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Teaching English Literature at the University of Human Development, Slemani:
My Kurdish Undergraduates by StevenBarfield
Before coming to Kurdistan I taught for some 25 years at various British Universities –
principally the University of Westminster in central London. When my British academic friends
ask me about teaching in Iraqi Kurdistan, they have all kinds of exciting images in their heads,
often from the Western news.
I’m always sorry to disappoint, but my students aren’t – at least for the most part – heroic,
battle-hardened guerilla fighters, parking their guns at the front of the classroom; in case they
should be suddenly called to the front to save women and children from the evil machinations
of ISIL. Though quite a few certainly are Peshmerga. Nor, for that matter, are students living in
the socially repressive world we often associate with the Middle East: women are as vocal as
men and no one seems scared of government spies, rather they criticize the government all the
time, sometimes more than we do in Europe.
If anything the most obvious thing about Kurdish students is that they are remarkably generous,
good-tempered, high-spirited, and big-hearted – and therefore sometimes a bit too voluble
and easily excited – but always willing to give their opinions and never shy in class of arguing for
greater feminism, democracy, multi-culturalism and human rights, in their corner of Iraq. They
are proud of being Kurdish, of course, but in general Kurdish nationalismisn’t about intolerance
or xenophobia, funded as it is by traditional Kurdish ideas of hospitality and cosmopolitanism.
Very few countries could tolerate hosting a refugee population greater than 20% of their own
population. As it is often remarked by Westerners who work here, it is really very rare to meet a
Kurd one doesn’t like. However, their love for the West - the Kurds hero-worship Britain and
America because these are the only countries who have helped them - means that at the
beginning it took a few weeks for the class to settle down, such was their intense excitement
that someone from London was actually teaching them.
Kurdish students can be impulsive sometimes and often speak before they think - Kurdish
driving too has a deserved reputation for recklessness - which is most probably a result of the
way the dominant culture in the countries they have lived in had historically tended to
denigrate the Kurds. Queuing to discuss your returned essay with your teacher seemto be a
lost art – instead it is a bit of a good -natured scrum - and I frequently point out that I can’t
listen to four or five people asking me questions in class at the same time. Kurdish students
tend to be far better on discussing emotions, than in being objective and abstract, which makes
teaching characters in novels or drama, or lyric poetry relatively easy; but addressing questions
of form and style are correspondingly more difficult. You have to have a long term teaching
strategy of familiarizing them to this more abstract, less concrete form of attention to the
literary text and critical frameworks that we use to make sense of it.

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Students here are not particularly used to western methods of teaching, which they are
meeting more and more in the university system: such teaching and learning strategies are
about small group-work and a student- centered approach to learning. This means that when
they realize that as a teacher you want to hear their own ideas, rather than for them to simply
reproduce what they have memorized from books: they sometimes go overboard and all of
them start talking at once. The Kurdish school system tends to squash any subjectivity,
creativity and individual opinions out of the students in preference for learning facts by rote for
interminable exams: it is much like Mr. Thomas Gradgrind’s definition of a horse in Dickens’
Hard Times, which all his students must learn by heart:
‘Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and
twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but
requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.'
A very capable Kurdish student once asked me in deadly seriousness, if I would ‘take marks off
if he presented his own ideas in an essay’. So in the freedom afforded by higher education,
Kurdish students sometimes become too subjective and creative in response to the new found
self-determination, intoxicated as it were by the independence offered by the different system.
Such is their natural excitement at what they see as an exercise of their democratic rights by
speaking in class, you sometimes have to work a fair bit to get them back on task and I have had
to quiet down certain people in the classroom. Kurds seem to have a natural affinity with the
clowning tradition - perhaps as a response to their difficult history - and you have to accept that
each class will have a few clowns who need to be given some tough love for their own good.
We do have a fair amount of fun in class, as Kurdish students respond well to feeling you have
their best interests at heart, even if that means you have to be robust with them from time to
time. Natural extroverts, they do treat lessons as if they expect them to be always fun, which
has both good and bad aspects. Engaging students is a key strategy, as they aren’t that used to
listening attentively, or indeed having people listen to them. I sometimes have to be strict with
students who are being a bit disruptive, but to my Kurdish students’ credit, this isn’t something
they resent and they often will say ‘sorry, but they can’t help it’.
A natural affinity for collaboration between Kurdish students, makes group work in seminars
easy, but it can also be a problem when it leads to copying one another’s work for homework
and exams: sometimes bad students can even influence good student’s work for the worse.
This aspect of the tradition is once again rooted in the Iraqi Kurds’ tragic history, when they had
no one to rely on apart from each other and as a teacher, you need a long term strategy to
make them understand the positives and negatives of their love of collaboration and sticking
together against what may.
Given the opportunity the better Kurdish students will try to connect literary questions to
questions of Kurdistan and its future, which can make a foreign teacher’s life a fascinating one.
They are also easily moved by literature and as a deeply Romantic people, you will find that
they take to identification with characters and particularly with those who suffer in novels or

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plays, like a duck does to water. Are Catherine and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights victims of
society? This is a question that naturally appeals to students. Even Macbeth seems to elicit
some pity from Kurdish students. Tragedy is something Kurds have no difficulty in
understanding, and they also effortlessly grasp what waiting as a concept means, as in Didi’s
and Gogo’s standing around for the eternally delayed Godot in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. On
the other hand, you have to work to convince the weaker students they shouldn’t borrow
authority without thinking – another product of the Kurdish school system’s elision of students
own subjective reflections and discouraging of thinking for themselves– by cutting and pasting
from web sites. Learning to value their own thoughts and to situate these within the thoughts
of others is one of the long term strategies a teacher needs to implement.
Lastly, when I spoke to my colleagues teaching at UHD they had similar experiences to mine
and I cannot stress enough how valuable it has been to share and discuss issues with my
Kurdish, Arab and French colleagues here; which is also a sure way to improve teaching
throughout Kurdish Higher Education by promoting teacher reflection. My Kurdish students are
optimistic dreamers, somewhat like Gatsby is Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, dead set and
determined on imagining a better more inclusive Kurdistan, but they are often unsure what
exactly that dream means in practice. This is an emerging society after all, where today’s young
people are dreaming of creating a country far different from anything previous generations
might have even glimpsed. Students do need to be encouraged, however, to understand that
democracy in the classroom - like anywhere else - is about responsibilities as much as it is about
rights, and about listening politely, in equal measure to being able to speak freely. Passionate,
kind and often very funny - Kurdish students are usually smiling – their evident, unalloyed joy in
tackling tasks they previously thought impossible, offers ample reward for all the work I have
put into teaching them.
31st
March 2015