Passion and Politics: Teaching and Learning in Tirana (and Beyond)

It has been a very busy few weeks. I have attended four more conferences (although two were one day meetings here in Tirana): one at the law school on Electoral Politics; one at the Sky Tower Hotel on higher education here in Albania that was organized by former Albanian Fulbright scholar to the U.S.; another in Sofia, Bulgaria (taking two 12 hour bus rides to get there and back) that was sponsored by the Balkan Sociological Forum; and the last an interdisciplinary conference held in Vlora, Albania and sponsored by the Albanian Sociological Institute and various universities. All were interesting and informative in their own ways.

And I turned 60. In Sofia!

In the next post I will reflect more on the conferences and the general principle of a public good or a common good. This concept of a public good or a common good seems to run through most of the conversations I have, and I hope I can articulate my understanding of what it is, or isn’t, or could be, here in Albania.

But first I wanted to reflect on my weekly teaching routine.

In case you aren’t interested in my weekly routine, here are a few pictures from Sofia and Vlora. At the end of the post are some pictures that give some sense of the festivities that took place in Vlora and Tirana for the 100^th anniversary of Albanian independence. I think they are a good place to start in regard to understanding the possibility of a vibrant public life here in Albania.

And, if you get a chance, come back in a couple of weeks or so for the dish on the common good J 

This is the hall at the University of Sofia where the opening session of the
Balkan Sociological Forum conference was held. Beautiful but freezing!

In the foyer outside the room where opening sessions were held.

In the center of Sofia. Taking a break from the conference.
That is our "guard dog" on the left. He followed us all around the city and protected us from the other dogs.

For my birthday, some colleagues and I went to a traditional Bulgarian restaurant.
They surprised me with a lovely wooden plate.

We stopped in Kosovo for dinner on the way back from Bulgaria.
We are getting ready to do a circle dance.

My colleagues said this would make a lovely hair commercial.
All I see is someone who has to watch her feet to do the dance!

View from the balcony of the hotel in Vlora.

Sunset in Vlora. I took this picture right across from the hotel where we stayed.

MY WEEKLY WORK ROUTINE.

My weekly work routine up until last week consisted of co-teaching a senior level course in Public Sociology and sitting in on four ESL classes. The Public Sociology class meets once a week for four hours and the ESL class met four times a week (including Saturday afternoons) for two hours. The ESL class ended last week, and most of the students in it will take a qualifying exam next week to see if they can move from their current “Upper Intermediate” status as English speakers and writers on to an “Advanced” class.

I have already written fairly extensively on the ESL class so here I will elaborate a bit on the Public Sociology class and a “guest lecture” I did for a Political Systems class.

The Public Sociology Class. You may be wondering, “What the heck is Public Sociology and why are YOU (a communication scholar) teaching it?” Well I was wondering that myself until I researched public sociology a bit.

Basically public sociology is a combination of critical cultural theory and communication activism. At least that’s how I see it. In 2004, Michael Burawoy, then President of the American Sociological Association, made a keynote speech at the ASA annual conference advocating for more emphasis on investigating quotidian dilemmas in people’s lives rather than engaging in experimental research or research based on aggregate data gathered from sources such as the GSS.

Here’s a quote from Burawoy:

“. . . There is no shortage of publics if we but care to seek them out. But we do have a lot to learn about engaging them. . . . We should not think of publics as fixed but in flux, and we can participate in their creation as well as their transformation. Indeed, part of our business as sociologists is to define human categories—people with AIDS, women with breast cancer, women, gays—and if we do so with their collaboration, we create publics. ”

Hmmm. Sounds very much like publics theory to me, although my own training did not emphasize so much the “creation” of publics by researchers as much as the understanding of publics through analysis of their discourse.

Anyway, no matter. I have built my part of the course around what I already know and teach about publics and public problems.

I have given two “public lectures” (advertised on my host university’s website and attended by more than just the students in the class): One on the connection between the assumptions of public sociology and the principles of coordinated management of meaning, a communication theory, and another on the role of universities in developing citizens.

In the regular class, I have focused on publics theory and communicative action using the work of John Dewey, Jurgen Habermas, Joseph Gusfield, Gerard Hauser, and Barnett Pearce.

Whether teaching to a small group or a larger group, I have tried as best as I could to make the presentations interactive (more on that later).

As to the “small group” (or regular class), we have six students enrolled, but generally no more than three attend. I have been told this is fairly typical for private universities here; however, the three that do attend are fairly attentive and engaged in the class.

