“Paradoxically, local knowledge can motivate conversations between different localities, answering questions that transcend one’s own borders.  It is when we acknowledge the localness of our own knowledge that we have the proper humility to engage productively with other knowledge traditions."

Suresh Canagarajah, “Reconstructing Local Knowledge”

Proposal Information & Theoretical Apporoach

     In 2010, the University of Cincinnati (UC) received one of four sub-contract awards for a US-Iraq University Linkages Partnership (ULP) granted through the US Embassy-Iraq. Partnered with English education faculty from a public university in the Kurdish Region of Iraq, specific objectives included the revision of English literature curricula to provide opportunities for collaborative project- and problem-based learning, writing-to-learn activities, formative assessment practices, and e-learning teaching techniques, and the creation of exchange opportunities between Kurdish and UC students and faculty.

     To address these objectives, partners proposed two main activities: (1) the creation of a Blackboard learning community as a means of facilitating monthly online meetings, promoting focused discussion of theoretical and pedagogical scholarship, and exchanging teaching resources and materials with one another, and; (2) a series of workshops, held both at UC and SUH, to demonstrate and practice instructional approaches, co-create and revise course syllabi, classroom materials, and assessment instruments, and further promote the cross-cultural exchange of pedagogical knowledge and disciplinary perspectives on English Studies education.

     During the first year of the grant, American and Kurdish faculty members met exclusively online in preparation for a series of workshops to be held at UC the following summer. From the outset, however, the collaboration met with a kind of passive resistance from Kurdish faculty at SUH. The contradictory nature of our partnership became apparent in our attempt to become a discourse community through an online environment that first year. An analysis of the texts from these early online discussions reveals much about the role of resistance in transnational university partnerships.

     Although our study employed several perspectives on resistance (Bizzell, 1992; Canagarajah, 2002a; Canagarajah, 2002b; Ivanič, 1998) two primary theoretical premises guided our analysis. The first is that all knowledge is inherently “local” (Canagarajah, 2002b); that is, community-specific, value-laden, discursively constructed and, thus, necessarily collaborative in nature (see Canagarajah, 2002a, pp. 54-55). The second is that transnational partnerships established between U.S. and MENA region university faculty for purposes of facilitating educational reform are best served by adopting practices that “envision not just changing the content of knowledge, but the terms of knowledge construction” (Canagarajah, 2002b, p. 251, emphasis in original). Taken together, these premises suggest that, while transnational partners can never merely shed their localness or the biases that inevitably attend any one person’s situated ways of knowing, we can nevertheless work toward the more “pluralistic mode of thinking” that Canagarajah envisions as both the cornerstone and the consequence of collaborative cross-cultural exchange.     

In our presentation, we examine three vignettes that illustrate critical junctures in our online collaboration during the first year of our transnational partnership. Our analysis of the findings from these online discussions reveals shifts in our collective understanding of resistance and the generative role it can play in transnational partnerships. Our presentation asserts that, by learning to accommodate contradictory points of discourse within our extended online dialogues, our theoretical perspectives likewise changed, inviting us to reconsider the collaborative practice of transnational educational research, where so often, regardless of nationality, the local participants are considered the “other.” Our presentation will provide background on the partnership, share findings, and relate interpretations of the data from the online transcripts, concluding with the implications for future transnational university partnerships. Audience comments and questions will be addressed in the last ten minutes of the presentation.

Bizzell, P. (1992). Academic Discourse and Critical Consciousness. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Canagarajah, S. (2002a). A geopolitics of academic writing. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Canagarajah, S. (2002b). Reconstructing local knowledge. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 1(4), 243-259. Carley, K. (1990). Content analysis. In R.E. Asher (Ed.), The encyclopedia of language and linguistics. Edinburgh: Pergamon Press. Freire, P. (1970/2001) Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum Press. Gutiérrez, K. (1999). Rethinking diversity: Hybridity and hybrid language practices in the thirdspace. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 6(4), 286-303. Hatch, J. A. (2002). Doing qualitative research in education settings. Albany: State University of New York Press. Ivanič, R. (1998). Writing and Identity: The Discoursal Construction of Identity in Academic Writing. Philadelphia: John Benjamin Publishing Co. Swales, J. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Boston: Cambridge University Press.