Who’s Steering: Technology or Pedagogy? Analyzing an Arabic Immersion Experience

With reflective practice as framework, this paper ponders whether the ICT tools used during an Arabic language immersion course run by the National US StarTalk program at the University of Wyoming are subservient to pedagogy or whether pedagogy has primacy over these tools. In Part One, I introduce the context for this immersion initiative. In Part Two, I examine two paradoxes: (i) the disjuncture between teaching and pedagogy, and (ii) the conflicting representations of the net-gen. In Part Three, I analyze the Arabic StarTalk curriculum to determine whether its objectives were served or enslaved by the available technologies. I conclude with a call for rethinking this binary technology/pedagogy theorization toward a position suggesting instead a rapport of interdependence, convergence and symbiosis.