ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a transnational historical case study that examines student writing in Arabic published between 1900 and 1906 at Syrian Protestant College (today, the American University of Beirut), located in Beirut, Lebanon. As writers and editors of their own newspapers and magazines, students at the college adopted the role of instructing their peers; they wrote about writing to make sense of its power, to facilitate dialogue and critique, to educate and advise their peers, and to negotiate educational, cultural, and linguistic borders. These student publications reveal the practical and pedagogical consequences of a transnational writing education: Students negotiate what it means to be a writer, a moral and ethical being, and someone who strives to promote individual, institutional, and cultural development. This historical, transnational, and translingual view of writing education at the turn of the 20th century allows contemporary scholars and teachers to consider the many ways in which students today might also negotiate educational, cultural, and linguistic borders. All English translations within the chapter are accompanied by the original Arabic text.