I am co-teaching with a woman who is a native Albanian, but got her PhD in Sociology from Michigan State. She lived in the U.S. for sixteen years and speaks fluent English. Together we designed the course to include the information I’ve already mentioned plus three broad case studies/examples of scholars engaging in public sociology work. We have decided to use Barbara Ehrenriech’s Nickel and Dimed as one case study and Dwight Conquergood’s work on gangs in Chicago as another. We haven’t decided on the third, if you have any ideas let me know J

For what I consider the major assignment in the course, we have asked the students to write an analysis paper that will require them to do some fieldwork. We adapted the assignment from one I used in a course I taught on the material and social construction of poverty a few semesters ago. Basically, the assignment asks students to work with an organization that addresses a public problem and analyze the effectiveness of the organization’s methods.

The rest of their grade will come from a final exam. Apparently this is generally the way students are assessed here. One exam at the end of the course. Whew! I doubt I would have made it through my undergraduate degree much less my masters or doctorate if everything rode on one exam for each class!

So that’s the class I am actually “teaching.”

On Thanksgiving Day (yes, of course, Thanksgiving is not a holiday here J), I did a guest lecture in a Political Systems class. It also is a senior level class. As I recall, there were seven students in the class: six women and one man. My lecture was on the stages of Presidential campaigns in the U.S. and the communicative functions of each stage.

I used video clips for the presentation and they proved to be the most interesting part of the presentation for the students.

Here are a few reflections on these classes:

Language. The most fundamental challenge in the classroom for me is my lack of Albanian language skills. My interactions with students lead me to believe most speak at perhaps an “upper intermediate” level or maybe just a tad lower (“intermediate”) and my Albanian language skills are at best “beginner” level. So when I teach, the lesson consists of me talking in English for a while and someone else translating what I say into Albanian for a while. If I ask a question of the students, it takes four steps before I understand the answer.

Needless to say, the teaching process is slow this way and I can expect to cover about half the material I generally cover in the time frame. The glacial speed of the progression of class is exacerbated by the lack of textbooks, my second major challenge.

Textbooks. While efforts are being made to translate basic texts, the number of textbooks available in Albanian is very limited. This might not be such a huge problem if there were an abundance of original Albanian texts – works by Albanians in the fields of political science, sociology, psychology, discourse. But, sadly, this is not the case. In fact, during the communist era many texts were banned or destroyed. Here are two stories that poignantly illustrate the significant impact of this censorship.

By far the most interesting presentation I saw at the law school conference on Electoral politics was on the “lost texts” that contained historical accounts of the electoral system in Albania from 1912, the year Albania gained Independence from the Ottoman Empire, to 1939, the year Albania was invaded by Italy, setting up the rise to power of communist leader Enver Hoxha, who ruled Albania with an iron fist until his death in 1985.

The presentation was basically an account of the laws that governed who had the right to vote, how people were protected under the law in regard to the right to assemble and to express their opinions about public matters, and what were the actual voting procedures.

As I listened to the speaker, I was struck by how similar this account was to the one Michael Schudson describes in The Good Citizen concerning the U.S. system. But what was markedly different was that the process of standardizing voting procedures, ballots, etc. was just getting started when POOF! It was stopped dead in its tracks.

Moreover, most of the books that contained accounts of the electoral process were destroyed once Hoxha came to power. Essentially, Hoxha locked down Albania for about fifty years. No one got in, no one got out. Information was tightly controlled. Information was destroyed. Albania existed in its own bubble cut off from the world around it.

If it hadn’t been for the few brave souls who were willing to hide some copies of these accounts of the budding Albanian electoral system of the early 20^th century, part of Albanian could have been lost forever.

As it is, few people are aware of these “lost” texts and even fewer can access them.

This presentation was my first concrete introduction to how valuable and rare historic information is here. It also in hindsight conditioned me to the presentations that followed for the rest of the day, although at the time I was not aware of this conditioning.

To be honest, at first, I was a bit horrified by the rest of the presentations I sat through that day. My first reaction was, “Uh, I could have read this on Wikipedia!” But that initial snarky criticism was much too harsh.

A few days after the conference, I had dinner with an American legal scholar who had been a keynote speaker at the conference. I had started to voice my disappointment with the “quality” of the presentations when she said something that gave me pause. She declared that the conference was one of the best she had attended in a post-communist country!

Her reasoning was that most of the presentations were fairly objective, well-translated accounts of electoral systems in other countries or decent interpretations of current international laws related to electoral politics.

As I thought through her evaluation of the conference, I realize how right she was. While the information present seemed very rudimentary to me, it WAS at least information, not widely outrageous opinion or fabrications.

And then I started thinking about how the organizers had been so careful to say the conference was “scientific” – that term puzzled me at first. I was expecting presentations based on data-driven research, not direct translations of the work of researchers and theorists such as Lester Milbrath and Robert Putnam, not accounts of the electoral systems in the U.S. and U.K. that could be surely found in any encyclopedia.

But then I realized that WAS the “scientific” part. “Scientific” to mean perhaps “vetted” or “legitimate” or maybe even “able to advance knowledge in Albania.”

