Searching for praxis and emancipation in an old culture

Abstract

I was born in 1943 in Marj’youn, a town in South Lebanon about 100 kilometres south-east of Beirut and about ten kilometres from the Palestinian borders then. The town residents may be described according to the standards in the 1950s, as mainly middle class, including merchants, landowners, and professionals with a minority working class of soldiers, artisans, and workers. My father was an artisan/small contractor, and as such my family was a working class family. My mother, who had a high school diploma from an American missionary school and had a working knowledge of English, was considered to be an educated individual according to the standards of the time. My family, especially my mother, had high educational expectations for the children, particularly for me, being the only male child in the family. Two bundles of events stand out in my memory. First, as a child of six years, I suddenly became aware of the existence of the Palestinian issue when an elderly Palestinian couple, Imm Mousa and Abu Hussein, came unexpectedly to live in a room in the basement of our shabby house. They were referred to as refugees from Palestine. The couple looked happy as if they were coming to visit for a short time waiting for the ‘events’ in Palestine to clear up. Imm Mousa treated and pampered me like her son. After few months, the couple suddenly faded away as suddenly as they first appeared, most probably to join one of the hastily primitive shelters that were set up by the UN to house the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees for what was thought to be few months before returning to their homes in Palestine. Until now, I do not know what made my family share their poverty and the little they had with this Palestinian couple! The second bundle of events which I vividly remember pertains to the critical role that the transistor radio played in connecting me to the world of news and culture. With this little magic transistor box in my hand and from my poor home in this remote town I could follow what was happening in the world. I took special interest in the broadcast from radio Cairo which had at that time a cultural radio channel that specialized in broadcasting and critiquing classical plays and music. The transistor was an artefact that helped shape my educational and cultural formation. My education at school and university was a continuing struggle to work in order to support myself and my family and at the same time maintain a very high academic achievement standard, which I regarded as the only thing that could give me a head start to obtain a scholarship to enable me to continue my education and to move up the social ladder. My career as a mathematics educator started when, upon graduation from the American University of Beirut (AUB), I had my second encounter with the Palestinian issue when I took the job of an assistant teacher training specialist in mathematics at the Institute of Education run jointly by UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) and UNESCO. The Institute of Education provided long- and short-term in-service teacher education programs to teachers in Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza as well as in the refugee host countries (Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria). My job was to cooperate with the UNESCO mathematics education specialist to design and supervise the implementation of the mathematics education courses for mathematics teachers in all UNRWA schools. In the course of my job, I had to visit the UNRWA schools in the Palestinian camps regularly and conduct training sessions for teachers there. My experiences in the UNRWA schools made me aware of the extent to which education is intricately linked to social context and justice. Here I came face to face with a human tragedy, where the Palestinian people in their totality were uprooted by force and intimidation from their homes in their country Palestine, to be accommodated in refugees camps with minimum provisions for survival. On the one hand, I had a chance to experience the glaring injustice which was evident in the daily life of the people in the camps as well as in the schools. On the other hand, I also experienced the human compassion reflected in the tremendous efforts of UNRWA to provide subsistence and education via UNRWA schools, which were comparable to, and even better than public schools in the Arab countries which hosted the Palestinian refugees. Now that I reflect on that experience, I realize that education in the Palestinian camps was more meaningful to the people than any of the many countries I had the chance to know. I finished my Ph.D. in 1973 and joined the Department of Education and the Science and Mathematics Education Centre (SMEC) at AUB. As it often happens, I started my career there by developing the courses for the Master degree in mathematics education. As a young assistant professor, I was inspired, in this foundational phase, by my professors and their courses at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My teaching at AUB and my supervision of MA theses had little impact on my belief system regarding the social aspects of education. Attempting to publish a paper on my first research project in a scholarly journal was a remarkably daring feat. For some reason, the journal of Educational Studies in Mathematics (ESM) attracted my attention because it dealt with topics similar to my project. The editor of ESM was Freudenthal himself, one of the early fathers of mathematics education, who was the founder, editor, and the single irrefutable referee of ESM. Frankly, I was not intimidated to send the manuscript to ESM because I was simply not then aware of the weight and temper of Freudenthal. To my great surprise, I received a letter from Freudenthal responding to my submission in strong and unquestionable authority to tell me that, unlike some of the ‘rubbish’ he received, there may be something good in my manuscript but I needed to work on it. I did revise the manuscript and it was eventually published. My first successful experience with publishing in international mathematics education journals encouraged me first to continue my career as a mathematics education researcher and second, it initiated me to the ‘trade’ of publishing in international journals. An experience which had a lasting impact on my conception of social aspects of education was my involvement in several mathematics curriculum development projects in Saudi Arabia and Sudan. This brought me face to face with the actual world of policy makers, schools, teachers, and students. Through institutional arrangement between the American University of Beirut and some Arab ministries of education, the Science and Mathematics Education Centre was charged with implementing science and mathematics curriculum development in some Arab countries. I assumed the leadership role in the mathematics education of these projects. Saudi Arabia was an oil-rich kingdom with vast financial resources and very ambitious plans for social development but within the strict interpretation of Islam. The Sudan, on the other hand, was a poor, vast, agrarian republic with limited financial resources to meet its development needs. Culturally, Saudi Arabia is an ethnically, linguistically, and religiously homogeneous Moslem society, whereas Sudan is (was) an ethnically, linguistically, and religiously diverse society. The education system in Saudi Arabia grew out of religious community schools to become a vast public education system whose schools were equipped with modern facilities and mostly expatriate teachers from other Arab countries, mainly from Egypt; whereas, the education system in Sudan was modelled in its educational approach after that of Britain, which had ruled the country before the fifties. The Sudanese schools lacked in facilities and equipment but were in good supply of well-prepared Sudanese teachers. Unlike Saudi Arabia, Sudan had a unique tradition in teacher education. In the 1930s, Griffiths, one of HMI inspectors of education, decided to establish an institution to prepare teachers for rural areas and set up an institute of education, calling it Bakht-Al-Rida after the name of the nearest little village. There he built a campus with minimal facilities similar to what one would expect in the rural areas of Sudan. The recruited student teachers were required to live on campus and lead a combined life of work and education in this minimalist environment. The student teachers as a group were expected to develop, test, and debate the school curriculum, lesson by lesson. Griffiths documented the establishment of Bakht-Al-Rida and his experiences there in a book, now out of print, under the title An Experiment in Education (Griffiths, 1953). For about five years in the mid-seventies, our team had the chance to work with teams of local mathematics educators and to visit schools and meet with teachers in both Saudi Arabia and Sudan. The socioeconomic and cultural contrast between Saudi Arabia and Sudan sharpened my awareness of the complexity of how and to what extent the socioeconomic and cultural contexts mediate student mathematics learning. I emerged from these experiences with a double identity, a mathematics education researcher and a mathematics educator. The researcher identity made me conform to the standards set by the scholarly community without much regard to implications of my research to practice. On the other hand, the educator identity pushed me to use my expertise in the field to give judgments and recommendation to policy makers and practitioners without regard to research findings. By the end of eighties I was able to achieve a professional transformation by integrating the researcher and educator identities through integrating theory and praxis!