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| Title | Carol Clark interview |
| Interviewee | Clark, Carol |
| Interviewer | Urgola, Stephen |
| Date | 2017-05-31; 2017-06-18; 2017-10-11; 2017-11-09 |
| Description | Carol Clark was a faculty member who taught English language and writing at The American University in Cairo from the 1970s through 2017, having received an MA in Teaching English as a Foreign Language at AUC. Clark recalls her first contact with Egypt, a visit in 1973 when she met an Egyptian man whom she later married; upon relocating to Cairo she studied in the AUC English Language Institute TEFL program as an MA Fellow; she gives a description of the ELI and TEFL program in that period. Her first teaching at AUC was with adult education students in its Division of Public Service (DPS). She recounts her departure from AUC by the 1990s, living in Kuwait and then teaching elsewhere in Egypt, and raises the issue of AUC local-hire and foreign-hire faculty status that affected her (she discusses faculty issues and relations with the administration in later periods as well). Clark rejoined AUC in 1997 in the Center for Adult and Continuing Education in its USAID-contracted English Language Testing and Training program, and reports advances made in the 1990s especially in the adoption of teaching and learning objectives and evaluation standards and the application of computer technology. Clark gives a portrait of the English Language Institute where she returned to teach in the 2000s, discussing its structure and leadership at the Director and Coordinator level. AUC’s Freshman Writing Program is described, on the basis of Clark’s periodic teaching there and its links with the ELI, whose own writing and graduate curriculum she discusses. Clark recounts her involvement in the revamping of AUC’s Core Curriculum and Freshman Year Program in the 2000s, including in the design and teaching of new courses. Facilities at the old downtown campus are compared with those at the New Cairo campus as Clark evaluates the impact of the 2008 move (and commuting) on teaching and campus community. Clark outlines the English Language Institute’s restructuring (as part of the creation of the Academy of Liberal Arts in 2013) that separated the TEFL MA program from the new Department of English Language Instruction, for which she was the first chair. She comments extensively on students over the years, touching on their abilities and learning style, foreign students, the 2012 student strike, and on her children’s experience from her vantage point as an AUC parent. Clark tells about the establishment of AUC’s day care center in the 1980s as well as her long involvement with AUC’s Faculty Services Committee, and offers her observations on how life in Cairo changed in her decades as a resident. |
| Subject | American University in Cairo--History. |
| Publisher | Rare Books and Special Collections Library; The American University in Cairo |
| Language | English |
| Medium | oral histories (document genres) |
| Source | AUC Oral Histories; Rare Books and Special Collections Library; The American University in Cairo |
| License | Copyright 2017, American University in Cairo. All rights reserved. |
| Transcript | 1 Transcript of oral history interview conducted with Carol Clark on May 31, June 18, October 11 and November 9, 2017 for The American University in Cairo University Archives [00:00:00] Interviewer Stephen Urgola: This is an oral history interview for The American University in Cairo's University Archives. The interviewee is Carol Clark and the interviewer is Stephen Urgola. We're in the Rare Books and Special Collections Library on the AUC New Cairo Campus, and today's date is May 31, 2017. To start, can you give your full name and place and date of birth? Interviewee Carol Clark: My name is Carol Clark, Guirguis is my married name. I was born in Fort Meade, Maryland on June 8th, 1950. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: And can you briefly describe where you grew up and say something about your family's background? Interviewee Carol Clark: Well my father was in the U.S. military, and he was a cryptographer, and so he was stationed at Fort Meade when I was born. He got stationed at shaped headquarters in Paris shortly after I was born but my mother and I couldn't travel with him right away, so she went to California where she was from and had my sister, [00:01:05] And then shortly after that we got concurrent what they called concurrent travel and went to Paris to live for the next two and a half years. We also lived in Fort Hood, Texas; Fort Huachuca, Arizona; Okinawa; Colorado Springs, Colorado; Germany Mannheim, Germany. And when we were in Mannheim, Germany my sister and I talked our parents into letting us go to boarding school in Limerick, Ireland for a year. So I lived there for my 9th grade year and then we were our last place being stationed was Fort Lewis, Washington where I finished high school, and I went to college in Bellingham, Washington, and I did a B.A. degree in double major in English and Spanish with an education minor. And so that's a little bit about my family background, my father never graduated from never went to college. He graduated from high school. [00:02:06] My mother never graduated from high school but they were very cultured and they made sure that I saw the world and appreciated reading and paintings and sculpture and a lot of other things. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: And what part of the country were they originally from? 2 Interviewee Carol Clark: My mother was from Los Angeles, California. My father was from, he was born in Georgia, but his family migrated to North Carolina and he grew up in a on a farm about five miles north of the Georgia-North Carolina border. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: And so what did you do after your undergraduate years? Interviewee Carol Clark: Well I graduated about a quarter earlier than my cohort and I got a job teaching communication skills to firefighters. That was my first job. My high school English teacher got me that job and while I was there living with my mother, a friend saw a job advertisement for a job in Turkey, [00:03:06] And I had not expected to go to the Middle East. I was applying for English teacher jobs in the state of Washington but I got the job. So I went to Turkey for two years and that was my first, no it was my second English teaching job, my first one was an undergraduate. I went to Mexico and taught in a village for one quarter of my undergraduate degree as an independent study. So going to Turkey was kind of piggy backing off of that experience. And so I taught English in Turkey for two years before coming to Cairo. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: Can you tell me about when that was and what that experience was like? What were your impressions of Turkey, of the Middle East? [00:03:52] Interviewee Carol Clark: Well that was in 1972. I was there from '72 to '74. And I was living in Gaziantep which is not exactly eastern Turkey but it's east of Ankara. And so at that time there was no airport. There was no television, there was no English language library in the area. It was very isolated. So my roommate and I had another roommate who was hired in Seattle. We had a very difficult first year because the teaching philosophies were different. The culture was very different for us. We had to learn Turkish. It was not easy but, after a year, we adapted. Turkey was, people were welcoming within the small context of where we were. They often assumed we were German because there were a lot of Turkish Gastarbeiters going to Germany at the time. But it was I felt it in many ways it was a violent culture. [00:05:00] There had been a lot of student protests that resulted in violence and people dying especially in Istanbul. So I was I was happy to move to Egypt after that I found Egypt an easier place to live for me Interviewer Stephen Urgola: And what brought you to Egypt? Interviewee Carol Clark: Well a couple of things. First of all I met my husband during the two years during the summer vacation that I had in Turkey. So I knew I wanted to get to know him better. And I also knew that if I wanted to stay in EFL [English as a Foreign Language] field I needed more 3 training, more specific training. Although I had a background in education, and I learned to study languages through my Spanish experience, I felt I needed more higher education training so I applied for the TEFL [Teaching English as a Foreign Language] MA Degree here. And I got it. And so right after Turkey I did my TEFL MA Degree at AUC. [00:06:08] Interviewer Stephen Urgola: I'll return to that in just a moment. Your future husband, can you tell me first his name and something about his background and where you met? You said it was during a summer break? Interviewee Carol Clark: Yeah I was I remember I went to boarding school in Ireland. I was traveling with a couple of Irish friends that I had reconnected with on my way back to Turkey. I had traveled around Europe and spent a month in Ireland. And so they were traveling with me and we couldn't we couldn't sit together on the on the airplane from Athens to Cairo and we didn't know anyone in Egypt. But I ended up sitting next to a man and woman and we struck up a conversation together, and to make a long story short they introduced me to my husband when we got to Egypt. [00:07:00] Interviewer Stephen Urgola: So you were going to Egypt with your friends just for a holiday? Interviewee Carol Clark: As a tourist, yeah, in 1973, just before the October war. So Egypt was very aligned with Russia at the time, and I hadn't really expected to start exploring the Arab world. But when we were, I had taken a boat from Famagusta, Cyprus before the Cypriot War with Turkey and we had we had gone to Beirut. But we had met some Arabs on the boat including, at that time, I considered Egyptians Arabs, now I don't, but that time I did. Including an Egyptian who was from Alexandria, and what encouraged us to come to Egypt, and that's what put that, and reading The Alexandria Quartet, put coming to Egypt into my mind. So when my Irish friends wanted to come I ended up coming. [00:07:56] Interviewee Carol Clark: So I met my husband through these Egyptians that I met on the plane and his his background is auto mechanics and management. But we went out and I actually lived with his family when I was doing my TEFL MA. And as soon as we finished the MA we got married. As soon as I finished the MA we got married [laugh]. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: And you met him on that holiday? Interviewee Carol Clark: Yeah yeah yeah. Through the people that I met on the plane and it's really funny because twice I took planes to Egypt in the mid '70s that on that trip and on another trip, and I had the people that I sat next to make friends with me and invite me out afterwards, that it never happened on any plane going anywhere except to Egypt. But in a way and it's very it's it's funny how I was with Irish friends at the time because I felt that the Egyptian people were 4 a lot like the Irish people in terms of being friendly and talkative and easy to converse with just right away. So that's what happened. That's what brought me to Egypt. [00:09:08] Interviewer Stephen Urgola: Well what were your impressions of Egypt on the voyage as a tourist? Interviewee Carol Clark: Well the main impression was how warm and friendly the people were. I mean we knew no one in Cairo and we had gotten delayed in flight, and this lady and her—this lady was coming back from an operation she had had in Paris and her father and brother met her and her husband, and they waited for us. We weren't expecting anything. I thought I had seen the last of her. And they waited for us and they brought us into into town. And they found us a pension to stay in Zamalek and then the brother called us the next day and asked us if we wanted to see the pyramids and that's when I met my husband. [00:09:54] So it just the warmth and kindness of people that you know that were strangers really made a strong initial impression on me. And of course seeing the pyramids seeing Old Cairo, and we went up to Alexandria on that visit. I don't think we didn't go to Luxor on that visit. But it was just fascinating. You know as a child I had read about Tutankhamun and all of that so to see the treasures of The Egyptian Museum was awesome. Although I had seen Tutankhamun's mask in London before I came, but still it was it was thrilling to be here and it was kind of magical. So that was my initial impression. How kind the people were. But at that time you know it was Egypt was off the beaten track for Americans because of the realignment with Russia. So there was also a little bit of a strange political feeling. Sadat was president at the time but they were just coming out of the Nasserist era. [00:11:04] So um but I loved it, and I wanted to come back, and I did come back lots of times. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: And so tell me about the AUC Teaching English as a Foreign Language Master's program. Can you describe what the program was like, what the faculty were like etcetera. Interviewee Carol Clark: Okay well at the time that I got hired there was a cooperative agreement with UCLA, Dr. Faze Larudee was at that time, he had just come back from teaching at UCLA. And Russ Campbell had been here, he had done an exchange with Dr. Faze Larudee and I had come in that June preceding starting the TEFL MA program and I'd met with Russ Campbell and he had interviewed me. So there were there's always been a very nice DVP program, Distinguished Visiting Professors. At that time, they used to come for two weeks at a time. [00:12:05] So we got some some big names in the field at that time. Mary Finocchiaro was one of them. And Harold Madsen, I think he was from Brigham Young University came. And then he came as a faculty member later on. So there was a lot of good exchange that led to faculty coming in and teaching in the TEFL program. We had a really good professor named Dick Schmidt who later went to the University of Hawaii and he's just recently died. He was our 5 psycholinguistics teacher. And there was Dr. Faze Larudee. He taught contrastive analysis and we had Maurice Imhoff who later became chair of the department. He taught the grammar section. So it was a good solid program. [00:13:04] And part of the, one of the highlights of the program was that they had TEFL fellows. Now I applied late. I didn't apply till the June preceding. So they they there were two tiers of test TEFL fellows one tier that was appointed in the ELI and a second tier that they were just starting up. And I was very lucky I got accepted into the second tier when someone at the last minute opted out and her name was Sophie Sarwat and she was very well known as a synchronized swimming coach. And I guess that was her main love. So I got appointed to what was then the DPS the Division of Public Services as a as a TEFL fellow. So I got a fellowship and that was really helpful. [00:14:00] And I taught two days a week adult education and adulthood what's now The School of Continuing Education, was called the DPS [Division of Public Service] at the time. So that was also very beneficial. We used to, everyone in the TEFL program had to observe as many classes as they could so we would observe one another's classes. It was very beneficial. