True Story 7.04
Jordanian student rails at the tone of his teacher’s feedback
The setting for this story
At the U.A.E.-based American University of Sharjah, most professors are Americans. Following is a complaint from Waheed, a male student from Jordan, about his female American professor.
A story of misaligned minds5
I recently received my paper back from my professor with very rude feedback. Some of her comments were: “I can’t follow your reasoning”; “What is your point?”; “Flat and dry!”; and even “So??” I know my paper wasn’t perfect, but couldn’t she say it in a nice way?
Waheed’s question
What’s going on with this professor that she’s being rude to me?
Critique of story 7.04
A characteristic shared by many communitarian societies, of which Jordanian society is an example, is that people at high levels in any institution – an extended family, a business, a university – are expected to take an authoritarian (but not necessarily tyrannical) stance towards those below them. In the schools of such societies, this expectation serves as one of the features of knowledge-focused classrooms. Teachers, assumed to be authorities in their field, are expected take a directive stance towards their learners, who are assumed to know little or nothing and require academic guidance.
In instructional cultures that are communitarian and knowledge-focused, teachers’ critiques of their students’ written and oral performances can seem to lack empathy. Most students aren’t upset by this because they care far more about getting it right than about having their errors minimized. One possibility is that Waheed was upset because his professor wrote only direct criticism without including guidance about how to improve or an offer to help him improve (such as “My office hours are posted, so stop by with this paper one day and I’ll give you some help.”)
What’s surprising to me about Waheed’s complaint is that, during his secondary schooling in Jordan, he apparently had not become accustomed to this sort of unsparing teacher feedback.
What about the fact that this teacher was an American? Was her feedback to students in the U.S. gentle whereas now she’s being harsh because this is how things are done in the Middle East? Unlikely. Feedback like this is not unusual in many U.S. universities, so I expect that she was responding to students’ written work just as she did in the U.S.
I’m going to guess that Waheed was upset by this professor’s tone because she is female. Females should be gentler than males. This professor didn’t meet Waheed’s standard for female gentleness and relatability.
For thought
When we are trying to explain a misalignment of minds in a classroom inhabited by people from different societies, the broad characteristics of those societies – “communitarian,” for example – are only a starting point. The more we dig into the details, the more questions emerge.
For example, what if we discover that this professor recently became disillusioned by the terrible quality of her students’ writing? Could she have decided to be far tougher in her feedback, so that she’s become over-the-top even in Middle Eastern terms? Or suppose we find that Waheed was romantically attracted to her? Would identical feedback from another female American professor not have led to his feeling emotionally upset? In the absence of much more information about Waheed and his prior schooling, we’re left to speculate about such possibilities.
When we’re assessing behavioral complications across cultures, definitive explanations often prove elusive.
Related stories
Story 7.11 includes an explanation of why I said in the critique above that “Most students … care far more about getting it right than about having their errors minimized.” Story 1.08 also addresses male–female issues in educational settings; its story, set in Brazil, leaves little doubt about the explanation for the questionable behavior.
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Endnotes:
5 Al-Issa (2005), 159, incident 2.
Full citations are available at misalignedminds.info/References.