12: Brothers, Apart: Qais, Majed, and The Many Faces of Hayat al-Bedu

I had been living in Rashid for a few months in early 2010 when Qais became a part of my life. By then, I had established some routines in the village where I was living on the ground floor of a two-story apartment building. The boy’s school where I taught English was almost directly across the street. In the morning, I opened my heavy steel front door, walked down the steps, crossed the street, and passed through the green-painted metal gate of the schoolyard. At school, I spent my days co-teaching with Mahmoud Abu Saleh. In spartan classrooms with rows facing towards our chalkboard, Mahmoud introduced vocabulary and grammar, breaking down the English language for students who encountered it everyday on television but who were not fluent. Mahmoud relied on the same paperback instructional guide used in every school throughout Jordan. My role was to pivot from this pedagogy towards a more student-centered learning experience. I conceived of activities enabling students to interact with one another, using their new vocabulary, and expressing their own ideas in English. I used questions and prompts to start conversations in class. This pedagogy often devolved into laughter as it departed from so many of the hierarchical features of schooling in Rashid. However, over the course of months, students did enjoy the “What is Rashid?” assignment that I developed. Working in small groups, students answered questions about life in Jordan, their Bedouin village, and about Islam. They used digital cameras to document daily life and we eventually created a short booklet. Students gravitated towards this activity because it granted them permission to call attention to features of village life on their own terms and through their own words.