Abstract:

Any typical undergraduate higher education classroom around the globe would look the same in terms of infrastructure and ambience. But, that’s not the case in Saudi Arabia. Teaching research to 59 female undergraduate Saudi students was atypical in all forms. A mid-size private university located in the Eastern province of Saudi Arabia is the scenario for this research. Freshmen and sophomore students, ages 18 to 20 were the authors of 55 final research papers of a Writing & Research course taught in the spring of 2015. Indicating that Saudi Arabia is one of the most conservative countries among the Middle East and Gulf countries might be an understatement. A Saudi woman started being educated at the higher education level very recently. Her obedience not only to her family traditions and values but to the rigidity of the law of the country in general makes her to be perceived as a passive and inactive member of the society. However, their actions and classroom behaviors on selecting research topics that would have jeopardized the job and limited freedom of any university professor, and in which technology played a massive role in their daily lives, manifested an incredible route that could make the news globally. For example, to understand the school climate, it would be fair to say that very few of these female students have a clear reason for being educated at a higher level except that they may be potentially working at some of the government major corporations in low key positions or leading their own small businesses being helped by their parents. Regardless of their strong ties to the religion and cultural norms, the young Saudi female surprisingly disclosed unimaginable behaviors as they selected the topics for research. The preconception normally observed by the external community did not emerge in the issues to investigate. For example, early marriage, drug addiction, adoption patterns, plastic surgery, women driving in Saudi, environmental hazards, use of cell phones for male contact, cheating and plagiarism in the classrooms, women rape, domestic violence, women empowerment, replacement of note-taking by cel pictures, as well as the false medical reports for being excused academically are some of the hot topics investigated. Additional topics intended but not allowed by the instructor were homosexual encounters and religion disobedience. The research paper was progressively constructed. It started with deep brainstorming of topics, classification and organization of topics by themes, development of online measurement instruments, choice of data subjects, scrutiny of data and final discussion. For the purpose of this proposal, the roles of the undergraduate female Saudi student and the instructional exchange with the instructor as well as the process of teaching research in a restrictive social environment as well as the analysis of anecdotes occurred during the investigation, the exploration of topics and how the carefully examined results could be culturally transformative will be considered.

Keywords:

Research, teaching, undergraduate student, Saudi Arabia, higher education classroom.