that Saudi female graduate students might have different experiences at other institutions, particularly those that are more research oriented with a higher percentage of international students. Our relatively small number of participants also means that we co-constructed meaning with individuals from a relatively small pool of Saudi, female graduate students. Experiences of graduate students at other universities, in other geographic regions, or a study that included undergraduates may have led to different findings. Additional participants may have provided further verification of trustworthiness of the findings. Another limitation was that all of the Saudi women studying at CDU were enrolled in the College of Education and Behavioral Sciences (CEBS). Students in other majors might have had greater exposure to male classmates.

Discussion and Implications

The stories participants shared with us provided insight into the types of issues they wrestle with while navigating classroom environments and the CDU campus at-large. As PC suggests, our participants adapted in response to environmental factors, and in doing so, their socially constructed reality changed. This was highlighted by such performative challenges as struggling with American idioms, academic acronyms, and the speed of class discussions within classroom environments. PC proved useful in understanding and organizing our participants’ engaged and practical responses to these challenges, which included critical learner and pedagogical suggestions such as becoming more adept at group work (Sarah and Fatima), additional faculty and tutorial support to strengthen their writing and reading skills (Sarah, Fatima, and Ami), concerted efforts by their instructors and classmates to speak with less jargon and idiom-laced language (Sarah, Fatima, and Ami), receiving instruction less focused on form (i.e., grammar) and more on direct explanations (Ami), and shorter classes (Amani). These women demonstrated a strong desire to succeed, both for personal benefit and to help their home country. For them to take full advantage of their experience in the United States, our participants expressed a belief that the implementation of these suggestions could help them realize their respective goals. Moving between two contrasting cultures, each of which imposes starkly different behavioral expectations and restrictions, makes for a delicate balancing act with few resources to rely on when the cultures are in conflict. PC provides a framework for understanding how this balancing act can be successfully negotiated via an active, recursive learning process that constructively responds to and builds upon prior learning experiences within a foreign learning environment.

Unintentional Gender Segregation

Overall, our participants described few gender-based issues at CDU, which led to a revelation during our investigation—the fact that CDU may have actually provided a more gender-segregated educational experience than we assumed. Majors in the field of education do not appear on any KASP scholarship publicity material that we found (Ministry of Higher Education, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, 2010b), yet all the female Saudi students at CDU were studying in the CEBS. Possibly due to their specific majors within the CEBS, three of our four participants stated that they typically do not have male classmates of any nationality so Saudi women studying in other fields or at other institutions may have significantly different perspectives. For context about low numbers of male classmates, CDU’s overall graduate student population includes about 26% males and 74% female students (UNC, 2013). The gender disparity is likely because individuals still consider CDU to be a teacher education institution, even though it also offers degrees in business, natural sciences, humanities, social sciences, and the performing and visual arts. However, it leads to the question of whether women are still guided into so-called feminine majors through KASP even though the Saudi government has ostensibly allowed them more academic and career options.

Relationships With Male Faculty

Although it was a different experience than what they had experienced in their home culture, our participants appeared to enjoy the opportunities to engage with male faculty at CDU. Overall, they felt supported and respected by their male faculty, and both Fatima and Sarah noted specific instances where a faculty member went out of his way to demonstrate interest and concern in a manner that apparently differed from what they had experienced previously. This sensitivity appears critical to the Saudi women because such consistently demonstrated concern provided them the support and degree of trust needed to gain confidence as competent, independent learners within a foreign learning environment.

Recommendations

Based on our discussions with this group, we propose the following recommendations for faculty and staff who interact with Saudi students.

As highlighted by our participants, they face cultural challenges when in class with Saudi males. Therefore, when instructing classes with both Saudi females and males, be mindful of the strong patriarchal attitudes the males generally display and recognize how this might inhibit the classroom success of both genders. Consider separating the Saudi males and females when students are working in teams or small groups. In our participants’ experiences, it is common for Saudi men to default to traditional gender roles when they perceive a woman behaving in a manner that would be considered inappropriate back home.