One more revelation I had based on attending this conference was that no clear standards for what constitutes “original research” exist or can exist if an academic community is still struggling simply to have knowledge, not necessarily to produce it. And I can see now how translating the work of others into Albanian can count as “original research.” Of course, I still draw the line at simply copying something and claiming it as one’s own – that’s plagiarism no matter what, isn’t it?

The other story related to the lack of textbooks has to do with the discipline of sociology. During the communist era, sociology was declared a “militant science” and, basically “outlawed.” Those who taught what was akin to sociology could only use the works of four authors: Marx (and I was told one couldn’t actually teach Marx but rather a version of “Marxism” approved by Hoxha), Engels, Lenin, and Stalin!

Oh my! Sociology without Weber! Sociology without Durkheim! Sociology without Mead! In other words, no sociology at all.

Apparently the same was true in regard to other disciplines, in particular philosophy, but the philosophy professor I know does not speak very good English and I haven’t had a chance to sit down with her with a translator yet.

Anyway, these stories give some insights into why there is a dearth of translated texts or original texts to use in courses. Hearing them also gave me a new appreciation for how easy it is for me to have a wealth of information delivered to my laptop with a few clicks of the mouse.

Teaching Style. Students here are apparently more used to a lecture style of teaching than an interactive style. One teacher I talked with said this is a holdover from the communist era, when critical thinking and questioning were not encouraged in the classroom. Students were expected to sit and listen and soak in the information (banking model of pedagogy). She herself experienced this in her early education: children are supposed to sit, listen, and NOT ASK QUESTIONS or have ORIGINAL IDEAS. The best answers were those memorized from the teachers’ lectures or the texts provided.

This teacher also suggested that many teachers in the public schools still use this method, so the move to more innovative ways of teaching and developing of critical thinking skills has been slow. In fact, this teacher indicated she had moved her own child from the public school system to the private school system mainly because of the lack of innovation and critical thinking pedagogy in the public schools. Sound familiar?

This may explain why when I have asked questions in class, they are first met with a prolonged silence. I have tried following up my question-asking with, “There is no right or wrong answer. I want to know what you think,” and that has worked to some extent. But still when I hear their (translated) answers I get the sense that they are holding something back – not quite willing to venture an original idea.

This is fascinating to me in light of the state of public discourse here. Or it may explain the state of public discourse here. From what I have been told, public discourse here is abysmal. Debates consist of politicians and political leaders making (sometimes outrageous) accusations against their opponents and calling each other names. No cases are made to support any kind of policy claims, in fact, from what people have told me there is no talk of policy whatsoever. It is mainly just posturing. (In all honesty I don’t know if these interpretations are accurate, as I cannot understand what is being said. I will say, though, that the style, which I can observe, seems to be more aggressively argumentative than constructively argumentative.)

Are the politicians and political leaders as afraid to voice original ideas as the students in my classes? Has their education failed them? If the public discourse is as impoverished as I have been led to believe, what are the chances for democracy to thrive here?

Well, these are questions that keep popping up as I make my way here. I don’t have the answers but I can make more observations.

I will make one such observation before I end this post. It was something that I learned when I did the guest lecture in the political systems class.

As I mentioned earlier, the lecture I did in that class was on the communicative functions of the stages of U.S. presidential campaigns (Trent & Friedenberg). When I got to the last stage, the election stage, I focused on how one of the communicative functions of that stage was to legitimate the process. I offered as an example of this legitimating function, videos of Mitt Romney and John McCain’s concession speeches, explaining that one way the system is legitimated is by the person who loses graciously conceding to the winner.

The basic message of the concession speech is "My opponent won fair and square, the system works, let's get along (at least for awhile) because in the end we are all Americans."

And I further explained that the loser always concedes. This is a ritual that reassures the voting public that the system is legitimate.

The students found these videos and the concept of a concession speech most interesting. One student even commented that such a speech would never happen in Albania. The party that lost would accuse the party that one of stealing the election, but would not concede.

I wondered if this was really true, so I asked the professor in the class if she thought this was true.

“Oh, yes!” she replied. “But you have to remember they are speaking for their party more than speaking for themselves.”

Speaking for their party. What does this mean in regard to a common good? A public good? Albanian identity? Hmmmm.

More on this next time.

Naten e mire! (Good night!)

Along Rruga Ismail Qemali in Downtown Vlora

In Skanderbeg Square during Independence Day Celebrations. The caps the boys are wearing are called Qeleshes. Notice that they are shaped differently. The shapes indicate what region the person is from. Most of these boys are from central Albania, as the tops of their qeleshes are flat. The boy with the qeleshe with the rounded top is from another region, maybe Elbasan.

Crowd in front of the National Museum during Independence Day celebrations. The ghost-like things in the background are statues of famous Albanians that were revealed later in the ceremonies.