Pedagogical Approach and Inspiration
My approach in the classroom, as in my research, is to begin with the “local.” I start all of my sessions, lecture and seminar alike, by asking students some version of “What do you already know?” and “What do you wish to learn?” as well as asking what they found interesting or perhaps puzzling about that day’s topic and readings. This simple routine produces a benchmark against which to calibrate the day’s teaching. I return to this benchmark at the end of the session by reviewing what we have learned, and on this basis, begin preparation for our next class. Each session thus serves as the foundation for the next, constituting an iterative process of producing and sharing knowledge.
The practice of drawing upon local knowledge affirms the dignity of students as co-learners and as a routine, it creates opportunities to unsettle the room, to disturb assumptions about concepts that students feel that they know but have never had to articulate or to explain. Lectures on nationalism, for example, might begin with a request to describe what it means to be a “real American,” as well as how that authenticity is expressed and put into practice. Conversations around performative rituals such as the singing of the national anthem before a sporting event will, in the diverse classroom, invariably reveal differences and inconsistencies, from the German student who questions the need for such open displays of patriotism, or the student from Thailand who observes that in her country the anthem is sung in movie theaters before the start of a film.
The ability to tailor instruction to students’ individual needs is a learned skill, an aptitude developed during my several years of service as a bilingual elementary school teacher in immigrant communities in Washington, DC as well as in Northern California, where, still far removed from the PhD, I had the privilege of serving as the teacher of twenty first-grade students, almost all of whom had been born in Mexico and had immigrated to the United States at an impossibly young age. Part of my task was to help my students and their parents become Americans, the next first-generation of citizens. But what kind of Americans, and which stories would I tell them, myself an immigrant and the son of immigrants from Iran?
I was fortunate to have strong mentors who patiently modeled best practices for me to use in the classroom, to not be overawed by what was invariably a dizzying array of possibilities in an American classroom, from native languages to income disparities. Above all, these veteran teachers trained me to always pay attention to the class as it actually exists, in its day-to-day moments, an insight that has proven to be remarkably useful as I’ve continued my career as an educator.
Together, we put this approach into practice in our garden project at Bancroft Elementary School in Washington, DC, what would later form the basis of the school’s partnership with the Obama White House and First Lady Michelle Obama’s vegetable garden. A large number of our parents at Bancroft Elementary had grown up in rural environments, in Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, and El Salvador. They possessed knowledge that did not neatly fit into our official curricula or state-issued textbooks, what constituted prevailing notions of “real learning.” We as teachers were able to harness their unique proficiencies, valued in their own right, to put together the garden as a vehicle for the exploration of math, of composition, and of course, science, for the students, their parents empowered to teach and learn alongside their children.
Against a context that celebrates the benchmark and the standardized test, the decision to learn by getting our hands, literally, into the dirt amounted to an act of subversion. Drawing upon representative experiences and local knowledge became, in its own way, moral action and a direct challenge to ideologies of merit and measurement. Above all, we affirmed that there is no single or definitive path for learning, much less for reaching the truth.
Teaching at Swarthmore College
Named one of “Twenty Professors that Will Change Your Life” in my second year of teaching at Swarthmore, I carved out a unique mentoring role at the College by supervising overseas research projects in authoritarian settings, including a senior thesis that drew upon six months of IRB-approved fieldwork in northern Jordan to analyze how Syrian refugees pursued strategies of survival through informal and underground means in the context of Jordan’s evolving domestic and regional politics. Another student, inspired by my seminars Revolutions and the Politics of Schooling in the Middle East and Latin America, excavated archival materials found in Havana in order to assess the ways in which the Cuban educational system undermined the authority of the postrevolutionary state. I also tailored one-on-one directed readings for students recently returned from overseas research, including a senior whose honors thesis proposed non-violent strategies for civilian self-protection during mass atrocities, one of the first academic works to do so and now the subject of a doctoral thesis as he pursues his PhD in political science at Yale.
I intend to continue teaching courses that encourage independent research as well as cross-disciplinary understanding of Iran and her neighbors, including Politics of Education in Iran, Social Theory of the Iranian Revolution(s), Nationalism, Communism, and Islamism in Iran, and the Intellectual History of Modern Iran, a comparative course focused on the negotiation and localization of modernity in Iran as well as late-developing countries such as Turkey, India, and Japan. I anticipate hosting colloquia on how to do research in authoritarian settings, as well as workshops on democracy and elections in Iran, replicating panel discussions like The Revolution Will be Telegrammed: Iran After the Elections and the End of Sanctions, a session that I organized at Swarthmore last spring and that that brought together a cross-disciplinary group of Iran specialists, including Amir Moosavi, Laura Secor, Narges Bajoghli and Reza Marashi.
My aim with these sessions is to engage explicitly with the politics of place, that is, to push the boundaries of where and how informed conversations about contemporary Iran take place. I take seriously the role of presence in scholarship as well as the conceit that intellectual labor must be made a conduit of knowledge for the public. Access becomes obligation, and as I continue to make regular research trips to Iran, I remain committed to submitting dispatches for The Guardian, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post. I am convinced that Iranian and Middle Eastern studies is already in the midst of a renewal, promoted by a rising generation of scholars drawn to the field by its interdisciplinary nature and unburdened by the political and intellectual baggage of the recent past.
