Ode to WhatsApp
My phone pings with a flurry of messages. It is approaching midnight on a Thursday, and these messages are from my writing students as they struggle to upload their first major essay assignments to Turnitin, an internet-based plagiarism detection platform. Messages will ping-pong between our WhatsApp group chat, individual student accounts and me until I go to bed at 1 am. I wake at 7 am to more messages, for my students have yet to go to bed. I remove my mouth guard and voice message my replies, determined to outrun the rolling snowball of student anxiety threatening to avalanche me. This at-all-hours accessibility mocks traditional office hours.
I teach academic writing in the Academic Preparatory Program at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani (AUIS), located in the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq. The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) was proactive in its response to COVID-19; it sealed its border with neighboring Iran and announced an end to on-campus university classes on February 25. The semester was two days old. I hadn’t had time to form bonds with my students, let alone learn their names. AUIS was the first university to go on-line in Iraq despite a country-wide lack of infrastructure (power cuts are a daily occurrence and many parts of the country have limited internet access), a non-existent culture of self-directed learning, and an absence of basic computer skills among the student population, a few of whom live in internally displaced persons (IDP) camps where living conditions are even more precarious. Add to that the odd earthquake, nightly curfews for students in the south, and Ramadan fasting, which leads students to sleep late and stay up all night. And… all the learning is happening in a second language.
What could go wrong?
In our scramble to get on-line, faculty looked to the heavy hitters in the developed world. What were Harvard and MIT and the University of Nebraska doing? We read articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education, took Zoom tutorials, and silently panicked as we translated engagement, content, teaching style, and a motivation to learn to a not-in-person delivery format. Although I appreciate the advice coming from American institutions and colleagues, higher education in the wake of COVID-19 is not a one-size-fits-all reality.
Enter WhatsApp.
At first, I was reluctant to use WhatsApp. I never give students my personal phone number, preferring to conduct communication face-to-face or via email. Cognizant of social dictates in the Middle East, I wasn’t sure how a western, female teacher calling a single, early-twenty-something male student might be perceived. I knew my academic preparatory program students would need a lot of support because the level of academic writing I teach is the level in which they learn what a thesis statement is and how to write it, what MLA citation is and how to do an in-text citation, and what an essay and its components are before they write a one. (Most high school students in the region have never written an essay in their native language, let alone in English, by the time they finish twelfth grade.) In addition, a study presented at TESOL Arabia a few years ago cited that students in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region see their academic success as dependent on their relationships with their teachers as opposed to students in the United States who see their academic success as the direct result of their own hard work. That is why I relented and ultimately joined the student WhatsApp group for most of the on-line portion of the semester.
There are some not-so-obvious advantages to using group chat as the primary feedback tool for on-line EFL education. The students are chatting with one another and with me in English throughout the day and night. If we had been in the classroom, their questions to each other would have been whispered under their breaths in Kurdish or Arabic or asked during student breaks in their native tongues. WhatsApp forces them to communicate and therefore think in English for extended periods of time. I was able to give one to one feedback for every major writing assignment through WhatsApp voice messaging, which provides them with extra listening practice. I used the recorded vocal messaging function to give line by line feedback as well as summative feedback concerning grammar, structure, citation and the quality of the arguments. The feedback was not only more detailed than it would have been if I had been writing it out, but it was more explanatory because I could lecture at greater length, giving multiple examples on the recording. I could also leave several recorded messages, resulting in a mini-tutorial session.
More important, becoming a member of a student group magicked group intimacy. Being a fly-on-the-Whatsapp-wall enabled me to judge their stress levels when the group chat dissolved into emoticons, especially a flurry of crying-with-tears faces or frogs (I have no idea why frogs.). It was the equivalent of a dorm study hall all-nighter, without the pajamas, junk food and cigarettes. In those moments, I could jump on the app and re-explain directions and key concepts or give examples for the students who couldn’t/hadn’t looked at the teaching content on our learning management system. Conversely, an absence of activity could also signal something was amiss, especially at night when they are awake and typically study. (During Ramadan, they sleep during the day because they fast. Also, the internet is more consistent at night.) Again, I would jump on the chat with an innocuous, “You’re really quiet. Everything OK?” and address student concerns in between brushing and flossing.
Video calling on WhatsApp was crucial in strengthening my relationships with my students because we hadn’t had much in-person time together. However, given the cultural dictates of the region, it has pushed both the students and me outside our comfort zones by dissolving the formality of a traditional student/teacher relationship, especially in the MENA region. When I video-called a student to teach her how to attach a word doc to an email via her computer, I saw her without her hijab, which never would have happened had we stayed in the classroom. Because I live in shared university housing and my roommate is a cancer survivor with a compromised immunity system, I work from my bedroom while my roommate works in the living room. The puppets on my bed have been visible in the corner of the video frame for most of my Zoom videos and live office hours.
My students have been virtually in my bedroom.
To be fair, I have been in their bedrooms, or in one student’s case, his mother’s bedroom, virtually, too. American higher ed institutions herald Zoom as the platform of choice for interaction, but students in the MENA region prefer WhatsApp. They know how to use it. They are relaxed on it, and most important, they interact through it. (Most of my students do not attend my live Zoom office hours.) They share jokes, memes, personal triumphs (one student shared a photo of Kulera, a type of bread, he learned to make in his training to be a baker). These insights into their personalities enable me to form bonds with them, which from their perspective, is essential to their learning.
The quality of the exchanges has become frankly personal. When I asked a non-participatory student why he wasn’t answering the live video call, he said plainly, “Miss, I don’t have any clothes on.”
“Good choice [not to answer],” I fumbled, quickly glancing down at my own sleeveless attire. This is the first semester in my almost five years of employment at AUIS that my students have seen my uncovered shoulders. On campus, my clothing is required to have sleeves.
Video calling has given me privy into aspects of my students’ lives that I would not have had otherwise. A student can write about the pain of her father leaving their family for a second wife, but my understanding of her life awakens when I see the bare walls of the cramped family room, hear her toddler brother wanting to play, say hello to her hijab-wearing, non-English speaking mother, who has insisted on meeting me, and watch the student hold her breath in anticipation of my judgment. To see the strained look on my student’s face as she measures my reaction to her mother’s religious blessings. To know, in that moment, my student has no idea of the high esteem in which I hold her.
The semester is ending. Because the students have a respite before their final tomorrow, I have not had any messages for five hours (as I am writing this, a WhatsApp alert winks from my phone). They have finished iftar, the meal to break the Ramadan fast, and are probably relaxing with family within the confines of COVID. Tonight, before I go to bed, as I have many nights this term, I will check our group WhatsApp for last minute concerns and wish them a good night.
