ABSTRACT
This chapter problematizes the propagation of technocratic discourse in higher education in the Arab states through Global North educational institutions operating as branch or satellite campuses. It analyzes the language of the competency-based, technical and vocational education and training (TVET) curriculum, adopted from or influenced heavily by the Global North, through a critical sociolinguistic lens to confront its perpetuation of a mechanistic, technocratic, human-capital ideology which maintains social control and power inequity within a region fraught by decade-long uprisings and civil war. This chapter illustrates how a TVET curriculum parachuted into the Middle East from the North, where political and economic freedoms have defined its development and stability, noticeably overlooks the sociopolitical agency that can be activated in vocational education learners. It contends that a critical sociolinguistic examination by educators and policymakers can reveal hegemonies perpetuated in technical education curricula and argues for the necessity for critical pedagogical approaches that can bring a transformative, emancipatory vocational education to life for disempowered Arabs.
