Application of the new media

at the class room

-----------------------------------------

Dr. Hoda Al-Mutawah

University of Bahrain - Kingdom of Bahrain

In February 2005, I resumed my teaching at the Department of Mass

Communication, Tourism and Arts at the University of Bahrain.
I was assigned three courses to teach to five groups for the first
semester, and four classes for each of the following semesters.
The courses that I have been teaching are as follows: Massco 355:
English for Mass Communication (1), Massco 453: English for
Mass Communication (2), and Massco 471: Special Topic in Mass
Communication. From the beginning of my teaching assignment
at the University, I recognized new challenges facing the students
attending our courses, and through creative problem-solving,
developed a curriculum that helped to address the special needs of
many of Bahrain’s new generation of university students.

It was my first semester after seven years of dealing with the English
speaking faculty and students in a Western culture; consequently,
bringing new thoughts and ideas to a traditional context was not
easy. However, my pedagogical learning experience, as well as
my academic education in the United States, helped me to apply
observational strategies as a methodology for my teaching from
the first semester. I decided to learn from my students as much
as they learn from me, as I strongly believe that the philosophy of
education cannot be successful without the educator’s ability to
put her/himself in the student’s shoes and exchange positions
with the student. This process of exchanging positions enables the
teacher to understand where the student is coming from.
After about three weeks of mingling with students, trying to
measure their level of English speaking and English writing through
one-page essay assignments, I applied the following methodology:

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First: The Questionnaire:
I designed a questionnaire that I used in the beginning of each
semester for all the courses I taught since February 2005. In the first
meeting of each of my courses, I give my students the questionnaire,
and ask them to take 15 minutes to respond to the questions. This
gives each student the opportunity to get oriented to the course
and to the body of the class. The Questionnaire is very basic and
easy, but it has some complexity. The questions are as follow:

1. Name:…………………………………………………………………..
2. Major: …………………………………………………………………..
2. Academic Year: …………………………………………………………
3. Expected graduation date: ……………………………………………

4. The most important three things that made you joined the
university:
A………………………………………………………………………….
B. ………………………………………………………………………….
C. ………………………………………………………………………….

5. Three things you learned from joining the university:

A………………………………………………………………………….
B. ………………………………………………………………………….
C. ………………………………………………………………………….

6. Identify three things that you are good at:

A………………………………………………………………………….
B. ………………………………………………………………………….
C. ………………………………………………………………………….

7. Identify three weaknesses, and how this class could help you to
overcome them:
A………………………………………………………………………….
B. ………………………………………………………………………….
C.………………………………………………………………………….

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8. Describe three things that you would like to learn or accomplish in
this class or that you wish that this class could provide you:
A………………………………………………………………………….
B.………………………………………………………………………….
C.………………………………………………………………………….

Second: Five-minute presentation.

I give each student 5 minutes to introduce her/himself, and tell us
about his/her answers.

Result:
First: At first I found it difficult to get clear written responses
from students. Some students asked me if they could take the
questionnaire home, so I decided to give the students the chance
to answer the questions at home and bring with them the written
answers in the next meeting.
Second: The responses I usually got from the students helped me to
moderate my syllabus and adjust it to the needs of the students.

Problem:
The usual problem that I faced since the beginning of this teaching
experience is the weakness of the English speaking and writing
skills of most of the students that take the class. Unfortunately,
the weakness of the students could discourage the enthusiastic
professor because it is very hard to teach a four-level English course
to students who barely read and write English. I discovered during
my last four years of teaching that most of the students who were
enrolled in the fourth-level course of English for Mass Communication
did not take the required introductory English language Courses
such as Eng100, Eng101, Eng102. Some students find it difficult
to pass the introductory English courses and depend on luck to
pass the fourth-level English Communication course. The behavior
of those students with low English performance has continued to
put pressure on professors to lower the standard and the context
of the course to match their level, leaving no challenge to those
whose performance is matching the level of the course. I remember

