Teaching U.S.History Abroad:A Letter from Egypt

Joseph Walwiak and Janice Lee Jayes

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On good days we are the vanguard of multiculturalism in American history. On bad days we are either masterful agents of cultural imperialism or rudderless victims of globalization in the academic job market. The ambivalence we feel when explaining our work to colleagues back in the U.S. only adds to the confusion. Graduate school brought us into the community of American historians, but a decade of experiences teaching in Latvia, Kyrgyzstan, and Egypt has altered our view of the profession and no matter what our passports or diplomas say, we are no longer “American” historians.

The irony is that we have been employed by universities abroad precisely because they expect us to teach U.S. history from the perspective of American historians, in the American classroom style. The American University in Cairo, where we currently teach, prides itself on its flexible curriculum, interactive classes, and individual attention to students, all ideals we can easily support. But beyond these mechanics, there is no disguising the non-American context of education. If you have had a classroom with a high percentage of foreign students in the U.S., or even a high number of American students with fundamentally different views of the American experience from yours, you have probably felt that pressure to reexamine your themes and time lines. That experience is a mere shadow of the transformation we have found in our thinking and teaching abroad.

Teaching abroad is entirely different from teaching at home, where most students arrive at college convinced that further study will merely flesh out their preexisting mental outline of U.S. history. Abroad few students have a formulaic vision of U.S. “evolution,” but neither is there a blank slate regarding the American experience. Our students in Egypt are inundated daily with movies, music, television shows, products and styles that, accurately or not, they associate with the American way of life. While they have escaped the “onward and upward” model of American popular history, they have not escaped American popular culture, or its chaotic appropriation of the past.

At first it was bewildering. Not only did students abroad not share in the most basic markers of American historical identity (1776, “Four score and seven years ago,” Little Rock, 1956, etc.) but they also had not automatically absorbed attitudes that placed Chuck Norris and Jack Kerouac in different genres. In the U.S., we were accustomed to think of our role as purveyors of disorientation, complicating our students’ chronologies and undermining their cultural divisions as a prelude to mental growth. It was quite another thing to be disoriented ourselves.

Luckily, disorientation served its purpose and pushed us to reinvent our vision of teaching American history. It encouraged us to begin our studies where our students overseas meet the U.S.&emdash;in the present. Working backwards from student’s questions and concerns (Why do Americans have so many movies about Vietnam? What is this fuss about gun control? Why are Americans so preoccupied with race?) has been our great classroom breakthrough. While its hard to fit these discussions into the standard U.S. History I and U.S. History II, template, retooling our classes allowed us to do the things which initially inspired us to become teachers. We can encourage students to think historically about issues, to analyze interpretations for cultural or temporal assumptions, and to examine the role that cultural memories, accurate or not, play in contemporary life.

In some ways our students in Cairo are more prepared for these tasks than our students at home. They have less invested in traditional approaches and their outsider perspective enriches discussion. They may not have resolved the “who was more important, FDR or Mickey Mouse?” debate, but they know they cannot understand the U.S. without understanding the place of each in American life. These students may have dramatically different visions of the U.S. from our own, and place greater confidence in reality TV than in our lectures, but in at least one way they are an instructor’s dream. They want a history class to help them understand their world.

The ease with which students combine antithetical approaches to American life&emdash;pop culture and political biography, diplomatic history and film studies, statistical analysis and deconstruction&emdash;has had another unexpected effect on our outlook. These students are searching for all useful approaches to decode a way of life that they cannot afford to ignore. Their anxious quest may lend a teleological bent to discussion, but it is also the most invigorating part of the experience. History in Cairo is no dead subject, reserved for reenactors and conspiracy theorists, but a critical field for social debate. The contrast between their enthusiastic and eclectic harvesting of historical approaches, and our own, fragmented, fascinating, but ultimately isolated historical field at home is hard to ignore. It has been nice to feel useful.

Teaching abroad is a constant exercise in comparative history. In Egypt, for example, history can be measured across at least four millennia; it certainly makes one wonder if our own preoccupation with decades is some sort of compensatory marketing scheme for countries with short pasts. Visions of scale are not the only difference&emdash;other cultures choose different thematic and chronological approaches, forcing us to constantly defend or depart from our own historical conventions. It would be impossible for our treatment of the American frontier experience to remain unaffected by the discussions we had with our Kyrgyz (descendants of traditional nomads) and Russian (descendants of agricultural colonists) students in the Kyrgyz Republic. In Egypt students are fascinated with the U.S. war of conquest on the Great Plains, yet have little interest in American race relations. Our Egyptian students, from a multiracial and former slaveholding society themselves, find our color line irrational, but are not particularly pleased if we point out their own stereotyping of class or religious divisions. Our students think we make a great fuss about Watergate, and ignore the more important issue of social decay. They question constantly the periodization Americans use, and impress upon us their own vision of worthy dates of human transformation. The first Gulf War is one of the few events we both highlight, but our interpretations of the significance of that war are more than hemispheres apart.

The American University in Cairo recently inaugurated a Center for American Studies and Research, not at the behest or funding of the U.S. embassy, but in response to the donation of a Saudi prince who feels knowledge of the U.S. is critical for the region’s future. Many American historians probably remember the area studies departments of their colleges screening films and hosting poets, but, due to the ubiquity of American culture, that central role in mediating the student’s experience with alternate cultures will never be ours. The need to react quickly to events and concerns around us has perhaps been our most difficult cultural adjustment, coming as we do from a professional culture that encourages illusions of control through syllabi and other classroom logistics. Tragically, our lack of control over the agenda was brought home to us when the first packed audience the Center hosted was for a much needed forum on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

This is not the professional life we expected, but we feel pretty content with our careers--on good days, anyway.

Joseph Walwik is Assistant Professor of American History at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. Janice Lee Jayes is a 2004-2005 Fulbright Scholar at Cairo University.