Teaching Middle East and Global Politics and Ideologies

When teaching MENA politics, I focus on cultivating students’ critical thinking, as we can easily fall into only seeing the region as authoritarian, dictatorial, and neglect utilizing a global lens, where we inquire about the ‘why’s and the ‘how’s, not just locally, but on regional and global scales. I invite students not to take any political thought, event, or process at face value and debate the power relations involved, to see the people and the nation, in tandem with the states and governments, and to remain critical about how specific sociopolitical processes are set to benefit a selected few. The key in doing so is contextualizing the course material a critical component of teaching that I learned during one of my courses.

Diversity: In Pedagogy and Assessment

I approach teaching as an inseparable part of my research. That is, I conduct research on teaching theories and student learning, have acquired certificates in teaching, and view teaching as collaborative, where the teacher can learn as much from the students as they learn from the instructor. At UCSB, I received a Certificate in College and University Teaching, for which I have completed a “Teaching Theory and Practice” course, where we explored leading theories and participated in multiple “instructional development” workshops. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I also co-created “reading pedagogy” sessions with fellow scholars of color. We got together to read and discuss inclusive pedagogical strategies, by reading works of Paolo Freire, bell hooks, and queer theory in pedagogy. These sessions taught me to be more fluid and creative when it comes to course design, assignments, and assessment.

Mentoring

I have extensive mentoring experience within and beyond the university. I have mentored undergraduate students on research methods to develop research proposals, peer-mentored fellow graduate students on sources to explore, provided feedback on their writing, and workshopped their research proposals. Outside the university, I co-founded a non-profit organization called Iranian Students of California, as a support network for graduate and undergraduates of Iranian heritage. Apart from our regular events and panels, where we hosted prominent scholars and professionals in various fields of study, we carried out peer-mentoring. As a scholar with both a social science and humanities background, I mentored non-STEM undergraduates, shared my experience about graduate school, and provided feedback on their graduate school application material.