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: Can you tell me more about the background of some of the other fellows? Interviewee Carol Clark: The other TEFL fellows, um the American ones had been at UCLA and they were they were brought over I guess earlier, but they were brought over for two years and most of them had studied Arabic. And then the ones that I was with were all Egyptians. I was the only foreigner among them. A lot of them had graduated from Cairo University English Department. Their English was amazing. [00:15:00] They had often grown up going to the English School or in the English Mission School and some of them had spoken French and English in their homes. They were sort of from that generation where they didn't speak as good Arabic as some of their cohorts. So you had to have really good English to be in the TEFL program at all. So I thought it was a very strong program. One of the best students in the program and I think she also had a DPS scholarship was concurrently teaching at the Canadian Embassy and she was she really worked hard and set a helped set a high standard and we had another woman who was a pastor's wife she was the wife of the pastor at St. Andrew's Church. Her name was Neva Vogelaar and she was older than most of the rest of us. I mean I was in my 20s some of and most of us were in our 20s. [00:15:59] A few people in their 30s she was maybe in her late 40s or early 50s, but she was a really good student and she, Neva among everybody else in the classes, I thought set the highest standard. And so it was good to have her in the class. And then when we finished the TEFL MA program Neva and I and two other one other person in our group and someone from another group were the first four teachers hired in the ELI for a new USAID program that was starting. And so we were very lucky to get into the ELI that way because there were I think at the time 13 permanent positions in the ELI and they were all taken. They had all been filled. So the fact 6 that USAID was funding this new Participant Training Program and they decided to house it in the ELI meant that when I graduated in '76 there were new opportunities for four of us and then the program expanded and expanded and expanded but we were the first four teachers in that class. [00:17:15] Interviewer Stephen Urgola: What was it like as a newly married woman in Egypt adjusting to a new culture to also be attending classes at that time, graduate classes. Can you tell me about the general experience of that period? Interviewee Carol Clark: OK well I was I actually finished my MA before I got married. But those were hard economic times. We would regularly line up in the gameya [government grocery store] when Brazilian chickens came in or when certain cheeses imported cheeses came in. The whole economic situation was much different than. My stipend, which I got I think at the end of the semester. I don't even think I was paid monthly, was 30 pounds a month and that was kind of a living wage. [00:18:09] Teachers at Port Said School made that much. The fellows in the ELI were on a different program and they got 90 pounds a month and that was a lot of money. At the time my friend who worked in the Canadian Embassy got between 90 and a 100 a month and that was a really good wage. And when I started working at AUC I think my monthly salary was 125 pounds a month and that was amazing. So it was a very different world then. I think I mentioned earlier that we were still coming out of the Nasserist era. So salaries were low, life was simple. There was still a lot of traffic in the city. [00:18:59] In the late '70s and in the early '80s they started building. USAID paid for new waste disposal sewers to be put in and new telephone exchanges and the roads were torn up and that made the traffic even worse. But there was a really good warm spirit of visiting people and the people, my colleagues in the TEFL MA program were very warm and hospitable to me. They invited me into their homes. They taught me how to cook in Egyptian ways rather than you know the typical American things because there weren't many imported goods then. The people were bringing, I'm sure you've heard these stories before from Jayme [Spencer] and other people who were here a long time. We would bring toilet paper sometimes and matches were in short supply sometimes. So you may do with what you had and people kind of cooked together and learned together. [00:20:06] So I made some really good lifelong friends at that time. Jayme Spencer from the library was one of them. There was a good sense of camaraderie and she was doing her TEFL MA at the same time. But yeah people were, Jess Duggan was the head of the library at the time, and he started a Thanksgiving tradition where they would invite people to either his house or Jayme's house and sometimes it switched. And we would go for Thanksgiving and everybody would bring something and it was especially a way to collect people who didn't have a family in Egypt. 7 [00:20:48] And so that was a really important thing to me as a young woman. When I first got married and even I think the first my first Thanksgiving the TEFL fellows sort of all got together and then after that I got to know Jayme better and we started this potluck Thanksgiving tradition that grew and grew and grew until they were 80 people coming and it was a huge thing. But it was a way of preserving our tradition. But at the same time there were it wasn't just for Americans. There were a lot of Egyptians invited to it. It was a way of sort of sharing the culture and the Thanksgiving tradition in a meaningful way in Cairo. So that was a really special thing. OK. I can't think of anything else right now. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: And can you describe the Division of Public Service, the DPS, where you were doing TEFL fellow teaching? [00:21:52] Interviewee Carol Clark: Okay, well, there was at that time and into the future the idea was it was a way of AUC giving back to the community, that these were much less expensive English classes to help people who wanted to raise their economic situation. They had classes in English. There was an Arabic Studies Division at the time that I think morphed into the diplomats school, our diplomats program. There was also later, maybe not in the '70s, but later they offered a computer program and then business as well. Those came on I guess in the '80s but in the '70s the big thing was was English. That was people's way to a better economic future. So it was a large program and I think it's continued to be large, mostly in the evening. [00:23:01] Most of the students were working or wanted to work. I remember for the female students it was a way of getting out of the house in a legitimate way. You know you were learning that it was also a social engagement type of activity too because that you know there were still a lot of strict traditional ways that at the time so maybe not all the women ended up working but it was a way to get out of the house and have a different kind of social life at the time. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: Who was in charge of English programs at DPS? [00:23:41] Interviewee Carol Clark: Well my coordinator was named John Nelson at the time. He later went on to McGill University to get a Ph.D. and he ended up working at the University of Maryland system. And he died just recently. After John Nelson. There were a series of people the last couple I remember are Christine Zaher and then Magda Lawrence and then Nadia Touba took over from her. I'm not even sure who's doing it right now. But those are some of the people that I remember. Because after I left I didn't, after I finished my TEFL MA I stopped working there and I started working in ELI so I didn't have as much connection with the coordinators. But John Nelson was amazing. He was really good. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: And can you describe the English language institute [ELI] in the mid to late '70s into the early '80s? 8 Interviewee Carol Clark: Okay. Well the ELI was led by a coordinator named Maryanne Malecki who had been hired from AUB. And she was very competent very, I thought she was very good. [00:25:04] She was my first boss there. And it had, as I said, this in fact it had an observation room where the ELI classes were expected to be observation classes for the for the TEFL MA program. And as a TEFL MA student I watched some of these classes. They had a one way mirror a room in an observation room with a one way mirror. So we would sit and watch them observe the classes and they also started videotaping. They had a closed circuit black and white TV and they would video or somehow tape, it wasn't exactly videotaping them but they would tape the ELI teachers and we would watch them as part of our class. [00:25:57] So there was a lot of cohesion between the TEFL MA program and the English Language Institute which I think made it stronger. Most of the teachers at that at the beginning when I started teaching there were wives, ex-pat wives of, many of them married to Egyptians they were British, Irish and American. Jan Montassir who later became Dean of Students was one of them. At the time Mary Ghali who later became the coordinator after Maryanne Malecki left was one of them she was British. And they, we looked up to them as our role models. The one that I really admired the most was named Ann Farid and she was, she was a very calm and quiet person, but she was really good at developing materials. She wrote a vocabulary book that Prentice Hall published and she wrote a composition handbook that we used for many many years and it was based on actual student writing. [00:27:06] So it had a lot of validity to it. We produced a lot of our own materials but we also in the early days we had no goals and objectives we had no learning outcomes. We sort of all knew what we were aiming at but we didn't have any particular goals and objectives to guide us. We just kind of knew and looking back on it that was a weakness. But that was the way a lot of programs developed in those days. And rather than having a text book, Ann Farid read or someone had discovered a little book called "Books That Changed the World" and it had chapters on different big thinkers like starting with Copernicus. [00:27:57] And I don't think it went all the way back to the Greek philosophers, but they had Copernicus and Malthus and Darwin and Freud and other great thinkers, Adam Smith, and the ELI teachers made up units to go with each of these chapters. In those days we weren't worried about copyright violation. So we took these different chapters from "Books that Changed the World" and made up vocabulary exercises and composition topics and those served as as readings but we supplemented them with other readings too about those great thinkers whose books or thoughts had changed the world. And then that was an introduction to the liberal arts as well as language fodder for language teaching and that became the upper level of the ELI and for the lower levels we found other textbooks to supplement them. [00:29:03] But I thought it was it was a great way to introduce students whose English skills weren't good enough because then later they would have to take the core seminar. But it wasn't called 9 the core seminar. I forget what it was called, but it was it was a pretty hefty classics based reading assignment that they of course they have to take at the freshman level. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: And what about testing methods in this period? Interviewee Carol Clark: Okay. In that period we had what we called the Michigan Test and it was a multiple choice test with as far as I remember a listening a reading and vocabulary and a grammar component and then I think we also had an essay test as well. I wasn't teaching in that section of the ELI at the time I was teaching in the AID section so we had a different curriculum, but slowly slowly I gravitated toward the undergraduate teaching. [00:30:13] Interviewer Stephen Urgola: And again what was the distinction between the USAID program the ELI and the other parts? Interviewee Carol Clark: Okay the undergraduate program was preparing undergraduate students who had been admitted to the university but whose English wasn't up to the cutoff level of Michigan. The AID program catered to adult learners who were participate who were working on USAID funded projects in Egypt and they were considered participants. They were they were candidates to be sent to the U.S. on what was called Participant Training Programs. So they had to take a different test. [00:30:57] The ALIGU test which is the American Language Institute at Georgetown University test which didn't have a writing component because it was aimed at adult participants who would go and take some sort of a training program in the U.S. So it had a listening listening and a grammar and a reading component. So we had a reading and discussion component in our curriculum and a grammar and a listening/speaking component but we did not have a writing. We didn't teach writing. So in my first few years of teaching I didn't teach writing until I started in the ELI. Maybe one more thing I should say about the USAID program. We tried to teach cross cultural understanding, specifically aimed at life in the USA because that's where they were they were headed. [00:32:07] So I can't remember the exact title of a book that we taught. It was something like "Language and Culture in the USA" and it was based on introducing them to the American culture. So that was very different than the curriculum in the ELI. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: Had you gone back to the U.S. for some period before joining the AID program in the ELI? Interviewee Carol Clark: No I hadn't. I was here four years before I went back to the U.S. But I kept up with I guess with the culture through correspondence and through the Americans I knew here, and through TV and and films and books, through reading. 10 [00:33:01] Interviewer Stephen Urgola: And so by the mid 1980s. How was AUC different if at all from when you first came in the early '70s. Interviewee Carol Clark: Well I can think of a lot of differences in the '80s per se, except that in the mid '80s I became coordinator of the USAID program. And during that time between '85 and '90 is when computers started to come in, and we had to start training teachers and computers. First, it's funny, first we worked with electric electronic typewriters that had some sort of memory in them and then we started getting our office computers but we also needed to train teachers so, Paul Condie and I, he was my assistant at the time, we created the first little mini course for teachers in the Apple 2C we had a little tiny little lab for the Apple 2C training. [00:34:12] And I think at first we were just using computers to produce materials. And then I left AUC in 1990. I was away for six years. And during that time is when computers and e-mail came in. So when I came back in the mid '90s I found sudden you know everyone was on e-mail. Everyone had a computer or a we shared, actually we shared computers in the office at that time. So I would say that was a big change and also Dr. John Aydelott had come to teach the ELI sometime in the '90s I think. [00:34:52] And he brought, he was a curriculum development specialist and methodology and he brought the idea that we had to create goals and objectives and so I think we became a lot more professional in that sense at that time in terms of being able to define what our specific goals and objectives were. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: And your CV had mentioned that you were involved with the division of commercial and industrial training in the late '80s. Can you tell me about that? Interviewee Carol Clark: Okay. The USAID program originally housed the English Language Teaching and Testing Program. We also had testing on the ALIGU exam and we had a testing specialists that oversaw that exam. At the same time the Division of Public Service they started this Commercial and Industrial Training [CIT] Division. [00:36:02] And they also started a sort of competition that took that gave English language courses to some of the same participants that we were training in the ELI only. We had a 200 hour program and they had they had a 120 hour program and at a certain point USAID decided to go for the cheaper program. And so they decided to move the whole program under the CIT. So when I became program coordinator when Mary Ghali left it moved under the CIT and the CIT handled mainly it was to handle any special projects that came to AUC. For example it was mostly English for specific purposes. 