BackHome
Refresh: OffView Personal Schedule
Individual Submission Summary
Share...

Direct link:

Teaching, curriculum and internationalisation at time of war: The case of Syrian HE

Tue, April 16, 10:00 to 11:30am, Hyatt Regency, Floor: Pacific Concourse (Level -1), Pacific D

Proposal

Syria is now in the eighth year of a devastating war, which has impacted many of its social sectors including Higher Education (Brookings Institution 2016). To date there is virtually no robust research mapping the status and conditions of HE before the onset of the conflict. Importantly, there are also no published studies capturing the nature and characteristics of the impact of the conflict on Syrian HE (Dillabough, Fimyar, McLaughlin & Al-Azmeh, 2018a, 2018b). In light of these gaps in the literature, in this paper we seek to map aspects of the HE landscape before 2011 and after the onset of the conflict, paying particular attention to the political economy of HE, internationalisation, research cultures and HE expansion, contraction and stagnation.

The paper represents a collaboration between a University of Cambridge research team from the Faculty of Education together with a group of Syrian academics currently living in exile in Turkey. Collectively, the team undertook a one-year qualitative study of Syrian Higher Education before and after 2011. The study involved two capacity building workshops engaging the Syrian research team in qualitative research design methods, interviewing, data coding and analysis.

The methods used in the study included:

1. Maps and timelines exercise following an ESRC ‘timescapes’ methodological approach (Hanna & Lau-Claydon 2012; Neale 2012; Neale and Hanna 2012); summary of Arabic language documents; and workshop participants’ writing on themes developed during the first workshop and literature review.
2. Face-to-face open-ended interviews with 19 male displaced academics currently residing in Turkey about their journeys into displacement and the political conditions of HE.
3. One face-to-face focus group with 12 male displaced academics and one remote focus group with students studying in Syria.
4. Remote open-ended interviews with 117 staff and students from 11 Syrian universities.

The review of the literature suggests that before 2011 institutional structures and practices of Syrian HE operated under the powerful and often contradictory pressures of government regulation and control, state-related assertions of broadly secular objectives, together with longstanding ambitions to utilise HE as an instrument for leveraging political power. Syrian HE has been particularly heavily affected by longstanding regional and national conflicts, whether military or political (see Anderson 2011; Avery & Said 2017 and Tinti 2017). An important challenge reported in the grey literature (Amnesty International 2007; UNHCR, 2010) points to the part played by the impact of previous wars in the region such as the July War of 2006 in Lebanon (2006) and the Iraq War with many young refugees fleeing from these countries to Syria.

Global economic pressures on HE were also mounting in Syria before 2011. Prior to 2000, a number of external institutions such as the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme had encouraged the Syrian government toward an HE expansionist model to accommodate growing numbers of young people seeking access to HE (Buckner 2011; Kabbani 2009; Kabbani & Khotari 2005; Salehi-Isfahani & Dhillon 2008; UNDP & Regional Bureau for Arab States 2003, 2006, 2009; World Bank 2008a, 2008b). Mazawi (2011) argues that the reforms of HE designed to promote economic advancement and encourage accountability and efficiency have taken place without corresponding improvements in academic freedom or the questioning of highly controlled forms of governance. Here is perhaps the central paradox that is documented in the HE literature relating to stagnation - that the promotion of horizontal expansion did not lead to a more robust, autonomous, effective, egalitarian and accountable system of HE in Syria.

The findings of the study reveal that core imperatives of HE practice - teaching, service and research - have all been undermined by the conflict and were clearly in need of substantive reform at the outbreak of the conflict. The findings also demonstrate that the war and associated conflicts have intensified any pre-2011 challenges Syrian HE was already facing, and in some cases, it has collapsed or is under serious threat of further stagnation. It is also clear that reports of diminished HE quality abound and that study and work since 2011 represented a dangerous endeavour that undermined the safety of its staff and students alike. Many too felt that HE was a site of major stagnation in the areas of teaching, research and knowledge generation.

Left to survive amidst the loss of human lives, threats to their livelihoods, careers and their social and labour market mobility, it is clear that the personal and professional challenges have left emotional legacies of loss and constraint. An important reality is the total diminishment of social trust and HE integretity leading to feelings of despair and doubt. In such circumstances, alongside the war economies currently in operation in Syria, the practices of bribery, exam fraud and corruption are seen as widespread; taken together, these factors further undermine HE integrity and fuel social distrust with many reporting that higher education is ‘not a higher education any more’.

At the time of data collection (July 2017) research participants also shared with us, although on a much smaller scale, stories of hope and innovation, with some university staff striving to modernise the curriculum, identify sources of research funding and restore the safety and educational opportunities for students. The positive relationships between students and staff reported in all but one university also provided some sign that human relationships between students and faculty remain grounded in forms of social respect, despite the perilous state of HE in many parts of Syrian society. In closing, we have sought to bring a rare and significant insider’s account of Syrian HE to a larger international audience with the hopes of raising awareness of the impact of war and conflict on institutions normally considered to have a stabilising, motivating and mobilising force for society as a whole. Our research tells us that HE can present a number of obstacles to positive change during war – including its part in creating stagnation at a national scale - and highlights the its continued significance as an important and sustained site of investigation within the HE in conflict literature.

Authors