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that one of the students I taught in the first semester declared
that he does not recognize the English alphabetic. I noticed that
some weak students are good in memorizing English-like pictures,
without knowing the meaning, just to pass the class. It was a
shocking experience to realize that those students had succeeded
in graduating from high school with about seven years of English
courses, and yet revealed they had no real English-speaking/writing
skills. I learned from students that the orientation program that the
University of Bahrain provides does not help them to prepare to pass
English classes. I attended one meeting of the faculty members at
the English Department in 2007, and I raised this problem. I found
agreement about the need for a re-evaluation of the orientation
program for first year>s students. However, I still had not heard
about any change in the orientation program. In November, 2008,
the issue was raised again through a general meeting between the
President of the University of Bahrain and the collective body of
university professors at the College of Arts. There was an agreement
that a new developed orientation program should introduced within
the new strategy of quality assurance at the University of Bahrain.

Teaching an English course to a majority of students with very low

standards of English abilities is a major challenge for any professor,
especially when the professor still has to meet the needs of about
5% of the class, where students> level of English matches the
requirement of the course.

A critical question should be raised when facing with this dilemma:

How could we meet the standard required by the quality assurance
in our educational when the university continued to admit students
with lower performance in both English and Arabic language without
receiving a qualified orientation program to enable them to succeed
in the university level? The current situation leads to the graduation
of some students who are not well prepared to face the demands of
the job market in our country, especially when the majority of the
students are admitted to the university because of a higher policy
that demands the acceptance of high school graduates with 70% of

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their total points according to a royal decree.

From the mentioned learning context, I found myself pressured with

multiple responsibilities: first, I have to amend the English problems
that most students of Mass Communication carry with them from
high school, which is linked to their attitudes toward learning English.
Most of them believe that they can not possibly acquire another
language; second, I have to teach the communication material,
which is as important as acquiring the English language; third; I have
to teach my students something beyond the course material, such
as acquiring confidence and professionalism in presenting their
ideas in general, even outside the class.

Amending the system of Education:

The problem that I described above demonstrates that the
educationalbackgroundoftheprimary,intermediate,andsecondary
level of those students at most government schools stands between
the student and the level of achievement that is expected of him at
the university level. Consequently, this situation invites us to apply
different educational strategies in teaching English language to Arab
students, as well as building the confidence of the student in his/her
ability to be successful in his higher education and in the real world,
especially when we learn from the experience of the job market in
Bahrain that those who lack competence with the English language
will be hard pressed to find a job, especially outside the government
sector, while those who come from private international schools
could easily find jobs, even with just a high school diploma.

Unfortunately, some professors believe that pushing students

to be their best and sticking to a challenging standard is cruel and
inconsiderate. Despite the fact that I am a Bahraini professor, both
a Bahraini dean and an Arab professor with an American education
spoke to me about the necessity of understanding the background
of the students and take this into consideration when grading them.
Both of them hinted to the economic background of the students>
families, implying that the university should make up for those

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«poor» students. This «mercy» policy pushes those weak students
to graduate with a Bachelors degree and become a burden on the
growing global market of Bahrain. I strongly oppose such an approach
and find it unethical to distinguish between students according
to their economic or religious background. Even when it sounded
only fair to adjust our national system to help the disadvantaged
students fit in, it is unhealthy to provide the society with low-level
achievers. That policy obviously resulted in doing more harm than
good to students. Instead of pushing students forward, some
students lobby using different methods to get their way to lower the
standard of the courses, and consequently, lowering the standard
of the education at the University of Bahrain. One of those methods
that some students use to lobby over their grads was telling the
professor that this is their last semester in the university, and that
they could not graduate with a low G.P.A., making it seems like it is the
professor>s responsibility, not theirs, to gain a better grade. I found
out that not all students are always honest. Some of those students
who claimed in February 2005 that they were in their last semester,
have continued taking courses until now, which means that they
remained more than three years at the university after their previous
claim. Another pressure that is practiced by students is to seek
revenge on the professors who do not listen to their claims by giving
him/her very low student evaluation in the end of the semester. The
evaluation of professors by students empowers the students, and is
a way to leverage demands from the professor. While this method is
applied internationally, sometimes it is abused by students, and it is
used to bribe some professors, especially professors who need the
evaluation to renew their teaching contracts with the university.

