Mary Badawi Oral History

Mary Nuala Badawi was a faculty member in the American University in Cairo’s English Language Institute from 1969 to 2003. Having trained to be a teacher in her native Ireland, she tells of coming to Egypt after 1956 to fill a teaching position at the English school in Heliopolis. There she met fellow teacher El-Said Badawi, later a leading AUC Arabic language faculty member, and she tells of going with him to England where he pursued graduate study, and where they married. She recalls their family’s life in Sudan several years later, where both she and her husband had teaching jobs. Badawi relates joining AUC’s English Language Institute as an instructor upon their return to Egypt, and describes the ELI’s leadership (directors and coordinators), facilities (noting the increasingly crowded conditions), personnel (including a shift from mainly native to non-native English speakers, and students (noting changes in their background and mindset over the years). Mary Badawi discusses teaching methodologies in the ELI, including her own adoption of a more flexible, creative “meaningful communication” orientation in place of an earlier prevailing “pattern-practice” method; other practices like computer language labs and extracurricular activities like student trips are also mentioned. She addresses the employment status of ELI instructors, noting drawbacks but also positives like job security and collegiality, and tells about efforts to equalize salaries and benefits between foreign and Egyptian faculty (led by her husband El-Said Badawi). His prominent AUC career is covered as well, including his introduction of a Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language program to parallel the ELI’s Teaching English as a Foreign Language program. Mary Badawi also offers observations on life in Egypt, including issues like government surveillance in and out of the university, street harassment of women, the 1967 and 1973 Wars, and the experience of raising children grounded in two cultures