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Vol. 1 No. 2 (2021): Technology enhanced learning in the MENA region

Dialogic theorising of Emirati women’s technology enhanced learning in the United Arab Emirates

DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21428/8c225f6e.b70d4b5a
Submitted
8 August 2026
Published
15-08-2026

Abstract

This theoretical study develops a dialogic framework to review literature surrounding technology enhanced learning (TEL), in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Dialogism is associated with the works of Russian formalist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), articulating the multiplicity and intertextuality of voices, perspectives and texts within any given genre or speech act. Dialogism has been developed within the field of critical pedagogy to foster openings for learners and educators’ varying and marginalised positionalities. In this study, the dialogic framework facilitates genre analysis of ten articles, reorientating underpinning assumptions. Findings probe a literary sub-text of non-citizen UAE educators and researchers’ transnational positionalities. Simultaneously, dialogism develops reflexive theorising of Emirati women’s learners who, although the largest group of learners in UAE federal universities, are often absent from the TEL scholarship discussing their learning. Dialogic analysis of the literature reveals the overdetermination of English as a second language, compared to other languages spoken in the UAE; backgrounding of gender issues; proliferation of neoliberal epistemologies and marketized learning. The inquiry concludes that the UAE-TEL genre, in the instance of the reviewed articles, reflects and constitutes gender discrepancies and other hyper-inequalities. Conversely, dialogism facilitates a theoretical awareness of who and what is ‘written-out’ and/or ‘written-in’ and to what effect.

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