Carol Clark Oral History

Carol Clark was a faculty member who taught English language and writing at The American University in Cairo from the 1970s through 2017, having received an MA in Teaching English as a Foreign Language at AUC. Clark recalls her first contact with Egypt, a visit in 1973 when she met an Egyptian man whom she later married; upon relocating to Cairo she studied in the AUC English Language Institute TEFL program as an MA Fellow; she gives a description of the ELI and TEFL program in that period. Her first teaching at AUC was with adult education students in its Division of Public Service (DPS). She recounts her departure from AUC by the 1990s, living in Kuwait and then teaching elsewhere in Egypt, and raises the issue of AUC local-hire and foreign-hire faculty status that affected her (she discusses faculty issues and relations with the administration in later periods as well). Clark rejoined AUC in 1997 in the Center for Adult and Continuing Education in its USAID-contracted English Language Testing and Training program, and reports advances made in the 1990s especially in the adoption of teaching and learning objectives and evaluation standards and the application of computer technology. Clark gives a portrait of the English Language Institute where she returned to teach in the 2000s, discussing its structure and leadership at the Director and Coordinator level. AUC’s Freshman Writing Program is described, on the basis of Clark’s periodic teaching there and its links with the ELI, whose own writing and graduate curriculum she discusses. Clark recounts her involvement in the revamping of AUC’s Core Curriculum and Freshman Year Program in the 2000s, including in the design and teaching of new courses. Facilities at the old downtown campus are compared with those at the New Cairo campus as Clark evaluates the impact of the 2008 move (and commuting) on teaching and campus community. Clark outlines the English Language Institute’s restructuring (as part of the creation of the Academy of Liberal Arts in 2013) that separated the TEFL MA program from the new Department of English Language Instruction, for which she was the first chair. She comments extensively on students over the years, touching on their abilities and learning style, foreign students, the 2012 student strike, and on her children’s experience from her vantage point as an AUC parent. Clark tells about the establishment of AUC’s day care center in the 1980s as well as her long involvement with AUC’s Faculty Services Committee, and offers her observations on how life in Cairo changed in her decades as a resident