Georgetown Faculty Reflect on Teaching in Doha, Qatar

February 15, 2011 – As students and faculty settle into their new building at the School of Foreign Service in Qatar (SFS-Q), faculty members coming back from teaching there say they feel privileged to have taught students in the Middle East.

“Without the teaching, I think I would have missed the real heart of what’s going on over there, which is providing a true Georgetown education for students who would otherwise have no access to the opportunity,” says Victoria Pedrick, an associate professor of classics and assistant dean for academic affairs at SFS-Q from 2007 to 2010.

Bringing SFS to Qatar

The Qatar campus opened in 2005 with 25 students that formed the first graduating class in 2009. Class size grew over the school’s first few years with the latest class to enter school – the Class of 2014 – having a class size of 44 students. There are now more than 160 students at SFS-Q.

“The greatest impact of this is to make a Georgetown education available to a group of students who would not otherwise have access to that education,” said James Reardon-Anderson, the school’s first dean. “These are well-qualified students, but they don’t want to go halfway around the world for their education.”

The Qatar Foundation provides financial and physical oversight of Doha’s Education City, where six American universities have schools, including Georgetown.

Interreligious Dialogue

Rev. Ryan Maher, S.J., an associate College dean, was among the first group of faculty members to teach at the school after it opened in 2005.

He stayed for two years, teaching courses in theology and education.

The experiences in the Qatari classroom gave him a new perspective in terms of interreligious dialogue.

“The reason interreligious dialogue is so important is that [religions] are not all the same,” Maher says. “And to pretend [that they are] just cheapens the commitment that people have made to their faiths.”

Exploration of Otherness

The mix of students at SFS-Q made for some interesting classroom debates, says Roger Bensky, a French professor who taught in Doha last year and plans to teach a workshop in public speaking this summer.

Bensky asked his students to analyze and explore the root of heated student discussions in order to understand other people’s viewpoints.

“The ambient culture of many of these students does not lend itself to cultivating intellectual differentiality or diversity,” says Bensky, who taught courses in public speaking and Shakespeare.

So Bensky engaged his students in a “mutual exploration of otherness” to understand and accept the origins of opposing viewpoints.

Same Standards

“[Professors and deans] had the same expectations as students on the Main Campus,” said Rohan Shanbhag (SFS’09), a member of the SFS-Q’s first graduating class. “We go through the same exact program and they emphasized that and they have to because they give us the same degree, so there cannot be a difference in standards.”

Coming from an education system where students mainly repeated what was taught, Shanbhag, now a graduate student in Georgetown’s Culture, Communications and Technology (CCT) program, found the challenge to think more deeply about topics stimulating and productive.

“The education was good enough to let me formulate my own thought,” he said. “It promoted creative thinking, it did everything what a good education should do.”