Dr. Rebecca McLain Hodges is global educator empowering others through world class teacher leadership. She is an educational anthropologist with experience teaching everything from kindergarten to EdD comparative education across 24 countries, a former Fulbright research fellow, and speaks French and Arabic. Supervisors: John Bowen, Keith Sawyer, Bret Gustafson, James Wertsch, Kedron Thomas, and Anne-Marie McManus
Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 2015
Cheating on exams is a rampant and highly developed practice among youth in the Arab world, often... more Cheating on exams is a rampant and highly developed practice among youth in the Arab world, often involving elaborate networks, advanced technology and adult authorities. Rather than viewing cheating as mere laziness or immorality, this article interrogates the social meanings of cheating by comparing the practices and discourses of cheating on high-stakes high school exit exams – the tawjihi in Jordan and the Baccalauréat in Morocco. Using informal networks to obtain higher grades, and thereby better futures, cheating is one way youth contest the putative meritocracy of the state to reclaim a sense of control over their lives. Ironically, cheaters develop twenty-first century skills of collaboration, networking and creativity outside the school in order to evade the nation’s formal system of educational sorting. We argue that cheating illuminates the declining effectiveness of the public school in the nation-building project and the simultaneous emergence of the outcomes-oriented ‘neoliberal student’.
Cheating on exams is a rampant and highly developed practice among youth in the Arab world, often... more Cheating on exams is a rampant and highly developed practice among youth in the Arab world, often involving elaborate networks, advanced technology and adult authorities. Rather than viewing cheating as mere laziness or immorality, this article interrogates the social meanings of cheating by comparing the practices and discourses of cheating on high-stakes high school exit exams – the tawjihi in Jordan and the Baccalauréat in Morocco. Using informal networks to obtain higher grades, and thereby better futures, cheating is one way youth contest the putative meritocracy of the state to reclaim a sense of control over their lives. Ironically, cheaters develop twenty-first century skills of collaboration, networking and creativity outside the school in order to evade the nation’s formal system of educational sorting. We argue that cheating illuminates the declining effectiveness of the public school in the nation-building project and the simultaneous emergence of the outcomes-oriented ‘neoliberal student’.
In response to rising youth unemployment and pressures for democratization, the Hashemite Kingdom... more In response to rising youth unemployment and pressures for democratization, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan’s explicitly transformational Education Reform for the Knowledge Economy (ERfKE) aims to overhaul the centralized public education system. ERfKE’s curricular goals include multilingualism, technological fluency, democratic participation, cooperation and teamwork, critical thinking, and entrepreneurship. The roll-out of this royal initiative relies on teaching educators and staff new ways of thinking about the present and potential future. Based off of twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork with public school teachers and teacher trainers in Jordan, I argue that the operationalization of education policy reforms relies on state actors to transform teacher sympathies in a way that makes state goals and visions of the future more emotionally salient and persuasive reasons for action. This process often puts teachers in the position of justifying behavior according to state goals in contradiction to traditional role expectations of religion, gender, family, and culture. In this paper, I explore the ways institutional power constructs and reconstructs the culture of teaching by bringing to bear contributions of educational anthropology to theories of authority and the state. Specifically, I interpret interactions between teacher trainers and teachers to show how state social policy “works” in lived experience. More broadly, I question how individuals raised within a culture engage in cultural transformation and the ways in which this transformation can be authoritatively engineered.
This paper presents a comparative historical look at schools in Lebanon and Syria as a space for ... more This paper presents a comparative historical look at schools in Lebanon and Syria as a space for debate and experimentation over the definition and transmission of “cultural” “ideals” in order to better understand the institutional topography and public reasoning over education and educational reform in each country today. Public schooling and state management of private schooling is on-going, dynamic experimentation to shape the political, religious, linguistic, gender, economic, and ethnic identities of the historic, current, and next generations. By comparing and contrasting two intimately-related and sometimes diametrically-opposed state cases, I attempt to complicate and contextualize our knowledge of citizenship and identity education in the Arab Near East.
Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 2015
Cheating on exams is a rampant and highly developed practice among youth in the Arab world, often... more Cheating on exams is a rampant and highly developed practice among youth in the Arab world, often involving elaborate networks, advanced technology and adult authorities. Rather than viewing cheating as mere laziness or immorality, this article interrogates the social meanings of cheating by comparing the practices and discourses of cheating on high-stakes high school exit exams – the tawjihi in Jordan and the Baccalauréat in Morocco. Using informal networks to obtain higher grades, and thereby better futures, cheating is one way youth contest the putative meritocracy of the state to reclaim a sense of control over their lives. Ironically, cheaters develop twenty-first century skills of collaboration, networking and creativity outside the school in order to evade the nation’s formal system of educational sorting. We argue that cheating illuminates the declining effectiveness of the public school in the nation-building project and the simultaneous emergence of the outcomes-oriented ‘neoliberal student’.
Cheating on exams is a rampant and highly developed practice among youth in the Arab world, often... more Cheating on exams is a rampant and highly developed practice among youth in the Arab world, often involving elaborate networks, advanced technology and adult authorities. Rather than viewing cheating as mere laziness or immorality, this article interrogates the social meanings of cheating by comparing the practices and discourses of cheating on high-stakes high school exit exams – the tawjihi in Jordan and the Baccalauréat in Morocco. Using informal networks to obtain higher grades, and thereby better futures, cheating is one way youth contest the putative meritocracy of the state to reclaim a sense of control over their lives. Ironically, cheaters develop twenty-first century skills of collaboration, networking and creativity outside the school in order to evade the nation’s formal system of educational sorting. We argue that cheating illuminates the declining effectiveness of the public school in the nation-building project and the simultaneous emergence of the outcomes-oriented ‘neoliberal student’.
In response to rising youth unemployment and pressures for democratization, the Hashemite Kingdom... more In response to rising youth unemployment and pressures for democratization, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan’s explicitly transformational Education Reform for the Knowledge Economy (ERfKE) aims to overhaul the centralized public education system. ERfKE’s curricular goals include multilingualism, technological fluency, democratic participation, cooperation and teamwork, critical thinking, and entrepreneurship. The roll-out of this royal initiative relies on teaching educators and staff new ways of thinking about the present and potential future. Based off of twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork with public school teachers and teacher trainers in Jordan, I argue that the operationalization of education policy reforms relies on state actors to transform teacher sympathies in a way that makes state goals and visions of the future more emotionally salient and persuasive reasons for action. This process often puts teachers in the position of justifying behavior according to state goals in contradiction to traditional role expectations of religion, gender, family, and culture. In this paper, I explore the ways institutional power constructs and reconstructs the culture of teaching by bringing to bear contributions of educational anthropology to theories of authority and the state. Specifically, I interpret interactions between teacher trainers and teachers to show how state social policy “works” in lived experience. More broadly, I question how individuals raised within a culture engage in cultural transformation and the ways in which this transformation can be authoritatively engineered.
This paper presents a comparative historical look at schools in Lebanon and Syria as a space for ... more This paper presents a comparative historical look at schools in Lebanon and Syria as a space for debate and experimentation over the definition and transmission of “cultural” “ideals” in order to better understand the institutional topography and public reasoning over education and educational reform in each country today. Public schooling and state management of private schooling is on-going, dynamic experimentation to shape the political, religious, linguistic, gender, economic, and ethnic identities of the historic, current, and next generations. By comparing and contrasting two intimately-related and sometimes diametrically-opposed state cases, I attempt to complicate and contextualize our knowledge of citizenship and identity education in the Arab Near East.
Uploads
Teaching Documents by Rebecca Hodges
Papers by Rebecca Hodges