Solution:

From my teaching experience at the University of Bahrain, I found

out that our students need different approaches to remedy the
situation. I found out that the only way to deal with the problem is to
make the learning experience joyful, collaborative and productive
for most students despite their weakness in English language. The

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fact that most of the time, the same students are also weak in their
Arabic writing has contributed to my decision to use the resources
at the University of Bahrain to benefit the students. I keep trying
different methods of teaching and registering the progress and the
responses of my students.

Interestingly, when researching similar problems in the teaching

of writing and communication, I was able to discover that other
instructors had experiences much like mine, and came to similar
solutions. For example, Kenneth Bruffee, a composition/rhetoric
scholar describesthat collaborativelearninginAmericanuniversities
came from the desperation that compositions experienced with
students who were unprepared to write at the expected level for
their position as university students. Bruffee writes:

…increasingly, students entering college had difficult doing as well

in academic studies as their native ability suggested they should be
able to do. Of course, some of these students were poorly prepared
academically…The common denominator among both the poorly
prepared and the seemingly well prepared was that, for cultural
reasons we may not yet fully understand, all these students seemed
to have difficulty adapting to the traditional or normal conventions
of the college classroom. (Bruffee, 1984, p. 417).

Instructors turned to alternative methods, one of which was

collaborative learning. At first it was mostly in the form of working
in teams or peer groups. The use of peer groups in communication/
writing classrooms changed the social context in which students
learned, according to Bruffee. He argues that “collaborative
learning, it seemed, harnessed the powerful educative force of peer
influence that had been—and largely still is—ignored and hence
wasted by traditional forms of education” (Bruffee, 1984, p. 418).
One of the first things I did to try alternative methods of teaching to
these needy students was to have them work in peer groups.

In the first semester, which was February to June 2005, I provided

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students with a box with small cards. I had about forty students. So I
had to divide the class into eight groups. Each group has a maximum
of five students. Each student randomly selected a number and
that will be his group. I tried to be flexible with student choices, and
accepted switching from a group to a group in the first meeting only.
I gave students a sheet of paper to list their names and their group
number. I also asked each group to select a leader for the group. Then
I asked the leader to have the student write their names, their e-mail
addresses and their contact number on a separate sheet, then copy
this sheet and give each person in the group a copy of this sheet.

By forming groups, I wanted students to learn to work together to

solve problems collaboratively, just as they would have to do in the
business world. John Trimbur (1989) argues that “…collaborative
learning may be distinguished from other forms of group work on
the grounds that it organizes students not just to work together
on common projects but more important to engage in a process of
intellectual negotiation and collective decision-making” (Trimbur,
1989, p. 461). To have students strive toward the same objectives,
I articulated the goals of the class, and made sure that every student
was willing to work in a team to encourage a positive learning
experience. Succeeding in working in the group is needed for a
successful attitude after graduation. Some students have some
resistance in the beginning to working in the group, but over time,
they show progress. Students do learn from each other in such small
groups.

In the semester of Feb 2007, my teaching skills were experimental.

In Massco 453: English for Mass Communication, my syllabus was
constituted of news translation, vocabulary and class discussion.
Students were also given assignments to do personal interviews
and short stories. They also had small dictations to practice spelling
in each class. In this class, students learn rules of a good interview,
rules of good listening, and journalistic ethics. The groups also
had to select four controversial issues and do a presentation in
the class. Some groups are defending the issue, while others are

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against the issues. Each group has to demonstrate their analytical
skills to support their views. Creating a clear purpose for writing and
communication is considered “a meaningful rhetorical act” (Flower,
1989, p. 749), which helps students focus and find the significance
in their act of communication.

This approach follows what Trimbur (1989) describes as using a

combined social and cognitive approach to teaching. “Knowledge,
in this account, is not the result of the confrontation of the individual
mind with reality but of the conversation that organizes the available
means we have at any given time to talk about reality. Learning,
therefore, cannot be understood strictly on cognitive grounds;
it means rather joining new communities and taking part in new
conversations” (p. 465).

The more I used groups, the more I found that students were gaining
important benefits. For example, by 2007, I noticed that the
students benefited heavily from working together as a team. I also
introduced web design as a way to encourage students to use media
technology. However, the students who attended the morning
class received a better chance in benefiting from the lab. There was
a problem in securing computer labs for the evening classes, as this
class not scheduled as a lab class.

