A veil of sand : an autoethnographic study of a school reform program in the Middle East

Abstract

This autoethnography discusses my 15 months in the United Arab Emirates in a Muslim girls' school as part of a school reform program during 2007-8. The rise of high stakes educational testing globally has created situations where non-Western cultures have felt pressured to quickly meet the demands of rankings, such the PISA system, so as to be competitive in a global market. There has been little research published in English on the experiences of school reform workers in cross cultural settings in the Middle East. The purpose of this study is to address this lack, to explore the challenges of working in this region from a personal perspective and to present my learnings from this experience. I use my journal entries and memories from the UAE to discuss my experiences in this cross cultural setting. My stories narrate the dilemmas I faced working with teachers and school leadership who were enacting different ways of knowing to my own. My experiences reflect the multi layered messy process of working across cultural expectations with school staff who were faced with implementing a Western curriculum purchased from Australia. Having this new curriculum imposed on schools in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi raised issues that school staff and the reform project workers had to grapple with in this typically authoritarian society. I follow my evolution as a teacher, principal, academic and school reform advisor and discuss my growing awareness of the differences in beliefs and practices between my views as a Western educator and those I saw being enacted in the schools in the UAE. This disconnect becomes more obvious as the discourse of the school reform agenda underpinning the directives from our company came in contact with the realities of the school's long held practices. Within this autoethnographic study, I consider the impact of place on identity as I document my connections to place and landscape in Australia and in the UAE. Finally, I explore creative ways of thinking about and processing my experiences through different aspects of image and the visual.

Date of Award	2016
Original language	English