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AUK hosted the Real English Arts for Language and Life (REALL) Language Arts Festival—a festival that showcases English skills while celebrating student talent in the performing and visual arts. The festival featured original plays, poetry, storytelling, and artwork, which were performed by AUK students as well as students from various local schools across two separate days at the university’s auditorium. 

AUK’s Intensive English Program students opened the event with a performance to the AUK community audience. The second performance was a collaboration between AUK’s Admissions Department, Intensive English Program, and Graphic Design Department who assisted with the IEP art gallery. It featured performances and audiences from the following government and private schools: American United School, Canadian Bilingual School, Danah Universal School of Kuwait, and the US State Department’s Access Jahra.

The organizer of the event, Ms. Alison Larkin Koushki, IEP Senior Instructor commented, “We recognize the important opportunity this festival provides its participants as English teaching experts advise us to involve students in projects in which they experience the language. Learning through drama and the arts projects does just that.”  

One of the student performers, Zaina Alaa from the Canadian Bilingual School, enjoyed participating, saying, “While we were performing, we were learning many things such as how to act and how to pronounce words, but at the same time we had a great time rehearsing and performing. Learning can be done in a fun way.”
   

The AUK campus community came together for a flag hoisting ceremony in honor of the start of the month of February which includes Kuwait’s national and liberation days, and to mark His Highness the Amir, Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah’s 14th anniversary as the country’s ruler.
 
The event was hosted by the Office of Student Life, Division of Student Affairs and included the recitation of the national anthem and flag-hoisting at the campus’ outdoor garden.
 

AUK welcomed the spring 2020 semester with a successful new student orientation event followed by welcome week activities for all students. 

The orientation was held at the University auditorium  where students were welcomed by AUK President Dr. Rawda Awwad and the Vice President for Student Affairs, Dr. Hanan Muzaffar who introduced the students to the dynamic environment on campus that involves both academic and co-curricular activities and events.

Commenting on the new student orientation and welcome week, Dr. Muzaffar said, “New student orientation is a vital step in setting a student on the path to holistic success. At AUK, we are committed to helping students prepare for this experience by ensuring that both our first-year students and transfer students feel welcomed into the AUK community and that they join AUK with ease. It is equally important to welcome our returning students to a new semester with a fresh and positive start, and our welcome week activities are chosen and carried out with that goal in mind. We wish all new and returning students the best of luck at AUK and a fruitful spring semester.”

Part of the new student orientation were informational sessions as well as ice-breaker activities that helped ease nerves and jumpstart friendships. Following the orientation, the students were broken up into smaller groups and taken on a campus tour led by AUK Peer Mentors who have been assigned to guide them through their first few weeks at university.  

The start of the spring semester’s welcome week saw a series of festivities such as an outdoor barbeque, sports competitions between staff & students, a cookies decoration challenge, and movie night in the recreational area, in addition to an involvement fair where students familiarized themselves with all the clubs and organizations that they could join on campus.
  

On the occasion of the 45th anniversary of the introduction of Arabic Studies as a separate program at Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, AUK Assistant Professor of Near and Middle Eastern Studies, Dr. Ahmad Meiloud was invited to deliver the keynote academic speech on “The Role of Arabic Language and Culture in the Modern World”.

The speech was delivered on the 18th of December, 2019 which was also the World Arabic Language Day, and brought together the university’s faculty, students, as well as ambassadors of the Arab states and other diplomats, representatives of the Bulgarian Ministry of Foreign Affaris, journalists, and others.

Dr. Meiloud was also interviewed and featured in the Bulgarian national television channel.
   

The American University of Kuwait’s Center for Gulf Studies (CGS) has awarded a Gulf Studies Certificate to Ms. Delaney Marshall, an AUK-Dartmouth exchange student.  The AUK-Dartmouth program (founded in 2003) established the academic student exchange program in the summer of 2019.  This is the first time a Dartmouth student has earned a Gulf Studies Certificate.  Ms. Marshall, a junior at Dartmouth, is a double-major in Middle Eastern studies and government.  The CGS director, Dr. Shareefa Al-Adwani affirmed, “The courses complemented her double-major and the exchange enriched the university experience for all.”

Dr. Al-Adwani continued, “Delaney’s contributions in our Kuwait Foreign Policy class have always been thoughtful, her approach to the material meticulous, and her overall class performance outstanding. We are all so proud of Delaney, and I look forward to the continued success of this program.”

Ms. Marshall successfully completed a minimum of 12 credits and earned the requisite cumulative GPA in Gulf Studies-related course this fall 2019 semester.  Her courses included Arabic Basic Language Skills, Arab and Islamic Art, and History and Politics of Kuwait, and Kuwait Foreign Policy.  Dr. Hesham Al-Awadi, Professor of History and International Relations and the instructor of the History and Politics of Kuwait class, reported that Ms. Marshall was “a diligent and serious student.”  

Ms. Marshall commented on her experience, “I appreciate the opportunity to be able to immerse myself in the academic aspects and cultural arenas of the Gulf.  My experience has been great and I hope to return to Kuwait one day.”