In the courses that followed, I tried to book the computer lab for
the class in the beginning of the course and fought to secure the
computer lab for the students in all my classes, both Arabic and
English classes. In the beginning, my students in the beginning were
able to use the Computer lab once a week. However, in the last two
years, I succeeded in teaching all my courses at the computer labs
of the E-Learning Center. The E-Learning lab has a smart screen
linked to the professor>s computer, a projector, and a computer
for each student. The E-Learning lab also has a connection to the
world-wide internet network, which makes the teaching material
that is available online easily accessible for the professor. Some
students in this class never used the internet before. They learned

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for the first time how to fight their fears and deal with the technology
successfully. My students also could connect with me and with
their classmates through multiple ways. As described by Brown
(2006) my students discovered that they “can use communication
technologies as a means for breaking down barriers that might
otherwise exclude them from particular learning environments” (p.
1). Instead of a group of individual writers and communicators, the
classroom becomes a community of writers, and the use of online
and computer resources facilitates the development of community
relations. “The term community is used often to describe class
dynamics associated with networked or online writing classrooms,
particularly in response to the potential for these technologies to
overcome material signifiers and geographic boundaries, creating
potential for more democratic and sustained participation among
class members online” (Brown, 2006, p. 2).

I will illustrate this method in detail. Students at the smart classes are
able to learn their English for Mass Communication course through
the following methods:

1.Acquiring the course syllabus and the class material on «Webct.

edu» a website that it is established by the University of Bahrain for
online courses.

2.Students are taught to visit links that are connected to their

topics and surf the net to collect information about the topic that I
discussed with them in the classroom.

3.Students are instructed to keep all their homework and

assignments on a flash or a floppy disc as well as a hard copy on a
special folder.
4.The class is divided into several groups. Each group is constructed
of 4 or 5 students. I used a box with numbers, and the students are
arranged in groups randomly. I asked students to appoint a leader
who speaks English better than the rest of the group. Later, after
three or fourth weeks of the class, I asked students to evaluate their
experiences, and I give an opportunity for students to change their

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group at this stage. The choice this time should be final, since the
students have enough time to mingle with each other in the class.

5.Students read the class lesson before coming to the class as

a group. Sometimes, I divide the lesson into the number of the
groups, and each group is responsible on one segment of the lesson.
The group leader then divides the lesson and gives each member a
segment. Next day,

6.I asked students to prepare a dictionary for the class that I call «My
Own Dictionary». Each student lists the new words they learn from
each lesson in his/her dictionary according to alphabetical order.

7.Students are also asked to translate their pieces of work and

exchange it within their groups. Then the whole work is sent to, me
and I send it back through Webct site to the whole class.

8.Students are taught several skills in this class, such as:

a.Giving presentations.
b.Communicating skillfully using the voice, eye contact,
facial expression, the right verbal language, and
body language.
c.Building their self confidence and self esteem.
d.Reading and writing skills.
e.Translation skills from English to Arabic.

9.Students are given a chance to establish a website and publish

all their assignments online. Normally, those websites are hosted
freely by Yahoo or Jeeran. The aim is to provide the students with
the opportunity to communicate internationally, and through this
move, they build up their confidence in their English language. I
normally get a technical assistant to demonstrate to students how
to register for a website or how to publish their work in a blog. The
experience of publishing online continued with students. Some of my
students got together after the course and published professional
web pages. Having to publish online added new experiences to

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students that helped them to expand their latitudes in technology,
in English language, and in communicating internationally using
different methods of communication technologies.

10.The teamwork experience is very effective in helping students

to learn how to cooperate and learn as a team. The teamwork
experience is very important for our students. It teaches them how to
build their confidence and feel safe within the group as well as within
the class environment. This experience is very challenging for some
students, especially for those who prefer to work individually. At the
class curriculum, there is a lesson to teach students about effective
ways of establishing successful teamwork, and it illustrates the
problems that students face within a team, and teaches them
how to solve those problems. Students are asked to evaluate their
experience as a group and as individuals, and write a five-page report
about the experience, and present this report for the class in the end
of the semester.