When feasible, place Saudi students in two- or three-person groups for discussions and role-plays as opposed to larger groupings to provide more opportunities for active participation. We base this recommendation on our participants’ description of the challenges that they face when working in group settings. Smaller groups provide greater opportunity to adjust the pace of discussions and might be a less threatening environment for students to ask for additional explanation of terms and acronyms. Language was the single greatest barrier that these women faced in their attempts to integrate fully into life and classes at CDU.

As Sarah noted explicitly, and others alluded to, be sensitive to the unique challenges that nonnative English speakers face when determining appropriate assessment methods. For instance, pop quizzes that draw upon readings that English language learners may not have had adequate time to absorb and group work that requires on-the-spot contributions to discussions may pose exceptional challenges to nonnative English speakers.

Based on Sarah’s suggestion, ask incoming students to determine what information would be useful to them so that they feel comfortable in their new environment. Obviously, some suggestions will be more feasible to implement, but at least students will feel that university staff are hearing their needs. Whenever possible, universities should provide student support information such as orientation literature, student handbooks, and community resources information in various languages to match their international student population. If possible, provide opportunities for Saudi women who have been at the institution for at least a year to interact with those just arriving. Both of these recommendations are relevant to all international students.

We believe that implementing these recommendations would facilitate Saudi women’s engagement in classroom activities and group discussions. Recommendation 4, in particular, would help ease these students’ transitions into the university and wider community.

In addition, we believe that an inquiry into the commonalities and differences that Saudi female graduate students experience compared with Saudi males and with other populations of international students would benefit current Saudi students and their host institutions, and would be of particular interest to scholars who focus on Middle Eastern culture and gender studies.

Conclusion

Due in large part to King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al Saud’s relatively moderate policies, women from Saudi Arabia are benefitting from wider access to educational opportunities than in the past. Although these motivated individuals appear to adjust well to the mixed-gender classrooms that they encounter at CDU, this study identified key challenges and opportunities for host institutions to serve them more effectively. Specifically, they would appreciate having additional opportunities to increase their English language proficiency and additional orientation to services provided by the campus and surrounding community. Regarding the need for support from male students and faculty, that differs by individual based on each student’s previous educational and life experiences. What appears to be universally important is that faculty and fellow students, both Saudi and American, create environments where these women can voice their needs and opinions.

Using PC as a framework for better understanding our participants’ experiences required that we think about how the process of accommodating and assimilating was both a learning and transformative process. Only when we started discussing the study’s implications did we consider that the transformation Saudi women experience when studying in the United States would require further accommodation and reassimilation after returning home. The process of renegotiating gender roles in Saudi Arabia, and accommodating strict sex segregation, will likely require significant effort on their part.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

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

Author Biographies

Robyn E. Sandekian is a doctoral student in the Higher Education and Student Leadership (HESAL) program at the University of Northern Colorado. She also works as the managing director of the Mortenson Center in Engineering for Developing Communities at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her professional and research interests include academic program development and assessment, faculty reward structures, and interdisciplinary education.

Michael Weddington is a doctoral student in the Higher Education and Student Leadership (HESAL) program at the University of Northern Colorado. His research focus includes student success through postsecondary career into postcollegiate adulthood from integrative perspectives and the national/international male gender gap at the postsecondary level.

Matthew Birnbaum is associate professor, chair of the Leadership, Policy, and Development department, and program coordinator for the Higher Education and Student Affairs Leadership (HESAL) program at the University of Northern Colorado. His research interests include trends in higher education law, international graduate student experiences, and organizational theory.

J. Katée Keen is a doctoral student in the Higher Education and Student Affairs Leadership (HESAL) program at the University of Northern Colorado where she serves as a graduate assistant in cultural services. Her research interests include international education, intersections of gender in higher education, diversity and social justice in first-year student programs, and campus ecology.

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