11 [00:37:02] At the time I remember we had Hazeb Hassan and the accountants came and they wanted a course for accountants or if a hotel came and wanted a special course for this was called the outside contracts division. And at one point I was I was sort of overseeing the USAID project and the outside contracts and then there was also a tutorials division so that people would come to AUC and want a tutorial for someone they would come to the CIT division. It was kind of a catchall and then they started up Arabic language tutoring as well under that and some computer specific training offsite. So it was when when we would send the teachers out to a site that was in the CIT. But when people would come in to AUC for the training that was under either the English Studies Division or the Computer Division or the Business Division. [End of May 31, 2017, interview session] [00:37:58] [Beginning of June 18, 2017 interview session] Interviewer Stephen Urgola: And this is the continuation of an oral history interview for the University Archives. The interviewee is Carol Clark and the interviewer Stephen Urgola we're in the Rare Books Library. And today's date is June 18, 2017. And I wonder if we can continue with your time at AUC in the '80s a little bit. Tell me some of the leading figures in the academic administration the provost for example and their impact on English language instruction. [00:38:46] Interviewee Carol Clark: Well I remember George Gibson being provost at that time. Before him the person I remember was Moyer Hunsberger. And I don't remember that they specifically had any impact on English language instruction at the time. One of the things that happened in the program I was administering, Bob Brown was our dean and the program got moved out of the ELI into this what's now the School of Continuing Education. And one of the important things that happened to the USAID contract is it got bid out for the first time ever. Did I tell you about that in the last session? Maybe not, but Bob Brown was sort of the figure that we reported to because our faculty when we got moved to the School of Continuing Education our faculty didn't have faculty status. In my last year '89-'90 I got faculty status and argued in front of the board for that and my faculty did get status at that time. [00:40:06] But before that we were sort of administered by the dean in that sense that was Bob Brown and then we had, Tim Craig came in as director of the CIT and then Bob Younghouse's came in and he he took Tim's position and he became Dean of Instruction in the School of Continuing Education for a number of years. So those were the figures that I worked the most closely with at that time. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: And when did when did, when were faculty instructors first hired from abroad as relocated faculty as opposed to strictly local hires? 12 [00:40:54] Interviewee Carol Clark: I don't remember exactly but I think it happened in the, it started happening in the early '80s when the when the USAID program expanded and we were sending Peace Fellows to the United States and they just needed far more good instructors than we had locally. They wanted native speaker quality. And so then they opened up the instructor level positions and there were some males who you know it was sort of sexist at the time most of the women were married to Egyptians and living here already or they were Egyptians. And then there were some males that began to be interested in working there. And I think that's what opened up the forward higher position for instructor back. And of course in the in the the Rhet was under the English and Comparative Literature department at the time and they had males too. They began to have males. So they opened up the instruction at that time for foreigners. [00:42:02] Interviewer Stephen Urgola: And did the compensation or benefits differ according to whether someone was male or female? Interviewee Carol Clark: No but they differed according to whether you were considered to be local or not. So I was under a local hire contract at first then when I left AUC I wouldn't come back until I got a foreign hire contract. I was offered two contracts while I was away working for Fulbright and I didn't take them because I had a regular foreign hire contract with Fulbright and I was equal to everybody else. Once you've experienced that you don't go you don't go back to the two tiered system. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: And what was your argument for the relocated status or why were they trying to offer the local hire? [00:42:57] Interviewee Carol Clark: Well there was always a matter of interpretation. Now originally I was married to an Egyptian and living here although we didn't have our own apartment. They assume that you have your own apartment. You've got your own everything. We were living with my motherin-law at the time. Then I went away. My mother got sick and I went to Tacoma, Washington to take care of her until she died. Then when I reapplied to come back. Because, only because I was married to an Egyptian, they gave me local hire again even though I was relocating from the United States. But what happened was what allowed me to do it was while I was away with Fulbright and my husband was working in Kuwait. And we were actually planning to relocate to Kuwait. And then Kuwait got invaded. So we were back here and I looked for another position and I found it with the Fulbright Commission. [00:44:01] And they, but to get back to it, while I was away from AUC I acquired a condominium in Dallas, Texas. That became my home of record there, not my parents home, but my own home. And we had relatives living in it. My husband's relatives were living in it. We still have it and we've co-purchased another house by then. So I just wouldn't come back with I had a 13 foreign address. I had a foreign home and I didn't own a home in Egypt and still do not. So that that was the terms under which I came back to AUC. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: And tell me more about your leaving AUC what you did and why you decided to make that move? [00:44:54] Interviewee Carol Clark: Well two reasons. One my husband got a job in Kuwait working for Alghanim Motors. But the more important reason was my children's schooling and the foreign local hire issue. My children were going to Port Said School in Zamalek and my older son was caught in the year that they decided to combine fifth and sixth grade. They decided to go from a 12 year system to an 11 year system. And he was caught in the middle of that. And they they squished the fifth and sixth grade curriculum together with disastrous results of course. And then he got put in the seventh grade in a prep school a year early and they were hitting the kids they were hitting them on their hands and sometimes there wasn't if there wasn't a teacher in the class and the kids got unruly they'd just come in and rap them on their hands with a ruler. [00:45:52] Everything I was learning was about education and my children were receiving a terrible education. So I had to get out of that. And when my husband got the job in Kuwait he went alone for a year to try it out and then we were set to go and Kuwait got invaded. And I read and I had been given a foreign hire contract by Kuwait University and my husband had a foreign hire contract and suddenly it clicked. I didn't and I just couldn't put the I wanted to get them into a better educational system. So I looked around when I went it was clear we wouldn't be able to go to Kuwait. I looked around and I found a couple of positions actually. Walid Abushakra from Kuwait was opening AIS [American International School in Egypt] at the time and I I have a teaching certification K through 12 from my undergraduate degree. And then I looked at the Fulbright Commission which was more in keeping with what I had been doing. [00:46:56] And they had the English teacher training program and they had a position available in Fayoum to teach third and fourth year faculty of education English department Cairo University Fayoum branch you know pre-service teachers. So I got that position and it was foreign hire. My kids went to CAC [Cairo American College], they got a better education but they didn't have the best foundation. No they didn't they hadn't really learned to read well and love reading. And my younger son even had to be in a remedial reading class for awhile. But at least I got them moved when it could still make a bit of a difference. It's really important to have a good education from preschool upwards but at least that was achieved for six years. Then USAID decided to close to bid out the program and we had to close down and Fulbright did not get the the new contract. [00:48:00] So I in the whole fall we were waiting to hear about the contract and I just took six months off of work. And we had saved some money but then we had to start paying the CAC tuition. Then in the spring I got. And I had been asked by Tom Farkas in the ELI to do three weeks of substitute teaching during that period. Then in the spring, one of the one of the ELI teachers' 14 husbands got very ill and they had to be in the States for six weeks. So they asked me to take that class for six weeks. I was also asked to teach at Misr International University novel in prose because I'd been doing that in national universities and I've been doing teacher development work and all kinds of things. So I was doing, I was teaching at Misr International University two days a week. [00:48:56] I was teaching for six weeks full time at AUC, and then the teacher came back but another teacher who is teaching graduate intensive students had contracted cancer. Aleya Schleifer I don't know if you remember her. You probably remember her husband Abdallah Schleifer, her ex-husband. And she died actually. So she they had had like three or four teachers to take over her class. She started the classroom with these students. And then two or three other teachers had substituted. When it was clear she wasn't coming back. They put me into that class so I did six weeks with an undergraduate class in the mornings six weeks with graduate class. After Mona Iskander came back and I was teaching two afternoons a week at Misr International University just about killed me. [00:49:55] But by then USAID had also closed down the English Teacher Training and Testing program that AUC had. And they they won a re-bid. So they were reopening it and AUC offered me a contract with that and it was a foreign hire contract. So I said all right. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: And did you know Aleya Schleifer well? Interviewee Carol Clark: I didn't know her well but I knew her for a long time. She tended to teach graduate students and then she started English. I think it was called English 111 at the time which was supposed to be a bridge between ELI and Rhet. Rhet had always had this problem and they always will, of a small number of students at the bottom of the of the heap who don't do as much work who aren't as prepared in English and so they wanted a place for them to improve their academic reading and writing skills. [00:51:04] So they created English 111 and Aleya was the was the first coordinator of that. And then at some point she wasn't the coordinator anymore and I'm not sure exactly what happened but she came back to the ELI and taught graduate students again. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: And what was the year you rejoined AUC? Interviewee Carol Clark: Um 1997, and I was there for—yeah we closed down the the project in '96 and so it was it was spring of '97, I was doing substitute teaching in the ELI and then in the fall in the summer of '97 actually I started with the USAID English Training Program Testing and Training Program. And they had moved it from the main campus to the Zamalek Dorm Campus. So that's where I taught for two years and then I came back to the ELI. 15 [00:52:05] Interviewer Stephen Urgola: OK so that ETTP was part of CACE? Interviewee Carol Clark: Yes. Yes. It stayed under CACE once they moved it. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: And so on your return to ELI can you tell me about the developments that you'd observe from when you earlier worked with them. Interviewee Carol Clark: Yeah there were a number of developments and I don't know if I talked to you about this the last time but when I first started teaching in ELI there were books but no goals and objectives you no objectives. And when John Aydelott before he went over to the USAID project he was a methodology professor in the ELI in the TEFL MA program and he brought a lot of best practices and curriculum development. [00:52:55] So they had created a writing handbook that had all the goals and objectives in it and the other thing that was so different was the computerization of everything. Although I had to change systems when I was at Fulbright we used Word Perfect. When I came back to AUC it was Microsoft Word and working that two years in ELTTP the English Language Testing and Training Program over in Zamalek gave me some wonderful experience not only in use of technology at that time the big technology was just using Word and Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint was just coming in. We had a little workshop on PowerPoint and there was some very good, they had some very good software for computerized language learning that I recommended when I came over to the ELI and we've still got it. [00:53:59] One is the Ultimate Speed Reader has our students have a lot of trouble with their reading speed and fluency and I found this later particularly when I started teaching graduate students in the ELI. Often they speak a lot in English at work but they don't read and write a lot. Especially they don't read a lot. And I was just talking to Naila Hamdy when we rode home from graduation yesterday together and we were talking about how hard it is for graduate students to adapt to the reading modes that are expected of them at AUC. And I've noticed in just testing their reading speed with its ultimate speed reader that they have very slow tend to have like a hundred words a minute or less some of them. And it's very hard to cope with with you know a 25-page article. If you're if you have a very low reading speed and often a non-academic vocabulary. [00:55:01] So I think computerization was between 1990 when I left and '96-'97, '97 especially when I came back. It was computerization, the technology and not only the technology, but what we could begin to use with our classes if we had a computer lab. That those were the days before smart classrooms or they were just they just came in a little bit after that. But teachers had emails and e-mail had become the main means of communication rather than your mailboxes. So I think that was another big difference. So and of course the library had become computerized too. So all of that. 16 Interviewer Stephen Urgola: And who are some leading figures in the ELI in the late '90s into the early 2000s? [00:56:00] Interviewee Carol Clark: Well we had Tom Farkas as the coordinator of the intensive English program. And a lot of that Aleya was had been the coordinator in the '80s of the English 111 at the time. But Tom was the coordinator and he was really an extraordinarily good leader. I thought he was very democratic very kind. Had a great sense of humor. He was one of the best bosses I've ever worked for and I said it at his farewell. I was really sorry to see him leave. He was wonderful. Let's see who else. Paul Stevens and Yehia El Ezabi took turns being the chair of the department and they were both very competent very good but they preferred to do research rather than be department chair or something. They just had this system going where every three years they would switch out. [00:57:08] And they both did a good job. Yehia El Ezabi was very quiet and often in his office. But he knew everything that was going on and he really knew everything. And I felt he was very accessible. There was a time when this was in maybe early '80s, where USAID decided to cut back and we all got a letter in our e-mail saying that there may be fewer positions the following year every year than it was when I was with USAID program in the late '80s. We would have to worry about are we. This was before they bid the contract. Are we going to get renewed. Are there going to be jobs in one year there wasn't. So I decided, all the teachers of course were really panicked, so I went to Dr. El Ezabi just in his office quietly and I said "You know there's a lot of panic going on a lot of people are worried about their jobs." [00:58:08] "Do you think maybe they'll need to look for other jobs?" If they, you know it was spring. It was March, and you know the new academic year was starting in September. So I said why don't you think about writing three kinds of letters, like you're for sure are going to be offered a contract for next year, you might or might not, or you probably won't, so that people know, especially because now we had lots of foreign hire teachers in instructor level positions. And if if they were going to have to leave within a few months they needed to start looking for other jobs. So he did it. He listened and he did it without any fanfare. And unfortunately one of the foreign hire teachers did lose her position. [00:59:00] But the problem at that time was we didn't have the annual faculty reports. There were no written observations No evidence of good teaching and bad teaching. So how do you really know who to re-hire unless it's just a matter of who you don't receive complaints about. So that was another thing that I think had changed by the time I came back in 1990, is we had the annual performance review. There were student evaluations on instruction and that made it more professional because it was just kind of fly by the seat of your pants in the '70s and '80s and then you know it still never easy to reduce your faculty numbers, to to fire someone. But at least you've got a paper trail at least you've got some evidence that, and you need to work with people before you fire. You can't just say boom you're not good enough and this person never got, never got an answer as to why her contract was n 't renewed so at least now there's some sort of system in place to help with that situation. 