To learn more about the Gulf Studies Certificate program, visit: https://www.auk.edu.kw/cgs/certificate_gulf_studies.html
  

The American University of Kuwait (AUK) hosted Mr. Guillermo Rebollo Diez, the Deputy Chief of the Spanish Embassy in Kuwait for a lecture to the AUK community covering the DELE examination.
 
In his talk, Mr. Rebollo Diez introduced the attendees to the Spanish cultural heritage, including its widely spoken language. He introduced the students to the Diploma of Spanish as a Foreign Language (DELE), which is issued by the Spanish Instituto Cervantes on behalf of the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science, and its six levels from A1-C2 to signify proficiency level. This certification system falls within the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR)—an international standard for describing language ability.

Mr. Rebollo Diez encouraged the students to pursue this certificate due to its international and lifetime recognition of language proficiency. During his Q&A session, he encouraged the students to be brave and put their language into practice to overcome the challenges of learning a new language. 

Professor Claudia Mejia, Spanish instructor at the Department of Arabic and Foreign Languages at AUK and a certified Spanish examiner was encouraged by the attendance. She commented, “There is a growing interest in Spain and Latin America at AUK; events like this motivate students to immerse in the language and culture of Ibero-America. The next step is to organize field trips and study abroad opportunities so students can experience the real benefits of learning a language.”
  

The American University of Kuwait’s Center for Gulf Studies hosted the civil activist group Gray Area for a multi-panel discussion entitled, Half-Kuwaiti (When It Doesn’t Count).  The talk was open to the public and was attended by more than 150 members of the AUK community and guests.  

Gray Area is a local initiative aiming to raise awareness on the state of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion experienced by people born of a Kuwaiti mother and non-Kuwaiti father who are not granted the Kuwaiti citizenship. According to Gray Area, “The sporadic implementation, contradiction, and lack of clarity of the laws and legislations concerning children of Kuwaiti mothers often leaves them in a gray area when it comes to their identities. Legally, children of Kuwaiti mothers are not considered Kuwaiti. However, their social and emotional ties often tell a more complex story.”

The evening began with a one-minute video created by Gray Area that immersed the audience into the life and daily challenges of a young man born of a Kuwaiti mother and non-Kuwaiti father. The video reminded the audience that the young man’s story represented multiple lives and realities for many people in Kuwait who are in similar circumstances.  

At the end of the video, the first panel took the stage, comprised of four members of the larger Gray Area community and the event moderator, Abdullah Al-Khonaini. Throughout the first half of the event, Al-Khonaini asked the four community members about the various obstacles they face while living in Kuwait, including questions on how they identified the obstacles they face in their day-to-day lives, as well as their successes and accomplishments. The community members recalled that navigating residency presents a major issue, as children of Kuwaiti mothers are not granted permanent residency and must renew their temporary residencies every five years. The community members also touched on their lack of ability to inherit their mothers’ properties, and how this, among many other factors, has caused a general sense of insecurity about the future. They noted that current legislations are causing families to separate, leading some to resort to emigrating to other countries in order to secure a better future. Despite these issues, panelists were personally accomplished, completing higher levels of education, obtaining careers they worked hard to excel at, and have even received local, global, and regional invitations to share their skills, knowledge, and work outside of Kuwait. The panelists noted that their personal successes were a result of tenacious proactivity, and that not all members of the community were able to obtain the opportunities for higher education, employment, or travel.

The second panel was comprised of the Gray Area team, who spoke about their own experiences in establishing the group, as well as their mission to raise awareness for the rights of children of Kuwaiti mothers. The Gray Area team also presented findings from a public survey they had recently conducted on how children of Kuwaiti mothers are perceived. Among the most important findings was that over 90% of those surveyed support the idea that children of Kuwaiti mothers should be able to inherit their mothers’ properties and obtain permanent residency.

The session was then opened to the audience for questions. The Gray Area team discussed the difficulties they face in finding reliable statistics regarding their cause and reflected on the general lack of formal state-level data on this issue. Members of the audience also shared their stories with the community members and asked what the future holds for the Gray Area campaign.

CGS Director Dr. Al-Adwani stated, “It is important to the mission of the Center for Gulf Studies to ensure our local civic activist groups have a forum within which they may present their messages and engage with the community for larger discussion. The large turnout of tonight’s session indicates that our communities want to listen, want to learn more, and want to interact.”

“We believe in the power of raising awareness as the first step towards legal change. There is still so much to be done when it comes to educating ourselves and the general public about the rights of children of Kuwaiti mothers as well as understanding the implications the current laws have on our society as a whole,” said a spokesperson for Gray Area. “We want to thank our community for their support and trust over this past year. We also want to take this opportunity to remind everyone that this is a campaign for all of us—Kuwaiti, half-Kuwaiti, men, women, and everything in the gray area in between—and that social and legal change can only happen when we all come together.”

For more information on Gray Area and to learn more about their campaign, you can follow them on Instagram or Twitter @grayarea_kw