11.Conversation Group: Students are encouraged to meet at least

one time outside the class for English conversation. Some students
complained about the restraint of time, but some groups were able
to meet at the university to practice their English speaking skills.
Some groups maintained their friendships even after the class is
over, which proves that the class has lasting effects on students.
The teamwork is very helpful in expanding and enriching students>
learning experience.

12.Curriculum Vita: Students of this class are taught how to

prepare their CV, and to how to pay special attention to the time. For
example, they are asked to mark down the beginning and the end of
any extra curriculum activities they do. Students are found careless
about the significance of time. They are also required to fix a date
for their graduation from the university. This was a new task. Most
students never thought of the importance of fixing a target date for
their graduation, so they could work later to meet the target. They
are also encouraged to write application letters to find the right job.

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They are trained in this class to focus on the job they find themselves
in, even if it is tentative.

13.In this class, students learned time management. They are

taught how to plan their day every thirty minute from the time they
wake up until the time they go back to sleep by the end of the day.
They were asked to monitor their habits to find time for studying,
time for family and social activities, and time for leisure.

14.Students are given extra credits for publishing their work in the
English newspapers. Only three students succeeded in publishing
articles in the daily newspapers and received extra grades for their
work. In addition to the communication skills that they acquired in
this class, which could qualify most of them to succeed in applying
for a good job and pass the job interview successfully. The students
were happy to learn how to use a website and were happy to have
created a good C.V.

Applying Communication Technologies in Arabic courses:

In teaching communication courses in Arabic, I had another
experience that is worthy of documenting. I have been teaching
Massco 471: Special topic in Mass Communication. In that course, I
had a different experience. In the first year of teaching the course,
I focused on Economic issues. I asked my students to select three
different daily newspapers; one of those dailies should be from
outside the country. The students should study and analyze the
economic pages for three weeks. The result was astonishing. The
students learned how to analyze newspapers> economic sections
as well as economic news, despite the fact that they admitted earlier
that they find economic pages dead and boring.

The class is divided from the first week into groups of four or five
students. Each group was asked to come up with a topic that deals
with economic issues, to be produced in a10 minute video-tape. I
reserved an editing lab and used a technical support person to teach
my students how to use the camera and the lighting, and later how

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to do video editing. Students received simplistic illustration of how
to film their video. The most important lesson is to learn how to get
involved in media technology, as well as how to succeed in working
in a team. Students also learn how to communicate using their
eye contact, their voice tone, their verbal clarity and their body
language. Each student is asked to give a small presentation, and
the rest of the class participates in the evaluation of the speech
presentation. This helps students to build their confidence and their
self esteem.

Students of special topics in communication also learn how debate

different issues. The class is divided into two sections according to
their choice. One section defends an issue, while the second section
presents their arguments to oppose the same issue. Students
enjoy very much the discussion, and usually they ask to assign more
classes for debate. The instructions from me to the students are,
«Keep what is said in the class in the class, and never take any issue
personally.» Students learn how to maintain respect for each other
even when they disagree over any matter. Rarely problems happen
outside the class, but because the students trust my judgment,
whenever disputes do occur, I present it as a general case, and I invite
students to find solutions. The class works together as a successful
team that helps each other to grow.

In the end of the semester, each group has to stand before the whole
class, and each member in the group has to talk about the whole
experience from his/her point of view. Each student is required to
produce a written report about the experience of the group. The
report about how to evaluate his work team and his role in it has to
be done individually. The report has to evaluate the teamwork from
a personal perspective. It has to describe the contribution of each
individual to the whole production from the beginning to the end.
Students have to research their topic before they write the script.
After this experience, I realized that professors should encourage
students, especially media students to work in a team, as the media
production is mostly an outcome of a team work.

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Mirroring the type of experience they will have in the world of media
is critical to the student’s learning and ability to problem solve as
a group. People in communication and media never operate in a
vacuum, and so having the students collaborate on the challenges
facing them will help prepare them for future experiences. As
described by Fishman and Lief (2008), …writing, if taught with an eye
toward transfer of learning and with an explicit acknowledgement
of the context of freshman writing itself as a social practice, can
set students on a course of life-long learning so that they know how
to learn to become better and better writers in a variety of social
contexts” (p. 2).