17 [01:00:23] Interviewer Stephen Urgola: And what changes, if any, did you observe among AUC students in this late '90s into the early 2000s, the undergraduates verses when you were earlier in the ELI. Interviewee Carol Clark: Well I can speak more to changes I've noticed just recently. I won't say I noticed a lot of changes at that time. When I came back in the in '98. The thing is I taught a year, when I came back to the ELI, I taught a year in the undergraduate program. [01:01:04] Then they needed teachers for the writing program at the time it was called The Writing Program for 112. They had a you know, the floodgates opened and they had a lot of extra enrollment that they weren't expecting. So I agreed to go over for a semester and then, then they needed me again in the spring. So I went over for a whole year. Then one of the graduate teachers resigned and I was asked to teach graduate students, which I did for about four years. So it's hard to say you know my my situation was so different. It was hard to say that what the difference was in students but I've noticed from 2006 until now is when I notice the biggest difference and I noticed it in two or three respects I know a lot of people complain about the language level of our students. [01:02:07] I don't think it's so much the language level. I think it's 21st century distractions. When I came to Egypt in the 1970s TV went off at 12 o'clock and there were three channels and there were you know computers were out, there were no cell phones. Nowadays students have 24/7 distractions including in the classroom and I've only noticed that in the last two years where they'll want to be on pulling their cell phones out and hiding them down under their desks if they know that you disapprove of it there. And they the resistance to reading is the second thing that I've noticed. [01:02:57] You know I could teach a novel fairly easily as part of a course in 2006 when I started teaching my Human Quest course. I had two full books and short stories and although at first they complained, they would complain about the reading, but they did it now. Students freak out if you get undergraduate students if you give them four pages to read before the next class. Four pages! And I've been reading articles about how this is a worldwide trend it's not just in Egypt. And that's where I think people are remembering students who used to, who had more reading in their background and were more willing to read. Nowadays the attention span has got shorter, probably due to a lot of elements including the Internet and social media and TV, but also they're resisting reading more and more and more and it it shows up in all their other work. [01:04:06] It shows up in a reduced vocabulary, it shows up and in poor writing skills, maybe sometimes although we get such good students. I don't, you know as part of the accreditation I looked at a variety of sources of evidence including employer surveys, including a survey we did of all AUC, and including what I've seen of student work, and I don't think that we're letting in 18 students with poor English. I just think students are resisting reading more and they're more distracted and they have a lot more to steer them away from their studies. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: Can you tell me about the Writing Program and those in that period where you taught with them, well what was it like? Interviewee Carol Clark: 112 and 113. I actually think it was better than what we have now. I was actually there during the transition year when they went to, because 112 was five days a week three hours a day, or an hour and a half a day I guess. And 113 was an hour and a half a day five days a week. So you could do a novel with the students. I had them read "Beer in the Snooker Club." I had them write eight essays. I saw them every single day. You get to know the students much more in-depth that way. So, but there was no curriculum no curriculum whatsoever even in 1990, no goals and objectives, no rubrics. So you would have an adjudication committee, and in the old days I think they the whole department looked at all the files. [01:06:00] When I was there you would be a committee of three or four, but I think it was three people. And you would exchange your students’ files and it was pass/fail. They either passed or they didn't. But I had I had a case of one student in 112 who failed and I never really understood clearly from the other members of the committee why she was failing. You know they would say it was out of focus but they couldn't tell me exactly what the focus was. And so now they've developed rubrics and it's much clearer to both the faculty and the students what's expected of them. They didn't have a textbook. They didn't have clear goals and objectives so you were passed on materials from various teachers but it was very disorganized. [01:06:58] Interviewer Stephen Urgola: Materials, were those the prompts for writing essays? Interviewee Carol Clark: No they were parts of books, sections of books, chapters of books, and I tried to follow this book that people had been using. Most of it, but and so, I had them write a descriptive essay, a cause and effect essay. I had them doing a literary analysis of "Beer in the Snooker Club" and then ended with an argumentation essay and various other ones too. I can't remember what all of them were. Compare and contrast maybe? Some eight or nine essays. Now they do three. But we met them every single day and I think it it allowed for more reading on the part of the students. And that's partly why we went back to this Rhet 1010 Core 1010 when we redesigned the freshmen program, [01:07:56] Because they're lacking the reading skills and then so then the writing program went to a three credit, three-three credit courses that was called 101 which was analysis, 102 which was argumentation, and 201 which was research writing. And that was similar to the old 113 but again in the old 113 we saw them five days a week for an hour and a half. So when you compress it so much it's difficult. And you take the writing skills away from what they're reading they're analyzing something I think more superficially that way. Oh and also they divorced the library course from because under 112 and 113 we were teaching them citations. We would bring them to the library. 19 [01:08:59] They would get a tour of the library and but we taught them how to cite there. We taught them how to find materials and we taught them, maybe a librarian would give them that, Jayme used to give keyword search classes and things like that. And then it was all connected to the essays that they were writing. And the same with 113, with the research writing course. It was just expected of the Rhet teacher to teach you know how to do library research and how to cite your sources. And then when they went to the three credit classes. It appeared that there wasn't time to do that. So then they created the LALT zero credit course. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: And then tell me about teaching graduate students in the ELI. [01:09:59] Interviewee Carol Clark: Well I enjoyed teaching graduate students actually, they're usually very keen and very appreciative. You don't get—but they come very tired. They're coming from, they were coming from, when we were in Tahrir Square, from all over the city. And that, because I stopped teaching grads before we moved to the new campus or maybe no I would do the modules. I would I was still doing grads, but it was harder on them to come to the new campus because of the drive on top of a full day of work. So we actually started a four day a week and for longer hours rather than five days a week we would go Sunday, Monday, and then give them Tuesday off as like a homework day. A day to stay at home to do homework. And then for the intensive program we would meet Wednesday and Thursday. [01:10:56] And it was a challenge because in fewer hours per week we would have to incorporate all the skills, but it was a good challenge because you could then connect everything that you were teaching and make it work for dual purposes, like if you're teaching outlining use it for the oral presentation as well as for the essay and you kind of cross-reference everything and get them to use the vocabulary in the grammar class. Things like that. So it was a challenge but I had very good students and and they tend to be very appreciative because I think they've probably never gotten the level of feedback that we give in ELI. And I've been contacted by grad students years later who say they kept all my feedback sheets from both are all presentations and they're writing and I think that's something we give them that they can take with them into their careers as well as into their graduate studies. It's how to do a well researched oral presentation and then how to write your your basic five paragraph essay. [01:12:06] But they were good. But as I say the reading skills I think were the weakest part in the grad students and they resented having to read long long articles that many of which they found themselves. Some of my predecessors Cynthia Sheikholeslami and Jill Cargile had developed a methodology that worked really well with graduate students and that is to get them to find their own readings and lead a discussion on the readings, particularly in the reading module which is the English 110 our one hundred level course beyond the intensive program, so that they're taking a graduate course and they're taking the reading module or the writing module or the listening/speaking with it. So there is a modularized system there too. 20 [01:13:08] Interviewer Stephen Urgola: Can you give me a sketch of AUC in the late 1990s into the early 2000s? What were the big things going on, the leading characters that sort of thing. Interviewee Carol Clark: Well Tim Sullivan was the provost and he was a great provost. He was really, he knew AUC backwards and forwards. He knew people, he knew how to tap into people's potential. He certainly did that with me. In 2005 I think it was I suddenly got this directive in my, or an offer in my office in my mailbox saying how would you like to develop a core curriculum. Of course we want you on the Mellon Grant committee. And I had not taught in the core curriculum at all. [01:14:01] And I've I know from John Swanson who developed the proposal for the Mellon Grant with Tim that it was Tim that put me on that committee that got me. In the end I developed the Human Quest course that's been running for 10 years but it's something I would never have dreamed of applying for or doing. And Tim saw potential in me, and when he retired I remember a lot of students say that as well about him. I mean he was a great figure at AUC. He's one of the really memorable ones. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: While we're on the topic of the Core Curriculum could you elaborate a bit a bit on that effort to revamp the core. Interviewee Carol Clark: Well at that point they wanted us to develop engaging 100 level courses and we got our mandate from in a meeting with with David Arnold, who was president, Tim Sullivan. [01:15:07] And they told us that students were complaining. That and I had heard this from the daughter of a friend of mine too who had come to AUC and gone home crying the first day of classes not knowing where she fit in. The Gucci corner was over here, in another corner was over the veil girls were over here and she didn't know where she fit. But also they wanted some really engaging first year courses. So this was our mandate, was to to create something that would inspire the students on their first days and not send them home crying, as it were I guess Tim and David had had heard some complaints as well from parents and students. So this was our mandate. [01:15:55] And there was a group of, Ferial Ghazoul was there, Donald Cole, someone from the Economics department, I can't remember his name. Aziza Ellozy was on the committee but she had just started the Center for Learning and Teaching [CLT] a few years previous to that. That was the first time I worked with Aziza and they were offering their services and they did help me a lot in developing the Human Quest course because that was the course where I tried to design it as though I were a student. What would appeal to me. I interviewed some students. My son was a student, had been a student at AUC, he was working in advertising at the time. And so I interviewed him about what had been engaging to him to make him wake up, because he took the 112-113 in those courses started at 8:00 in the morning. And I said I 21 said to Michael what made you wake up at 8:00 in the morning and go to that class and not miss that class very much. [01:17:03] What did the teacher do? So I got ideas from students and one of the things my son told me was he held debates or he did something different every day. And I started using debates in class encouraged by that. And that's become a cornerstone of the Human Quest course. And I also thought about well if I were a 21st century student what would I expect from The American University in Cairo. So that's when I went completely WebCT and PowerPoint in my classes but I didn't use PowerPoint to put up everything in the lesson. I just used it to put up pictures, photographs of things that we were doing, things to spark conversations. But I also had the students do PowerPoint presentations of chapters of "Guns, Germs and Steel", which is a very challenging book and in their first year. [01:18:03] But if they work in pairs and presented as, and they illustrate some of the concepts in the chapters, it works very well. So that's what I did I decided to make technology part of it. Part of the course. And then try to find engaging texts that I thought 21st century students would have questions about like their identity and things like that. So I built a lot into the course that I thought would appeal to students. And I did a lot of I had CLT come in midway through and and do an analysis give me feedback and I changed a little bit of the course based on that. I did a lot of my own evaluation at the end of the course, because a student evaluation of instruction is very general. [01:18:54] I made lists of every single reading every single thing that I had used including WebCT in different parts of WebCT and had the students analyze; used it a lot, didn't use it much, didn't do it at all. To see what readings appealed to them. What technologies and I, both from the CLT and my own questionnaire, I got the feedback. They liked the WebCT they liked, I started using discussion boards, they liked that. They liked small group discussions. They liked what I put on the PowerPoint, so they kind of reinforced what I was doing there. And some of the some of the courses that were developed under that Mellon grant were very successful, but they were only taught by one person like David Blanks. David Blanks was another person on that committee. He developed a "Big History" course at the time and he got David Chris—no, what was his name. David Christian? Who had developed a Big History course at USC and written a book called "Maps of Time". [01:20:04] If I got the name wrong, I know I've got the name of the book right. And he came to AUC and talk talked about how he had developed his big history course at that time. But the problem was once David left, David Blanks left AUC. Nobody taught the course nobody else. But I developed my course with the idea of sustainability and Lammert Holdijk also developed the Who Am I Course at the same time. And so we co-taught, I piloted my course for two or three semesters and then we gave a presentation to faculty. Those of us who were developing Mellon courses. And Kathleen Saville emailed me after my presentation and said she'd be interested in developing and teaching the course with me. So she was the first adventurer. 