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Oman to Fayetteville and Back

A member of the royal family in Jordan donned cap and gown May 13 in Fayetteville to take home a doctoral degree from the University of Arkansas.

Princess — now Dr. — Areej Omar Zawawi walked in the all-University commencement that day, picking up an advanced degree from the College of Education and Health Professions. Zawawi started a school in her home country of Jordan one year ago.

Zawawi came to the Fayetteville campus in 1995 as a teaching assistant in the King Fahd Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies. She audited a course and became interested in curriculum design and instruction, eventually enrolling in the College of Education and Health Professions under the guidance of Dr. Jerry Ford, former director of graduate programs in the college. She spent several years on campus completing coursework for her doctorate before returning home to Oman, where she met and then married Prince Ghazi Bin Mohammed of Jordan. They have three small children, two of whom attend the school their mother created.

The prince is the personal envoy and special adviser to his first cousin, King Abdullah II bin Al Hussein.

Zawawi's doctorate is in curriculum and instruction, and her recently completed dissertation examined whether the standard social studies curriculum in Jordan could be flexible and challenging enough to be used in a curriculum for gifted and talented students. The school she runs puts special emphasis on language — Zawawi's bachelor's and master's degrees are in linguistics from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. — and she describes it as a model school based on American curriculum, specifically differentiated learning.

She is applying the philosophy she learned in the curriculum and instruction department, Zawawi explained, in which children are considered separate learning entities, meaning their instruction is differentiated depending on their needs. They use workbooks geared toward their aptitudes such as whether they learn better when reading than using numbers or whether they are skilled in analytical thinking.

The school has 78 children from 4-year-olds to fourth-graders. Zawawi is renting space for the school now, but she plans to build eventually with one grade to be added each year. The children work in small groups, learning in English and Arabic. Students also take Spanish and French and can take Chinese as an elective. They study a different country each week, learning about its history and its animals, tasting its food and performing a skit about the country.

During the study of England, second-graders put on a skit about King Arthur and the Round Table, first-graders performed one about Florence Nightingale and the Crimean War and kindergarteners acted out "Little Miss Muffet," learning that the children's nursery rhyme was written by an English scientist studying insects.

Zawawi's school also incorporates integrated learning, encouraging students to make connections across curricula. Zawawi explained that, if botany is the topic being studied in science class, math problems focus on counting seeds and calculating growing times, and art focuses on impressionists' paintings of flora.

As she talked with enthusiasm about these philosophies of learning, Zawawi also described how the people she met in Fayetteville set the university apart for her.

"These were the nicest people I ever met," she said of the curriculum and instruction faculty. "They truly are brilliant. Their hearts are in what they are doing."

One professor took her to a weekly Kiwanis meeting; another introduced her to the campus Phi Delta Kappa organization, an international association for professional educators. She was reluctant to take a statistics course but found she enjoyed the class taught in the college. She took part in model Arab League exercises for high school students from Arkansas and surrounding states, and she enjoyed Razorback sports.

"The professors here made me a part of their family. The people of the area made me feel welcome.

"People say Arkansas is not cosmopolitan. On the contrary, it is cosmopolitan. I have met people from all over the world here. It was truly a pleasure to get to know them and learn from them.

"I believe we're a global village and it is so important for us to get in touch with each other. Rather than sticking with people from our own cultures, we should take advantage of knowing people of other cultures. That's one of the things I recognized here."

Contact:

Heidi Stambuck, director of communications
College of Education and Health Professions
(479) 575-3138, stambuck@uark.edu

Page last updated: 7/6/2006 15:03

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