During the First Semester of 20062007/, I focused on election

issues in Massco 471: English for Mass communication. The students
were asked to study their districts and each had to interview a
political candidate from his/her district. Later, they were asked to
give individual presentations about their district and about their
selected candidates. Most of them did not participate in the first
election of 2002, therefore, this class was their opportunity to
change their attitudes about election in general. They learned at the
class that whether they participated in the election process or not,
their choice has an impact on the result. They were instructed to
follow the news of the election from the first week of the semester
until the end. They were divided into groups, and each group was
asked to film a 10-minutes documentary film about the election.
The Outcome was another success. Neither all the students, nor
there families were very interested in politics before the course. I
could claim that the questionnaire that my students’ distributed
to the public, the interviews and the films that they produced for
the class has had a positive impact on them and on their families, as
well as on the people that they interacted with. No question about
the impact of the course on their awareness and on their attitudes
toward the role of their votes and their participation in the election
process. The questionnaire that the students distributed examined
people’s attitudes toward elections in general and toward a
selected candidate in students> districts in particular. I had to go

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with my students to some districts to supervise them during the
administration of the questionnaire. Each student in my class had to
fill six questionnaires. In the end, the class was able to gather about
400 questionnaires. Most students became engaged with the public
for the first time. Some students, including me were emotional
when hearing about each other’s experiences. I was happy that my
students grew up a great deal during this experience of studying
the people>s attitudes and learn about their own citizens in the
actual contexts. Some students talked about the generosity of the
people in some districts who treated them with all respect and dealt
with them as professionals. The course was an actual training for
students to learn how to communicate in a practical sitting. Besides,
the students in this course learned how to transcend their attitudes
of religious divisions as She’ah and Sunni, and learn to work together
as a team.

Each group had to show their video-tape and do a presentation

about their experience. Each student had to present an individual
report about the work team an his/her role in it. Each group also was
asked to select one of the seven daily newspapers in Bahrain to study
the media coverage for the election, and write a group report and
individual report about it. The students in this class reported that
they enjoyed very much using the technology for the first time. The
students received grades for publishing. This class provided them
with qualifications that are needed to get a good job in the field.
At the second semester of 20062007/, my students at Massco
471 did a study on the national unity in Bahrain, trying to help our
nation to be unified. At the first semester of 20072008/, my
students were asked to focus on their home town, and make a video
documentary about some towns and some villages of their own
choice. They worked in groups, and produced the video films as work
teams. Some students learned about their home town new things
that they never knew before.

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Conclusion:

The application of new media in teaching courses both in Arabic and

in English has been a successful approach in improving the quality of
education at the university of Bahrain toward the strategy of quality
assurance. After having published articles in the local newspapers,
students acquired the knowledge and the technique of writing
acceptable articles, as well as learning how to develop connection
with the local newspapers to let their work published. This of course
help the students to secure jobs as journalists. Second, Learning
how to analyze and write about economic issues, some students
acquired the required skills that helped them to succeeded in finding
jobs in reporting economic news. One of my students became an
editor for the economic section at a daily newspaper. His salary
is twice as mine, but I was so proud and so happy to see that what
I taught my students has been worthy and had helped them to
succeed in their practical and professional life. In fact, the impact of
our economic class could be noticed today, where no more boring
economic news are published. We could see how the economic
pages are colorful and lively. What was learned in the class affected
the quality of the reports in our daily newspapers. No one of course
knew how such university classes have contributed to the quality of
our press. My students produced films about the foreign laborers and
their effects on the job market and the economy. They also studied
the tourism in Bahrain, and documented their studies in video films
as work teams.