22 [01:20:59] She's a very adventurous person anyway. And then a number of other people I had students present. I've always found, I believe that the best gauge of learning is what the students can do. Not observe, even observing teachers in the classroom or student evaluations. Don't tell the whole story. But what the students can do. So I had students present four of my, the second semester I piloted in I had four students, talk to teachers about what they had gotten out of the class and what they would tell teachers who might be interested teaching it. And I got a whole bunch of people sign up. And so other people started teaching the class. We had five sections for several years and then we used it as a prototype for the new Core 1010 Rhet 1010 and that and the Who Am I course. [01:21:58] They were popular as regular core curriculum electives in the first year with students. Because I think they appealed to what students need, which is figuring out. I mean when you think about university it's a move from older adolescence to adulthood and they're trying to find their place in the world and these were two courses that allowed them to do that and finding their new identities at AUC. In a more multicultural environment. In 2006 it was more multicultural than it is today because we still had foreign students and you know and then finding your way into adulthood and then with all of our troubled times people, I teach the book in my Human Quest course on identity. [01:22:56] And it's about the conflicts between the the Arab world and the West and sees it as an identity issue an identity crisis. And it helps to to answer some questions of the students. And it's also written by a Middle Eastern writer writing for a European audience. So it makes them identify that they identify. I try to mix male and female writers, Middle Eastern origin and Western writers so that they they get people they can identify with. And then some writers from mixed cultures like Jhumpa Lahiri who's a writer of Indian heritage writing in America and her telling her parents stories sometimes. You know what was that like to immigrate from India to the United States. [01:24:02] Because our students are on the move. They're global citizens. They have many of them have traveled to places I've traveled to. And yet they sometimes feel alienated in the West especially after 9/11. So that's also very important I think to give them a sense of exploration and looking at their own identities when they first come to AUC. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: So and Tim Sullivan got us started on this. But I want to jump back a little bit. His predecessor was Andrew Kerek as provost, and the president at that time was Donald McDonald. Can you tell me about their roles at the University in their period? Interviewee Carol Clark: Well their period was mostly when I was gone too. I was working Fulbright. Kerek was still president. 23 [01:25:00] I think Gerhart had just come when I rejoined AUC. So Donald McDonald had left. Basically what I remember about him was he was very introverted. I think it was hard for him to warm up to people. I had actually in my last year at see an '89-'90. I was, because I was part of the management team in CACE which is now The School of Continuing Education. I was, we interviewed the presidential candidates and he wouldn't look at any of us except the dean. And that was a bad indicator. He was not top of our list but apparently he made a good impression on the faculty. And so on. So I didn't know Donald McDonald very well. [01:25:59] Andrew Kerek I knew just for a year and then Tim Sullivan became. And that was while I was in the USAID project. And actually he challenged my being a foreign hire faculty. And they've, I've just come across some of the old papers. But I covered my back. I had been in administration enough to know, so I had written a letter. I had applied through the New York office and I had written a letter to Marsha somebody who was working in the New York office at the time explaining exactly my situation how I had a foreign residence in Texas and I was planning to go to that residence. But I had been working in the ELI and then the USAID program wanted me in June rather than, I had even reserved my plane ticket. [01:26:57] And I made all of this very clear in my letter so that it would never come back to haunt me and it didn't. And Kerek had to back away from it then. No leaving a paper trail is the best thing you can ever do for yourself or anybody else. Without it's bureaucratic and it's it can be tedious. But if you don't do it. You lay yourself open for problems sometimes. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: And tell me about President John Gerhart and other leading administrators at AUC? Interviewee Carol Clark: OK Gerhart, I think was very much admired by the people around him. What I remember best about him he didn't, I don't think he knew me very well. But I remember him being always, he would always be out at events like AUC plays. I used to take my students to AUC plays. [01:28:00] I would see him there. And when my older son Michael majored in theater and he was in plays I would always see him and his wife there. So I think he really took an interest in developing the culture of AUC. That's what I remember the most about him. I remember David Arnold more. I was on the Faculty's Services Committee. By the time David and Sherry came in for, and and we talked to all the presidential candidates that year and David and Sherry really won us all over. I mean he was like the opposite of the old MacDonald. He was very friendly and Sherry was amazing. Sherry was just friends with everyone. And even after they left AUC I was going to a conference in San Francisco and I asked Sherry if she'd be there and they invited me over to their home for dinner. [01:29:01] This was after the revolution of course they were dying to hear all the news of the revolution but they were just really such warm and friendly people. I thought at AUC of course, David 24 had a very unenviable job of moving us to the new campus and there was so much flak. You know when we were really unprepared and yet we did it. And afterwards when that time I visited them in San Francisco and I was getting ready to take on an associate director's position in and I asked him, David how did you manage during that time. Because he would have these open fora and he was the only president or he was the first president to do that. He would have regular open fora where people could come in and ask questions and raise objections and he would give these serendipitous awards to people. [01:30:02] I remember Jayme got an award once, Hoda Grant got an award for for great service. And he said to me I said. How did you manage to keep your cool under those very rough conditions especially when we first moved campuses. I remember there was a very confrontational forum at the very beginning where people were complaining and dirty the place was and there was no technology and it was it was really hard and he just said I never took it personally. That's how he managed. And he time after time would face all of these questions and managed to get us moved. And I was one of the people that was really looking forward to the move even though I don't like the commute. But on the old campus it was too crowded too. There weren't enough classrooms. [01:31:00] I volunteered to in our last fall semester on the old campus. We had to rent or take I think we rented a classroom space in the Cairo Capital, uh CCC, Cairo Capitol Club building in Garden City. And so I would start out at 8:30 over there and walk back to the to the old campus with my students during their long break. And you know that wasn't a good solution or situation. And we were we were entering the technological age more and more. I mean in the early 2000s and there were a few smart classrooms on the old campus and especially CLT had a really nice smart classroom with a smart board and everything. And Kathleen Saville and I cottoned on to that, and Amani Elshimi too. And we would go and reserve that classroom when we knew we had a Human Quest class at a certain time. [01:32:05] Of course the ELI had their own classrooms. We couldn't negotiate for that. But for the the Human Quest Core Curriculum course we would go and reserve that class, we would try to be very early so that we would get it but there were very limited resources like that. There was there were one or two old. I think they had been call labs that had been converted into smart classrooms and again there was a lot of jockeying within the ELI. And it was easier to get those for graduate classes. And sometimes we would just have to book them for an hour or two or not. So I was looking forward to moving to the new campus and having technology available. Like what the CLT classroom was like. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: And what was your involvement in the planning process of the new campus? And then what was your experience of the actual move like? [01:33:03] Interviewee Carol Clark: I wasn't very involved in planning. There were committees for that but they had constructed a like a model classroom on the old campus. It was on the Greek Campus and my first Human Quest course was taught there and it was all tables lines of tables and I think 25 Aziza asked me for feedback on that and I said I didn't like it. It was too much you know, rows, and it wasn't conducive to co-operative learning type things. So I remember she asked me what I thought about rolling chairs and I thought absolutely. And some professors were afraid students would roll around too much which they don't really do but it allows a lot of different configurations within the classroom. [01:33:56] So although some of the furniture broke and especially the tables, are not very stable sometimes. One of our ELI teachers Noha Khafagi had one of them fall and break her foot, fall on her foot. Very early in the days of the new campus. But in general it was just sort of anecdotal, what do you think about this? Because I happened to be scheduled into that classroom. It did have days to show and all of that but they were still looking at what kind of furniture they wanted. So I was polled about that but that was about it. And when we moved we had to take whatever office we were assigned to where there was no preferential treatment or anything. And I was assigned to a bottom floor very dark office at first and then as time went by different offices opened up and I got a better office by the end. [01:35:00] But the only planning was packing up my old office and moving it to the new office. That was a good opportunity to get rid of a lot of stuff. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: And your experience of the early days on this campus? Interviewee Carol Clark: It was very tough. There was a lot of negativity. I think the main problems were cleaning the place, keeping the place clean. You didn't know when people were going to clean your office and you had to open the the office door for them. And that was problematic. And the technology didn't know where always work at the beginning. I don't have really strong memories of that but I remembered that it was a problem. And of course the very first bus ride we didn't even know where to find the bus back to Zamalek the very first time. But they got things organized. [01:36:05] Later I remember that the science building wasn't quite open yet and they didn't have enough classrooms for the English 100 classes. I remember that. But my classes were okay. It was a matter of getting your office clean. That was a problem. But you know who really had the problem. In our department was the grad teachers. Because that first fall I was, what happened for the first few years we were on the new campus is I would teach undergrads in the fall and grads in the spring and I gradually moved towards the undergraduates because I was doing all this work in the Core Curriculum. And it didn't make sense to be teaching undergrads for core curriculum class and then grads. You know I would rather stay with the undergrads and develop my teaching more in that area. [01:37:02] But one of the graduate teachers just lasted a year or maybe two and then quit because it was so dark and lonely. I don't think there were even students living on campus that first year. And the foreign students felt really alienated too. I remember sitting next to a girl on the bus. Her name was Laura and she was from Yale and she was over for a semester or two and she 26 was upset because the foreign students felt that there was no sort of welcome for them and that the Egyptian students were all on their own and not integrating well so I made it, through my conversation with her I decided to try to talk to my own students and say would any of you be interested in, I talked to this American student she'd be interested in having a language partner. [01:38:08] I had I had worked at Syracuse University for a semester and I had, part of my job there was to to match people up with language partners. So we started the language partners program and that helped some of the international students at the time who were very numerous in 2008, integrate a little bit better and practice their Arabic and then the ELI students could practice their English. There was a problem of disparity of levels. Americans tended to have a very low level of Arabic whereas the the ELI students had a pretty high level of English, you have to have a high level to get in. But it was it was one of the problems that existed that I wouldn't have become aware of if I hadn't been riding the bus with all these international students and started talking to them. [01:39:07] So the bus ride the bus has altered life in good ways and bad ways. But one of the good ways is it puts people together on the same bus that start talking to one another and you get to know people that you might not have gotten to know and you get ideas going and interesting things happen on that bus ride. