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Department News

October 25, 2021

UO’s Arabic Language Program Adopts a New Teaching Model

October 7, 2021

A team of three UO faculty members and one undergraduate student are creating a new, innovative curriculum for first-year Arabic at the UO.

The “flipped classroom” model prompts students to complete educational modules as homework, where they’ll first learn the vocabulary and grammar. In-person class time will then draw from the information students have studied and offer time to practice language skills. The new program will debut next year, with the current 2021-22 academic year serving as a transitional period.

Thanks to a recent Open Oregon Resource Grant of $36,700, co-principal investigators David Hollenberg, associate professor of Arabic and Islamic studies, and Hanan Elsherif, senior instructor of Arabic, will lead the transition to the new program. The rest of the team includes Abdulrahman Eissa, professor of Arabic, and Benjamin Loy, a current UO linguistics and religious studies double major who has reached advanced proficiency in Arabic and Chinese and is also self-taught in Turkish and biblical Hebrew.

“I’ve noticed that highly motivated Arabic students would lose interest because classes weren’t going as fast as they would have liked, and, at the same time, we were losing students who just couldn’t keep up with the pace of the classes,” Hollenberg said. “This new model will really allow for flexibility in every student’s learning ability.”

The materials for the new courses are being developed by Hollenberg, Elsherif and the team and will consist of a minimum number of modules each student must complete. Hollenberg said the new approach sets a baseline for students to meet and allows for varying levels of motivated students to continue ahead at their own pace.

Then in the classroom, students will be divided into groups based on their current proficiency level, allowing them to practice what they’ve been learning on their own. Students will be able to move freely from group to group as their proficiency levels improve or plateau.

“Our aim is to provide a space for students who are just not sure how deep into studying Arabic they want to go yet and to allow them give it a try,” Hollenberg said. “At the same time, students who are highly motivated to study the language will be challenged and their language skills will improve.”

Arabic culture will be a major focus of the first-year course, and the program also will shift toward dialect, or spoken Arabic, in the first year. Arabic is diglossic, meaning there is a standard written language and a spoken language that varies from region to region.

Hollenberg said they plan to focus on Egyptian Arabic, the language of the most populous Arab country and also a cultural center. Students also will receive a foundation in standard Arabic that will serve them in the more advanced levels after the first year.

The Arabic program works in collaboration with the new School of Global Studies and Languages that will launch this fall, and its new approach to language learning is a core value of the school. Global studies, journalism and linguistic students are the top three majors who tend to study Arabic, with alumni of the language program going on to work in foreign service, international governments, nonprofits and business or to attend law school. Hollenberg said the program has placed many students in professions that involve Arabic over the past decade.

“We’re really drawing on the motivation of students to learn,” Hollenberg said. “The instructor becomes more of a coach, rather than a disciplinarian. Instructors meet students where they’re at, working with them to take them to the next level. Students are empowered to take responsibility for their own learning, with the understanding that everyone learns at a different pace. I’m really to see how far the highly motivated students can get in this new system.”

—By Victoria Sanchez, College of Arts and Sciences

October 29, 2018

The Apocalypse of Empire: Imperial Eschatology in Late Antiquity and Early Islam

In The Apocalypse of Empire, Stephen J. Shoemaker argues that earliest Islam was a movement driven by urgent eschatological belief that focused on the conquest, or liberation, of the biblical Holy Land and situates this belief within a broader cultural environment of apocalyptic anticipation. Shoemaker looks to the Qur’an’s fervent representation of the imminent end of the world and the importance Muhammad and his earliest followers placed on imperial expansion. Offering important contemporary context for the imperial eschatology that seems to have fueled the rise of Islam, he surveys the political eschatologies of early Byzantine Christianity, Judaism, and Sasanian Zoroastrianism at the advent of Islam and argues that they often relate imperial ambition to beliefs about the end of the world. Moreover, he contends, formative Islam’s embrace of this broader religious trend of Mediterranean late antiquity provides invaluable evidence for understanding the beginnings of the religion at a time when sources are generally scarce and often highly problematic.

Scholarship on apocalyptic literature in early Judaism and Christianity frequently maintains that the genre is decidedly anti-imperial in its very nature. While it may be that early Jewish apocalyptic literature frequently displays this tendency, Shoemaker demonstrates that this quality is not characteristic of apocalypticism at all times and in all places. In the late antique Mediterranean as in the European Middle Ages, apocalypticism was regularly associated with ideas of imperial expansion and triumph, which expected the culmination of history to arrive through the universal dominion of a divinely chosen world empire. This imperial apocalypticism not only affords an invaluable backdrop for understanding the rise of Islam but also reveals an important transition within the history of Western doctrine during late antiquity.

May 10, 2018

Hanan Elsherif received the Thomas F. Herman Award for Specialized Pedagogy

Congratulations to Hanan Elsherif for receiving the Thomas F. Herman Award for Specialized Pedagogy!  Hanan is a Senior Instructor in the Religious Studies department teaching Arabic Language.

March 6, 2018

Forming the Early Chinese Court: Rituals, Spaces, Roles

It is our great pleasure to announce that Luke Haberstad’s book, Forming the Early Chinese Court: Rituals, Spaces, Roles is now in print and available for order from the University of Washington Press and good independent bookstores near you.

http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/search/books/HABWRI.html

Forming the Early Chinese Court builds on new directions in comparative studies of royal courts in the ancient world to present a pioneering study of early Chinese court culture. Rejecting divides between literary, political, and administrative texts, Luke Habberstad examines sources from the Qin, Western Han, and Xin periods (221 BCE-23 CE) for insights into court society and ritual, rank, the development of the bureaucracy, and the role of the emperor. These diverse sources show that a large, but not necessarily cohesive, body of courtiers drove the consolidation, distribution, and representation of power in court institutions. Forming the Early Chinese Court encourages us to see China’s imperial unification as a surprisingly idiosyncratic process that allowed different actors to stake claims in a world of increasing population, wealth, and power.