My approach in the classroom, as in my research, is to begin with the “local.” I start all of my sessions, lecture and seminar alike, by asking students some version of “What do you already know?” and “What do you wish to learn?” as well as asking what they found interesting or perhaps puzzling about that day’s topic and readings. This simple routine produces a benchmark against which to calibrate the day’s teaching. I return to this benchmark at the end of the session by reviewing what we have learned, and on this basis, begin preparation for our next class. Each session thus serves as the foundation for the next, constituting an iterative process of producing and sharing knowledge.
The practice of drawing upon local knowledge affirms the dignity of students as co-learners and as a routine, it creates opportunities to unsettle the room, to disturb assumptions about concepts that students feel that they know but have never had to articulate or to explain. Lectures on nationalism, for example, might begin with a request to describe what it means to be a “real American,” as well as how that authenticity is expressed and put into practice. Conversations around performative rituals such as the singing of the national anthem before a sporting event will, in the diverse classroom, invariably reveal differences and inconsistencies, from the German student who questions the need for such open displays of patriotism, or the student from Thailand who observes that in her country the anthem is sung in movie theaters before the start of a film.
The ability to tailor instruction to students’ individual needs is a learned skill, an aptitude developed during my several years of service as a bilingual elementary school teacher in immigrant communities in Washington, DC as well as in Northern California, where, still far removed from the PhD, I had the privilege of serving as the teacher of twenty first-grade students, almost all of whom had been born in Mexico and had immigrated to the United States at an impossibly young age. Part of my task was to help my students and their parents become Americans, the next first-generation of citizens. But what kind of Americans, and which stories would I tell them, myself an immigrant and the son of immigrants from Iran?
I was fortunate to have strong mentors who patiently modeled best practices for me to use in the classroom, to not be overawed by what was invariably a dizzying array of possibilities in an American classroom, from native languages to income disparities. Above all, these veteran teachers trained me to always pay attention to the class as it actually exists, in its day-to-day moments, an insight that has proven to be remarkably useful as I’ve continued my career as an educator.
Together, we put this approach into practice in our garden project at Bancroft Elementary School in Washington, DC, what would later form the basis of the school’s partnership with the Obama White House and First Lady Michelle Obama’s vegetable garden. A large number of our parents at Bancroft Elementary had grown up in rural environments, in Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, and El Salvador. They possessed knowledge that did not neatly fit into our official curricula or state-issued textbooks, what constituted prevailing notions of “real learning.” We as teachers were able to harness their unique proficiencies, valued in their own right, to put together the garden as a vehicle for the exploration of math, of composition, and of course, science, for the students, their parents empowered to teach and learn alongside their children.
Against a context that celebrates the benchmark and the standardized test, the decision to learn by getting our hands, literally, into the dirt amounted to an act of subversion. Drawing upon representative experiences and local knowledge became, in its own way, moral action and a direct challenge to ideologies of merit and measurement. Above all, we affirmed that there is no single or definitive path for learning, much less for reaching the truth.
Teaching at Swarthmore College
Named one of “Twenty Professors that Will Change Your Life” in my second year of teaching at Swarthmore, I carved out a unique mentoring role at the College by supervising overseas research projects in authoritarian settings, including a senior thesis that drew upon six months of IRB-approved fieldwork in northern Jordan to analyze how Syrian refugees pursued strategies of survival through informal and underground means in the context of Jordan’s evolving domestic and regional politics. Another student, inspired by my seminars Revolutions and the Politics of Schooling in the Middle East and Latin America, excavated archival materials found in Havana in order to assess the ways in which the Cuban educational system undermined the authority of the postrevolutionary state. I also tailored one-on-one directed readings for students recently returned from overseas research, including a senior whose honors thesis proposed non-violent strategies for civilian self-protection during mass atrocities, one of the first academic works to do so and now the subject of a doctoral thesis as he pursues his PhD in political science at Yale.
I intend to continue teaching courses that encourage independent research as well as cross-disciplinary understanding of Iran and her neighbors, including Politics of Education in Iran, Social Theory of the Iranian Revolution(s), Nationalism, Communism, and Islamism in Iran, and the Intellectual History of Modern Iran, a comparative course focused on the negotiation and localization of modernity in Iran as well as late-developing countries such as Turkey, India, and Japan. I anticipate hosting colloquia on how to do research in authoritarian settings, as well as workshops on democracy and elections in Iran, replicating panel discussions like The Revolution Will be Telegrammed: Iran After the Elections and the End of Sanctions, a session that I organized at Swarthmore last spring and that that brought together a cross-disciplinary group of Iran specialists, including Amir Moosavi, Laura Secor, Narges Bajoghli and Reza Marashi.
My aim with these sessions is to engage explicitly with the politics of place, that is, to push the boundaries of where and how informed conversations about contemporary Iran take place. I take seriously the role of presence in scholarship as well as the conceit that intellectual labor must be made a conduit of knowledge for the public. Access becomes obligation, and as I continue to make regular research trips to Iran, I remain committed to submitting dispatches for The Guardian, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post. I am convinced that Iranian and Middle Eastern studies is already in the midst of a renewal, promoted by a rising generation of scholars drawn to the field by its interdisciplinary nature and unburdened by the political and intellectual baggage of the recent past.