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: And any other way in which the new campus has changed AUC? Interviewee Carol Clark: Well it spread people out more. Now one of the things I was looking forward to in moving to the new campus is having my own office because we were we were in a little rabbit warren of offices. Although when I started teaching in the grad program I moved from the rabbit warren into an office of two and that had a little bit more quiet and privacy. [01:40:04] But you know when you're doing having conferences with students you don't want the whole world to be hearing and you don't want a lot of noise of a lot of conferences going on at the same time. So I was looking forward to that. But I think it's isolated people. It's we've lost certain elements of community that I think we had on the old campus because the spaces were closer together. The faculty lounge was more central and people would meet in the faculty. Now some people go but if it were more convenient I might go but to walk all the way over to another building halfway across campus you lose time going and coming. And so we don't have those central meeting. And there was a fountain area on the old campus where people would just sit and have coffee. [01:41:00] Now I think I think the workload has increased. I talked to Helen for a while at great length about this. The workload has increased over the years more service more professional development is expected. It used to be all teaching nothing else. And then gradually gradually more and more got expected. So and your your hours on campus are limited. So you try to cram more into those hours that you're here. So you can catch the bus home at a normal hour, 27 certainly one of the differences is I've noticed I'm out of the house for much longer periods. And that reflects on your ability to do the kind of grading you'd like to do even the development. [01:42:00] So I think creating a good sense of shared community has been one of the biggest challenges of the move out to the new campus. It's a beautiful campus and I enjoy it aesthetically but it's it's been harder for any administration to create a sense of community. I think we're just also spread out and certain people come in on certain days and if those are their days of teaching then that's all they're going to do because it fills up the day. I mean in the ELI we come in more days, we have four days of teaching and then often we're in on a Tuesday for meetings or something else. And that's taxing to, you think of the three-hour, almost three hour commute every day. So it's part of the reason I've I'm retired. I've got an extra year I could run on my contract. And I'm I'm retiring partly because of the commute. [01:43:04] I It's getting to me and my energy level. Even though I enjoy it when I'm out here. I have all the amenities and all of that. It's just it's wearing on the health. I think. [End of June 18, 2017 interview session] [01:43:04] [Beginning of October 11, 2017 interview session] Interviewer Stephen Urgola: This is the continuation of an oral history interview for The American University in Cairo's University Archives. The interviewee is Carol Clark and the interviewer to Stephen Urgola. We are in the Rare Books Library on the New Cairo Campus. And today's date is October 11, 2017 and would you please state your name. Interviewee Carol Clark: My name is Carol Clark. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: I'd like to ask about your role as the ELI associate director and that was 2011 to '13? [01:43:55] Interviewee Carol Clark: Yes. The the department decided to have an associate director. I think because they met they were planning to cut back on the release time of the coordinator of the intensive English program. And what was then English 100 and the graduate program they were planning to cut it back. And they I suppose thought that having an associate director would make things easier. It was also a very large department in that time. So my job was. Largely to oversee to be the liaison person with the director who was at the time usually the department chair of what was then MA TEFL program. 28 [01:44:56] And to oversee the professional development of teachers to do a lot of the work in terms of promotions and making up the committees for promotions and any other confidential committees, double increments things like that. And writing the reports, overseeing the writing of the reports. I didn't write every single one of them although that was originally in my job description. But writing 43 or 45 different reports became too cumbersome. So we divided up those responsibilities. So I worked with Amira Agameya for a year and Bob Williams for the second year. And that was the year that we split off. They became the Department of Applied Linguistics and the ALA [Academy of Liberal Arts] began to come into being as of Fall 2013. So we negotiated the budget. [01:46:02] I had to see oversee the ELI part of the budget as well. So there were those kinds of responsibilities. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: So can you tell me about the the process and the eventual separation of the English, the transition from the English Language Institute to the Department of English Language Instruction as part of the new academy of Liberal Arts. And maybe if the freshmen program is integral to this you could talk about that as well. Interviewee Carol Clark: OK well I'll leave the freshmen program aside. For right now. The two programs were really well merged in the English Language Institute. Because a large number of the graduate students became TEFL fellows and taught in the ELI. [01:47:01] And so that gave them and or they observed classes if they were taking a methodology course. So it was a really nice fit. It allowed the graduate students to have a canvas to look at as they were painting their own canvases. It allowed for practicums for for mentoring and it also gave the ELI fresh blood every so every year at least. And you know the TEFL students were up to date on the latest TEFL methodologies. And especially as technology came to the forefront they were even up until last semester. Our TEFL fellows were giving us the older teacher, all teachers in the intensive English program little presentations about the latest developments. [01:47:59] So it was it was a very nice fit. So that was one area that we had to look at and the ELI had traditional, the intensive English program and some to some extent the graduate program, had traditionally taken 11 fellows. However as the department has been shrinking and especially after this separation we've had less and less work that we could give to the fellows. So that's been a problem finding enough enough places for them. Sophie Farag started a pronunciation center and some of them have been working in that. Some of them have worked as teaching assistants in the English 100 now 0210 program. Some of them have worked in a course that a TEFL course for the workers at AUC and some of them teaching. So and some of them have taught linguistics courses or co-taught or did teaching assistant work so that was an area that we had to look at. 29 [01:49:17] Interviewer Stephen Urgola: Can you elaborate on the idea of the department shrinking? Interviewee Carol Clark: Well since the revolution especially enrollment has been shrinking because, in the Intensive English Program. Although this semester it's expanded again. So for it let's say for a couple of years after the revolution it began to shrink partly because I think for three for a no credit course to spend one or two semesters just learning English was more than many parents felt they could afford. [01:49:55] And sometimes they would have their students their children take multiple IELTS [International English Language Testing System] or TOEFL [Test of English as a Foreign Language] tests and private tutoring rather than sending them to the intensive English program. Um, 0210 didn't see such a shrinkage because at least the the students who were admitted were able to take seven credit hours of courses. Even though they didn't get any credit for three hours a day they were taking English. So over the last. I would say seven years. It has shrunk considerably. And teachers who have retired like me haven't been replaced in the last three or four years. However this fall they had more teachers many more teach many more students than they were expecting and they had to hire I think 13 teachers on one-semester contracts this fall. [01:51:06] So you know I can't say that it's totally shrinking but population and enrollment student population enrollment has become somewhat unpredictable since the revolution. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: And can you tell me what was the genesis of the idea of creating a separate Academy of Liberal Arts. Who are the major forces behind that, and then could you get into your role in the development of that unit and the separation of the department. Interviewee Carol Clark: OK I'm not totally sure who all the forces were behind it. I think Lisa Anderson had something to do with it. I had noticed in 2006 when I went to have a first year experience convention in Toronto that a number of university colleges were being created to take care of the core in the liberal arts. [01:52:11] And so when I came back to university in the fall of, I think it was 2011, John Swanson had moved over from being the core curriculum director. The first thing I heard was that Rob Switzer was going to be the core curriculum director. And then suddenly he was also going to be the dean of undergraduate studies. This was in fall 2011. So I can tell you more about the timing of it than I can about exactly how it was created. But I know from attending that first year experience conference and some AAC&U [Association of American Colleges and Universities] conferences or meetings. That probably John Swanson had a lot to do with it and maybe Lisa Anderson maybe even Ann Lesch. I think she may not have been. 30 [01:53:07] Interviewer Stephen Urgola: Bruce Ferguson, Dean of HUSS [School of Humanities and Social Sciences]? Interviewee Carol Clark: Well I know that he, he had too much to do with the ALI [Arabic Language Institute] and the ELI and the Rhet and the number of faculty that he had to vet every year. So part of it, I think he was also asked to, you know what are you going to do, about the ELI and the ALI. And so he certainly must have had some input into it. But I don't know whose exact decision it was but the impetus began in 2011. And there were still some marveling that we actually managed to pull it off by 2013. Then in 2011 also Medhat, Medhat Haroun was the provost, [01:54:02] And he had a strategic plan. And he set up a number of committees. One of those committees was the committee that I was initially asked to chair. And I was horrified and wrote back to him and said no I needed co-chair and this was for at it was originally called for the freshman year in the Core Curriculum. And they wanted a revision and a re-envisioning of what the freshman year would be all about in terms of what we offered in the Core Curriculum. And I believe I was asked to chair it because I had created a course called the Human Quest under a Mellon Grant previously. I can't remember whether we talked about that or not. And I had been active on the core Core Curriculum development core advisory committee was what it was called the previous year. [01:55:00] So I'm sure John Swanson was an advisee to Medhat Haroun and recommended me for that and that task force. It became a task force and Rob Switzer who was the new dean was on it. And so it became a place where a lot of us could talk about how we saw the liberal arts. There were professors from most mostly HUSS professors and for Rhet teachers and eventually some ELI representatives as well. And CLT representatives Aziza Ellozy and Hoda Mostafa were on it. And Hoda Mostafa was also the coordinator of the scientific thinking course, which is part of freshman year. So there was that. [01:55:58] And we had lots and lots and lots of really good discussions about how we envisioned the freshman year to be. We had a lot of discussions about the liberal arts about student learning. We also made sure to have two to three student representatives on the committee throughout so that they gave us a lot of really good feedback as we were creating a mission statement. We just started from zero and we did a mission statement. We did a vision. We did core values. And then we started actually designing what we thought would be the ideal freshman year and we had a retreat. On Saturday we all came out to campus and and discussed what we needed to discuss. And it took us two years, one year to come up with a general plan that we then presented at a retreat that Medhat Haroun held out at Porto Sokhna. [01:57:06] And then we took another year to actually plan it including the implementation because it involved the Rhet program considerably changing from three non-connected writing courses to two writing courses one of which would be connected to a freshman seminar and that became the Rhet 1010-Core 1010 tandem courses. And we did research and found out that 31 tandem courses which means two courses with the same group of students that may be taught by the same teacher or two teachers helped to create a sense of relationship among first semester students. You know they would they would learn each other's names they would they would be exploring certain topics in-depth. [01:58:02] And one of the things that we did in the process was allow student selection of topic or theme rather than just being randomly assigned to a course which had happened early. But we had to combine the analysis with the argumentative writing courses and that had some difficulty, but we managed to do it. And so we needed the fall of 2012 and particularly the spring of 2013 to get the course design in place once the provost had said go ahead continue. We needed then to get people to design the new freshman seminar courses and that Mellon Grant course the Human Quest that I had created. And at the same time Lammert Holdijk in the Rhet department created a course called Who Am I. [01:59:01] And they became the sort of prototype courses for new course designers. And Lisa Anderson had some Mellon grant money as a new precedent. And she gave it to us to to fund courses in this in the summer and Amr Shaarawi who by then was Provost also had some new initiatives funding that he gave to teachers in the spring as overloads to design new courses. So we have had enough for, I think can't remember. I think it was nine new courses in the fall of 2013, but we needed massive training of teachers. We created rubrics a lot of teachers didn't want to use rubrics. They wanted to do their own thing they'd been doing it for a long time and that was the semester that they ALA came into being. [01:59:59] And it was a big challenge for Ghada Elshimi at the time because she she also became the new department chair. George Marquis moved from being department chair to associate dean in HUSS. So she had to take on this whole new responsibility, and she hadn't been on the initial committee. So it was it was not easy. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: She was the chair of which, the Rhetoric? Interviewee Carol Clark: The Rhetoric and Composition Department. But she did an amazing job of you know hiring whatever new teachers needed to be hired for that interim period. And Lammert had done a wonderful job. It was his last semester I think he stayed on one more semester as an instructor and he helped a lot with the student enrollment projections and all of that. But so it took a lot of logistics. [02:00:59] We also know that the spring preceding the implementation, well even the fall preceding, Rob Switzer and I and a number of other people from the task force had to go to department to school deans first of all, and then to department chairs to see how viable the change in scheduling would be. And when we first went to that the chair of the senate he told us that it wouldn't work it would be impossible. But luckily Hoda Grant, who was associate dean at the time, worked very hard and getting four and five year plans in place for all majors to see how we could logistically put it into the students plans especially because in the School of Science 32 and Engineering they they have ABET [Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology] accreditation and there they have very rigorous study plans for their students. [02:01:58] So because it didn't mean adding courses it just meant reconfiguring courses, so the students would be able to take the freshman seminar and the freshman writing course together. We were able to do it and we had to go to the Curriculum Committee in the Senate. So it passed the Senate in the spring of 2013. And that's why we were able to implement it in the fall. But it met really preparing a lot of curriculum in the spring and summer of 2013. And we did, we did assessment through the CLT. We had we we polled teachers and students in the first two semesters of the implementation to try to troubleshoot the problems, even halfway through the course the first time it was taught and then many times throughout. And the new course designers created websites for new teachers so that they would have materials. [02:03:03] And Lammert and I especially made all of our materials available to teachers so that, and I think his course had nine sections and mine had seven sections they had the most sections that first semester because they had been taught so many times it was easier to do it that way. