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[zaylahis]

One question I was asked at an interview was how to get male and female students to interact with each other? A major problem in Oman as the males sit in front and the females at the back.(According to the interviewer) Muslims in Malaysia do not have problems...so religion can't be the reason. Is it a cultural phenomena that teachers have to deal with? Would changing the seating arrangement be a good start?

[SandyMan]

Several of us teachers tried to change the seating arrangement at the beginning of the first semester last year by asking male and female students to sit to the right and the left in the classroom (instead of at the back and at the front). My experience was that many of the female students found that very difficult and after a while I got the feeling that I was forcing the girls to do something they absolutely did not want to do, with the result that they felt tense. As tension is not conducive to a good learning environment, I just dropped it and let the students sit where they wanted.

With about 12 guys and 12 girls in a class on average, I've never had problems doing pair work or group work single sex.

[zaylahis]

How about group work with boys and girls? Don't girls talk to boys at all?

[SandyMan]

To have both male and female students in the same classroom is pretty new to the students here. Just being in the same room with members of the opposite sex that are not relatives is strange for them. Here in Nizwa, I haven't heard of any teacher who has tried to mix guys and girls in groups/pairs in the classroom. Nor have I seen guys and girls talk to each other on campus that I can remember. They basically move in two separate worlds, where most classrooms have separate corridors and separate entrances for the girls (so guys and girls enter the classroom from two opposite directions).

What sometimes happens is that at the end of class, you've got a guy and a girl having a ''conversation" across the classroom. They might stand about 5 metres from each other and discuss something loudly in Arabic - but that is usually admin stuff, like the girls passing on a message from another teacher to the guys - though with the Arabic, I'm not always sure.

Also, I've had classes where suddenly all students were absent, both guys and girls, which means that they must have communicated with each other in some way (mobiles?). But more often, all the guys or all the girls are suddenly absent from a lesson, which means that they haven't told the other half of the class of their plans.

When I went to SQU for a conference last spring, I remember seeing male and female students chatting to each other and I remember thinking that was pretty unusual but maybe more common in Muscat (Nizwa is pretty conservative).

[zaylahis]

Thanks Sandyman for the informative posts

[veiledsentiments]

From my experience, it is best for the teacher to stay completely out of the process of mixing the sexes. Let the students decide. I would never have assigned mixed pair work.

At SQU in the early days, it was so obvious that both sexes were scared to death about the fact that the opposite sex was there. The first semester, many students spend half of the semester with their eyes glued to their desktop. By the second semester, most groups have worked things out and there is a great variance. I had medical English classes - in other words the best and brightest - and the girls declared that they were sitting to one side... NOT the back. So they did.

Communication between the normal front and back grouping is facilitated by the fact that there are often relatives. If a male first cousin or even better uncle is there, he will be the go-between.

In a later year when I was working with first year English majors - which is a much smaller department - of predominantly females, the second semester group solved the problem of the boys being very marginalized by declaring them to be 'brothers.' They helped to bring the shy boys into the discussions in a way that I never could have done from my position as Female Western Teacher.

If you teach in one of the smaller private colleges in Muscat, it is very different. Many, if not most, of the students are from mixed secondary schooling and thus the atmosphere is more relaxed and they will work in mixed groups, but I personally still avoided mixed pair work... though many would have done it with no problem. (but there were a few conservative students who would have been upset)

The smaller the village one is teaching in, the more this is an issue for first year students.

BTW, the 'problem' is religion. (if one considers this a problem for your teaching...) Omanis are mostly Ibadhi Muslims which is a very conservative sect although quite accepting of foreigners and their foibles. But, this sect teaches a very strict rule that unrelated people of the opposite sex are not supposed to even look at each other. When these kids from the villages reach university level with its mixed classes, it is very likely that they have never spoken or even been in the same room with an unrelated female - not their mother, sister, aunt, or cousin. It is very obviously traumatic for them the first semester.

VS

[zaylahis]

Did either of you observe if Muslim teachers had problems mixing the sexes? Or would they not even bother?

[SandyMan]

I've never heard of (or observed) any teacher, whether Muslim or non-Muslim, attempting to mix the sexes in the classroom here in Oman. Others might have.