They produced beautiful films about many areas in Bahrain such as

the Bahrain Fort, the Gulf of Toubli, and the Bahrain Financial Harbor.
Students have chances to visit some places in Bahrain that they
never saw before. They also learn to communicate and mingle with
the people of their own town, where they did not dare to do before.
Students learn the history of their towns and enjoyed working with
new people. They even felt more important in discovering the public
space and the services that are available in their neighborhood.
This method of teaching about the community that surrounds our

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students is being embraced in educational theory, being identified
as “place-based teaching.” Knepler (2006) describes the attraction
to place-based teaching as, “…Students discover, explore, and
research local spaces, examining their communities in order to
better understand both the history of the places and the catalysts
behind both physical and social changes…. We believe that students
need to engage the multiple communities that surround them and
also that communities benefit from the energy and enthusiasm that
students can bring to active citizenship, where citizenship means
recovering, critiquing, and actively engaging the world around
them” (Knepler, 2006, p. 2).

Again, working on a team was useful and sometimes difficult and

challenging, but the result of the teamwork was astonishing. Some
students were very emotional during their final presentations, which
brought tears to my eyes many times. Witnessing the victory in their
eyes made me love my job, and made me believe that I succeeded in
my goal. Each semester, many students spoke between tears about
their disbelief for the own worth before this experience. Some of
them said that the multiple learning experience in my classes were
worth four years of their education.

For the last four years, both the Arabic classes and the English classes
I taught helped me to realize that I can not teach my students alone
because the majority of my students learned from the previous
educational experiences at the primary and the secondary school,
and later at the university level that they are protected by some
professors and sometimes by their own families. This feeling of
protection continued to make them feel insecure. Their insecurity
made it hard for any new method to succeed; therefore, those weaker
students fight back by giving good professors bad evaluations.
Some of the professors who receive bad evaluations, no matter how
much efforts they invested on the students, become indifferent to
the teaching process and instead of improving their teaching skills,
they become a burden on the teaching environment.

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Finally, I would like to add that our students could live up to the
challenge when they are given the right opportunity to discover their
own worth. They need to pass a dependable orientation program to
help them succeed in the transition from the secondary education
to the university level. Through the application of the new media in
education, our students could acquire multiple experiences.

Besides publishing online, producing video films, and publishing

articles on the daily newspapers via e-mails, students learn how to
negotiate their space in their community and how to succeed in the
job market. Most students never thought of publishing, but after
the first experience, they did not want to stop. The application of
the new media in the class room offers students the opportunity
to practice public relations and learn how to communicate with the
people in charge of the newspapers in order to convince them to
publish their articles. Students learn how to improve themselves
to meet the standards of the professional job market. Whenever
they learn how to build their confidence and succeed in working
individually and within work teams at the university, they ultimately
succeed in building their careers outside in the real world, and this is
our goal in meeting the challenge of the future.

Our students have so much to learn and so much to offer if we do not

fear guiding them correctly. We should not fear pushing our students
further to discover new horizons. It is wrong to let our fear hinder us
from giving our students the chance to discover their full potential.
Our students, whether they come from poor, conservative or
wealthy and open environments, all possess strengths and talent.
We only need to work harder on our methods as teachers to provide
our country with the right energy that is needed by the job market.
We do need to teach our students the right method to help them
discover their true worth and to encourage them to find their
strength not through their G.P.A. and their courses grades, but
in learning how to let their talent shine beyond the class and the
university boundaries.

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References:

Brown, N. (Spring, 2006.) The regionalization of cyberspace:

making visible the spatial discourse of community online.
CompositionForum,15,http://compositionforum.com/issue/15/
browncyberspace.php
Bruffee,K.“Collaborativelearningandtheconversationofmankind.”
In Villanueva, V. (ed). Cross-talk in Comp Theory. National Council of
Teachers of English. 2003.
Fishman, J. & Reiff, M. (Summer, 2008). Program profile: taking the
high road, teaching for transfer in an FYC program. Composition
Forum. Iss. 18. http://compositionforum.com/issue/18/
Flower, L. Cognition, Context and Theory Building. In Villanueva, V.
(ed). Cross-talk in Comp Theory. National Council of Teachers of
English. 2003.
Knepler, A. (Spring, 2006). Writing our communities. Local
learning and public culture. Composition Forum. 15. http://
compositionforum.com/issue/15/
Trimbur, J. “Consensus and differences in collaborative learning.” In
Villanueva, V. (ed). Cross-talk in Comp Theory. National Council of
Teachers of English. 2003.
Villanueva, V. (ed). Cross-talk in Comp Theory. National Council of
Teachers of English. 2003.

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