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: Could you say more about that retreat at Porto Sokhna that was part of the development of the program? Interviewee Carol Clark: Well it was very ambitious of Medhat Haroun to do that to bring the whole university together. And the purpose was to make everyone aware of what the task force groups had been doing in working on his strategic plan and what might be in the offing. He also had a very. A very positive outlook on trying to reward people for work that they did. [02:04:06] So he also gave out a lot of plaques to, commemorative plaques to people, to show his appreciation for their work. Including all the taskforce chairs and co-chairs but also he had asked all of the deans who they would want to nominate from their schools. So and because this was you know he died the following fall and he may have known he didn't have long. And he had done this kind of thing from what I understand in the School of Sciences and Engineering many times and so I think he saw this as an extension of what he had done in the past and as a way to get people together to understand and be willing to implement his strategic plan. [02:04:57] So it didn't all go smoothly, it was very hard. The check-in system, the venue was not ideal, but I think people appreciated the fact that he really, some people were cynical about it and made fun of him for it. But I saw him as a man who really wanted to do something for AUC. You know I think he sacrificed a lot in terms of his own time and his own health in order to fulfill the role of provost in a very difficult time. So I saw it as a as a positive thing. In general some people weren't very happy with some of the strategic plans either and some didn't really get implemented. But I think it was a noble undertaking. 33 [02:05:53] Interviewer Stephen Urgola: Just to jump back to his predecessor, Lisa Anderson as provost. When she became president she appointed him provost, but can you tell me about your impressions of her term as provost? Interviewee Carol Clark: Well at first I thought she was a somewhat unfriendly person and I understood from Tom Farkas that she had refused to, he had offered a contract to someone and she had said he couldn't hire that many people and he was extremely angry about that. And in fact he had found a way to get someone to move to the writing program so that he could go ahead and hire this person because he had given his word. But I think. I know that she didn't understand that part of the problem in the ELI was and has been since they decided to admit most students. We used to have a system where they would admit half the students, a little more than half the students in the fall, and another half in the spring. [02:07:03] And then I can't remember how long ago the university decided to have most of their intake in the fall, maybe because they were afraid of losing students in the spring, or maybe because it followed the usual patterns in the States. Not sure the reasons for that. But so the ELI for many years has had has kept a core of faculty and then they hire extra people on one semester contracts involved. And they move most of their students out at the end of fall semester. But for those few who have to repeat the course or go up from what was 98 to 99 what was 101 to 102. They have a few a few sections in the spring. So Lisa didn't understand that. I don't think she had been quite oriented to the ELI pattern. [02:07:58] And in the spring I was that year I was working on our accreditation and Tom Farkas. I'd worked very closely with Tom and he got sick that spring and I was asked to attend a meeting with Lisa as provost and I was pleasantly surprised at how open she was to understanding. She had Emily Golson there and she had— Interviewer Stephen Urgola: Chair of Rhet? Interviewee Carol Clark: Chair of Rhet. And me as representative of the IEP [Intensive English Program] and she and we had Elizabeth Yoder because she she taught, she was responsible for the grads. And she sort of said "educate me, tell me what the situation is." And I don't think she gave as much of a problem after that. I I found her once I got to know her. [02:08:57] I found her open to listening and understanding. Some things that she didn't. And to a certain extent she would she would reconsider her position. And one example of that is while she was still provost. This decision got made that if you that you you couldn't teach a regular overload and both. Lammert and I and and also Richard Holt had been depending on partially on ELI teachers doing overloads to teach the Who Am I Course, the Human Quest course and the seminar. What was started as the seminar, now it's called “Celebrating Ideas.” And so we were 34 kind of horrified and some teachers were even telling Richard [Hoath] I won't do it if it's if it's not an overload. [02:10:00] So, we got together Richard and Lammert and I and decided to make an argument and scheduled a meeting with Lisa. And at the meeting, what we did was we gathered the we talked to the teachers who had been teaching regularly these courses as an overload as part of the Core courses, Core seminar courses. And we asked them for their student evaluations and we were able to show that student evaluations of instruction had not suffered and that we were getting some of the strongest teachers to teach these courses. [Mobile phone rings] Sorry. And therefore [Mobile phone rings, words with caller] So we had this meeting with Lisa and she she said Okay for these courses you can do it as a regular overload. [02:11:01] As long as your regular teaching doesn't suffer she had been thinking of I think the engineering or the SSE School where a lot of teachers do regular overloads, a lot of faculty do regular overloads and it's not always to the students advantage. But for these courses she agreed to do it. So I know that she would. She would go back on a decision if if you could provide a well founded argument. I also found that she looked at people and if she thought that if she learned about you and thought you could do a good job at something then she would ask you to do it. And she did that with me. She came to a presentation I made at the the the opening of the Core Building. [02:11:57] They asked me to talk about the Human Quest course and we actually had some students come up and talk to, umm to the, Janet Mostafa. And she came up afterwards and said to me she thought the books that I had chosen for the course were good. Because we gave the books to the family that had donated the money for it. And then she started. Then I got the Excellence in Teaching Award right after that and then she started to ask me to do all sorts of, to be on all kinds of committees and things like that and she might have also been part of the suggesting people who put me on the core curriculum course. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: Can you say something about the First Year Experience program and any connection between that and the Freshman program or your involvement with FYE over the years? [02:13:02] Interviewee Carol Clark: Yeah there was a big connection and maybe I forgot to mention that we had FYE representation on freshman year task force. And in fact some of the student representatives came through FYE. But I yeah I was one of the first facilitators and later became a facilitator trainer. It started in 2006 the fall of 2006. Hoda Grant was the force driving force behind the creation of the FYE. And it was really that very first group with the best group I ever had. But we had lots of fresh ideas we had. There was a very nice facilitator training program. She contracted people from outside the university to come in and do some games and training with us. 35 [02:13:59] So people were very excited about it. Adham Ramadan was one of the first group that got trained. And it was the first, there had been people going to the First Year Experience conference for a while. And under Jan Montassir when she was still dean she was trying to get a whole course set up that would, they're doing this in a lot of universities in the States now, that help students adjust to college from high school. And they were never able to quite get a full course made. So instead instead of a one or two day orientation they extended it to four days three days. I think it started out as, and then they added a fourth day later. [02:14:57] And the idea was that students would get used to some methodologies of teaching as well as learn about campus and different organizations within the campus. And that this would help them settle in better. So I've enjoyed, I've been on the advisory committee several times. And we tried to keep it dynamic and think of different games to put in. Because students would know, I found after two or three iterations of the FYE the students knew how to solve games from the beginning because they had talked to other students or they'd done it in camps. You know these things don't stay secret and surprising for very long. So we would constantly try to change it and then they moved it. And I'm not really aware of all the the political reasons but they moved it out of Hoda Grant's office. [02:16:01] Maybe it was too much for her to manage everything but they moved it out of her office. And so I was still a facilitator trainer to some extent but the faculty got kind of sidelined and so that has changed over the years quite a bit. And their opinion some political struggles that I've heard about not seen firsthand. But now it's under the Dean of Students. I mean we didn't have a Dean of Students for a long time now we do. We hope that will continue. We'll see how it goes. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: Can you tell me about taking over the position of department chair of the Department of English Language Instruction and the transition the beginning period of the Academy of Liberal Arts? [02:17:01] Interviewee Carol Clark: Yeah and maybe I should have said a little bit about working with Bob Williams to disentangle the two departments. It was nice to work with him. He set up a set of draft protocols and I worked with him to add to them. That had to do with sharing IT support, how we would divide up the classrooms and although that wasn't all under us, but we had a number of officers up on the fourth floor how we would divide up resources. We went through the budget together and divided as equitably as we could depending on numbers of faculty that each of us was working with. We had to divide up the staff. [02:17:57] He took Maida [Torossian] who was assistant chair. And I don't think he took anyone else. We got everybody else we had to move files down from her office. We had to take some of her responsibilities and write them into the job descriptions of the staff. That we did have. So that that was a process that took about a year to divide up and the language labs. There had been 36 certain there'd been an ASHA [USAID Office of American Schools and Hospitals Abroad] grant for computer labs not language labs computer labs, and we needed to sort that out. And I think they had and they have a room up stairs that's an observation room for the methodology students so they took that. And we took the ones on the first, on the ground floor, the first floor, the labs. [02:18:57] So it was it was all in all a very cordial separation. And and then so as department chair I had the same responsibility roles and responsibilities as most department chairs. But I had to oversee coordinators who became program directors. Their position titles changed to program directors. So I had the director of the Intensive English program of the Academic English for graduate students and the English 100 which is now code number, I don't remember what it's called. Used to be called English for freshman, but it's now the English 0210. So I had those program directors and. [02:20:02] A lot of a department chair's job is just to make sure the department runs smoothly. Sign sign the vouchers do the budget. Make sure that you're planning properly and spending properly and marshaling your resources properly. And during my first, I was only department chair one year, during that year we created, we had to create a governance document for the ELI. And we were also doing one for the ALA, because it was new. So we created governance documents and a system for electing our department chair. Now you mentioned that Lisa Anderson had appointed Medhat Haroun. [02:20:49] And the ELI, we had we had become used to a more democratic system of governance so we definitely we had we had a lot of departmental meetings that year, because we were also going through a self-study for real accreditation were accredited under the commission for English Language Program. So we had to have a lot of departmental meetings, but at those departmental meetings we sorted out a new, because I knew I didn't want to continue as department chair. I'd had three years of you know two years of associate director when year department chair, and I I also knew I was going to retire, and I felt it was important to be there to mentor the new department chair. So we created a system for electing a department chair and we implemented it immediately. And then of course again a large part of the department chair's role is in overseeing the committees for promotion, for contract renewal and for double increments. [02:22:05] Interviewer Stephen Urgola: Can you tell me about the leadership of the Academy of Liberal Arts? Interviewee Carol Clark: Well Rob Switzer was dean and he asked, he appointed Ghada Elshimi as associate dean. After all I think Hoda Grant was associate dean at first for the first year or two and then Ghada Elshimi was appointed. Because Hoda Grant had been an associate director position of the core curriculum for a number of years and under Lisa Anderson one of the things she implemented was three-year terms for most administrative faculty administrative positions. With one year one renewable term. 37 [02:23:01] So Tom Farkas left his position after 25 years. Mohga Hafez left her hers after maybe 20 years. And even Lammert Holdike eventually left his associate chair position after a number of years. He held his longer I think than most people. But she established this idea of rotation rather than one person staying in an administrative job for for many many many years. And it's good in that that it allows for more people to develop their leadership capabilities. You get a really stronger faculty I think but one of the drawbacks of it of course is it destabilizes things for a while especially if you have a lot of turnover in the same year. So Hoda I think left her position after one year in ALA, [02:24:01] Maybe two I can't really remember which year. So she gave she gave that sense of continuity. I think although Rob had been Dean of Undergraduate Studies for two years at that time and and Director of the Core Curriculum the same time. That's a, that's a lot of responsibility. But Rob has been a great dean people I'm sure we'll miss him although Hoda or Ghada has taken over this year and she's well known to everybody. But he was very positive and supportive and very, very supportive of the liberal arts in particular I think. And he was a person that you could really go and talk to and who would listen. [02:25:01] And so that was the leadership. And then he created other positions like the one, the ACE [Academic Community Engagement] position that Pandeli Glavanis, community service outreach position and undergraduate studies. He got Amani Elshimi to work on that, sorry undergraduate research undergraduate research. And she's really done a lot to help fund research that our undergraduate students do. So it's grown and it's sort of the Undergraduate Studies Office and the ALA have, [pause] it's sort of amorphous. It's it's always changing always growing and I think it one of the one of the positive benefits has been, [02:26:00] Rob held a retreat the first spring, even though we were on an austerity budget. He held a retreat at one of the hotels in Six of October, to kind of try to unify the faculty. And I think it really helped too that at the time ALA—ALI was in real trouble because of the shrinking foreign student population and the rest of us got to know more about that. And it also provided more unity between Rhet and ELI, which we need to have more dialogue. So I think it's been good for instructor level faculty overall. We're not, for conference grants we're not in competition with with tenured faculty anymore or tenure track faculty. And the people who review our grants understand the population they're dealing with a lot better. So I I think it's been good overall. [02:27:08] Interviewer Stephen Urgola: One thing I want to go back to. You mentioned the TEFL fellows. What did happen when the ELI split into two unions? What happened with the TEFL fellows? Interviewee Carol Clark: Well we still have some TEFL fellows working in the intensive English program and I'm not sure if they're still working in the graduate program. They might be, but because in those last few years we had a very small student enrollment. We weren't able to 38 accommodate all of them. So there was one semester. It may have been last fall. Or last spring when we we were asked to have teaching assistants. [02:27:57] And I had even agreed last spring to have a teacher I have a fellow as a teaching assistant to observe classes and then teach part of them and then they got reassigned somewhere else or we had to add an extra section at the last minute I think. And so that didn't happen in my class. But I think there were still a number of teaching assistants and they were working as I said in the pronunciation center and some of them had even projects off campus and I can't remember very much about that. You'd have to ask Sophie, Sophie Farag. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: And when you'd mentioned the administrators who had long terms of service one of those was Mohga Hafez? Interviewee Carol Clark: Yes. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: Who is she? What was her position? Interviewee Carol Clark: She was originally she was originally an ELI teacher in the intensive English program. And then when they created, I think it was called English 111. At the time as a bridge course between the Intensive English Program and what was then the Freshman Writing Program. [02:29:05] And what happened was in the Freshman Writing Program they found that a certain percentage of their students just weren't able to do the work in the first semester. So they created this and Aleya Schleifer was the first coordinator there. And I don't know how it happened that Mohga, they took some teachers from the ELI and I guess Mohga was one of them. I was at Fulbright at the time so I can't remember all the details but at a certain point Aleya was removed from the coordinator's position and Mohga was elected. And so she was coordinator for a number of years. Now at that time coordinator's had full release time. [02:30:02] Over the last three or four years that release time has been taken away from them. So they now have a third or two thirds release time rather than full. But she was coordinator and she oversaw the teachers she oversaw the curriculum development. She helped to write a book based on freshman level writing. Textbook writing that she had collected in different units one for the fall and one for the spring. So part of what she did was was oversee the design of the book and getting copyright permissions and also she took an active role in the assessment. [02:30:56] Interviewer Stephen Urgola: I wonder if you could say something about the most recent generation of instructors in the ELI before the transition was made and then now the English language instruction 39 department. You mentioned a number of names from your earlier years at AUC, but maybe mention some of the people who played significant roles in recent years. Interviewee Carol Clark: In recent years well I would say certainly. Some of the people who played an important role were people who worked on the accreditation of our program. I was the first coordinator and Nagwa Assabghy, Mona Iskander and I were the were the three who really spearheaded it headed it and I although I was nominally the coordinator, all three of us really worked equally. I just, being the coordinator meant you took your undertook the responsibility of correspondence, frequent email correspondence with the CEA [Commission on English Language Program Accreditation]. [02:32:00] Interviewer Stephen Urgola: Sorry can I just interject by asking, was this the first accreditation of that sort for the ELI? Interviewee Carol Clark: Yeah yes it was it it came up as part of strategic planning. Mona Iskander was the one who initially suggested it I think in 2007 or 2008 2008. And then it was approved by the administration and I was asked, I had been on the subcommittee that sort of brainstormed how we were going to do it. So I was asked by Tom Farkas, Nagwa and Mona and I were asked to to coordinate it and then because they didn't want to do the correspondence, I was the nominal coordinator. Then you get we got the initial five year accreditation in 2010 in the summer of 2010 so that when I became the associate director I found out that we were going to have to come up for it again in 2015. [02:33:00] But with the self-study has to be completed before then. So then I asked Nagwa to to be the coordinator because I was involved in the Freshman Program and ALA and as department chair and she agreed to do it and so she became one of the key people. Betsy Arrigoni also she's done a lot of assessment and she really became a very good writer on that second team. Definitely Sophie Farag has been a key player in ELI in recent years as she took over as coordinator and then they changed the title to program director when Tom Farkas left in 2010. And she has done an excellent job and as part of the accreditation we had to do this. [02:33:59] She has created an ELI rec—records Google site where we go for all records including schedules including the ELI teacher's handbook which I initially wrote and every year we've revised it. She also was I think the first chair of what we call the program review and planning committee which has become our sort of governance committee. She's very meticulous and a very good record keeper. And she did a wonderful job as coordinator and program director of that. Now Mariah Fairly has taken over that responsibility and she's another really good up and coming. I think of her as up and coming but she's not anymore. But she was. She was. She started as a TEFL fellow. And in fact I was her mentor teacher when she did her practicum. [02:35:00] So I've really watched her career as it has developed and she was the study skills coordinator for a while and now she's the new program director of the ELI. And she also helped to develop a new curriculum when we became the academic bridge program. So she's she's a very hard 40 worker and very knowledge. Mariam Osman also has done a lot of work in Nile TESOL [Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages] and she was president of Nile TESOL for a while. She's been the program director of the the academic English for graduates program for the last six years. She's just cycled off of that. Rania Jabr also has been very active in Nile TESOL. [02:35:58] She and Mariah and Mariam have all been convention chairs or co-chairs. Now we've got Alex Lewko, who's another very strong teacher and now program administrator. He's taken over from Mariam. People in English 0210 that I would say have played key roles. Azza El Shebeenie of course as, when Mohga left but now Mona El-Saady is very dynamic. She and Laila Kamal and others help to create a new sort of adjunctive course for English 0210 where they adjunct to the seminar course largely. She and Laila had been teaching it and so the the idea of adjunction was that the same students would would be enrolled in the seminar course but would also be taking the O210, [02:37:03] But the O210 became focused on the materials from the seminar course. So it really helped students when they had to read a lot of books like "Lord of the Flies" to understand those books better and read them in more depth in the adjunct course. So I would say, and then Noha Hafage too has has been doing a lot, Mohga Hafez and Sanaa Makhlouf have done a lot of teaching in the Rhet department as well and so they've become a good bridge people between the departments. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: Can you tell me about Nile TESOL [Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages] and the role of AUC people in that organization and are there other organizations that AUC people are very active in? [02:37:58] Interviewee Carol Clark: OK well there used to be an Egypt TESOL but they dropped their TESOL membership and Deena Boraie. Was has been very active in TESOL and she was I think the incoming president of TESOL or at least she was on the board when Egypt TESOL decided not to renew their membership in so Deena and Magda Laurence got a group of us together. I was actually one of the founding members. I was asked by them to be one of the founding members. And Bob Williams with him was in that group also. And he became the first president. He became the chair of our of our founding members and the first president of Nile TESOL so that there would be a professional organization for teachers within Egypt that was affiliated with TESOL. So I'm trying to remember the year. [02:39:01] I can't remember. I think it was 2008 or 2009 when this happened. I think we were all still on the old campus when it started and AUC had been hosting an annual skills conference which complimented, there was an Egypt TESOL conference and an annual AUC skills conference every year. And that had been organized by CACE. Christine Zaher had started that conference back in the '90s, I think 1994. So it was kind of a logical connection then instead of being an AUC skills conference we would start an organization affiliated with TESOL but that would be open to teachers throughout Egypt. 41 [02:40:08] And that's how Nile TESOL, we didn't want to call it Egypt TESOL again, not to be confused with the previous Egypt TESOL, that we became Nile TESOL. And the annual conference became the centerpiece for it. But there is also outreach to professional organizations. There were there are professional development sessions. I want to say in sometimes in Alexandria, sometimes Mansoura or sometimes in Upper Egypt. So they try to have reach beyond Cairo. And Jonah Moos was also very active in the early years. And I remember he came to me and said they want me to to organize the conference. [02:41:04] And I don't feel I'm ready yet. And I said well beyond the conference organizing committee and so Philip Wachob, Phyllis Wachob who was a TEFL MA professor at the time was the first conference chair and then Jonah became the next one. And it's kind of rotated among a lot of the ELI teachers since then. But Kathleen Saville in the Rhet department was also very active when she was president of Nile TESOL one year. I think she didn't organize the conference but she became president. We do need to extend the membership more and try to get more teachers involved. I think. The ELI has taken a very active role in it. [02:41:57] Interviewer Stephen Urgola: And were people from, and in this recent period what are the connections between the School of Continuing Ed of personnel teaching English and those now in the ELI? Interviewee Carol Clark: There really aren't as many as there used to be. As far as I know I know that the ELI will always look to some people in the continuing ed programs. And ask for people in the fall semesters if they need extra teachers. And in fact I forgot to mention Marwa and Iman. Marwa Baza and Iman Baza they are twin sisters. And they were working in the CACE not CACE, School of Continuing Education. [02:43:00] Before they came to us, they've been with us now maybe four years, but it's funny because we had the twin sisters Mona and Hoda Iskander and now we've got another set of twins. And they're wonderful and they're very good teachers and very nice colleagues very pleasant colleagues. So that's the main link. We don't have many other links, that the the other link that used to be that is no longer is the, there was an exam that Deena Boraie when the when we had a testing unit she was the head of the testing unit and she created an exam, a writing exam. That we used to give to students. With uneven score profiles and it was designed to place students all the way from the lowest level in the Intensive English Program through the highest level in in the Rhetoric and Composition Program. [02:44:03] And she had a group of people from the Intensive English Program English 0210, 111, 100 whenever you want to call it and Rhet. And we worked on prompts. And she created a rubric and we worked on the rubric together. And they used to give that test to students with uneven score profiles on the IELTS and often students would be placed in English 100 or 42 0210 when they could function in Rhet. Or they'd be placed in the English in the Intensive English Program and they could function at the higher level. And when they were retested with this EWAT [English Writing Ability Test] that was often discovered and they were placed at the correct level. And about two years ago they stopped doing it. [02:44:57] Because of a case where a student contested the way she had been placed on it and it got long and drawn out and the university just decided it wasn't worth it. And that was that was done in the School of Continuing Education [SCE]. Now I think it's a big mistake. And in fact it could affect the ELI's accreditation. You have to have a way to see if students are misplaced and place them at the correct level English level within the first couple of weeks classes and this isn't happening anymore. It used to be a hassle for the registrars and for even the core curriculum and the Rhet department when students would be entering classes at the last minute, but I believe ethically you have to do the right thing for students. So that was one area where the ELI assessment specialists would send people for re-testing to the School of Continuing Education. [02:46:05] And ELI teachers would grade the would assess the writing. You know it was blind assessment no names or anything. So that has stopped that link. So the main links between the School Continuing Education and the ELI are just personal links that people happen to have with anyone who's working there. But the professional links certainly come through Nile TESOL because the School of Continuing Education is the seat of TESOL. They staff it. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: Thanks for today's session. Interviewee Carol Clark: OK thank you Steve. I'm sorry I couldn't stay longer. [End of October 11, 2017 interview session] [02:46:46] [Beginning of November 9, 2017 interview session] Interviewer Stephen Urgola: This is the continuation of an oral history interview for The AUC University Archives. The interviewee is Carol Clark and the interviewer Stephen Urgola. Today's date is November 9, 2017 and we're in the Rare Books Library. [02:47:05] And as we're resuming, I wonder if you can tell me about students at AUC, what are the main changes you've seen students over the years and maybe as you're covering this, talk about something about your perspective as an AUC parent. Interviewee Carol Clark: Oh OK. I think AUC students over the years certainly in the ELI, but I think throughout the university, one change I've noticed is the resistance to read to reading. It's getting harder and harder to get them to read demanding texts. When when I started out in ELI we had this 43 Books That Changed the World with some a little bit of authentic excerpts from let's say Freud or Darwin or Malthus. [02:48:02] And quite challenging syntax in the in the discussion of those thinkers. And now it's hard to get students to read just a very short brief article and they freak out if anything's four pages or more. If I give them a 14 page reading it's like the end of the world. So I think that's one thing I've noticed. Another thing I've noticed is the ubiquitous-ness of smartphones has led to lots more distraction in the classroom than what we used to have. And that makes it harder to teach quite frankly students just don't want to get away from their smartphones. They're used to communicating with other people that way. On the other hand technology has also made it easier for us to reach out to students beyond the classroom. [02:49:00] And I wouldn't s |
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