Teaching Statement
My goal in teaching is to enable students to become more critical and skillful users and producers of culturally valid messages, especially about Islam and the Islamic Middle East. My classes are discussion heavy and exams are open-book and take-home. In general, I prefer the writing of short and longer papers to exams. Although, I don’t hold back on details in my lectures, my goal is to leave them with impressions that surround three running themes in each course and in doing so helping them develop a mental map of Islam and the Middle East for future thought, discussion and possible research about the topic.
Goals in Teaching about Islam: Not an Apologist for Either Side
Although, I want to give the student the broadest range of information about the religions, cultures, and peoples of the Middle East, especially the Islamic contingent, I want to do so without being an apologist. When I speak of the Qur’an, I acknowledge that the Qur’an contains verses that we today, with our humanist sensibilities, will consider less than acceptable. When speaking of racism and narrow-minded cultural positions, I will not only point out that they exist in the Islamic Middle East but that they are rarely spoken of or engaged with. But I will also speak about the democratic movements in the Islamic Middle East, fueled not only by secularists and/or those who were moved by Western enlightenment ideals but also and perhaps most successfully by clerics and believers who have been and continue to be moved by egalitarian and democratic ideals they glean from the Islamic tradition itself. I speak critically of the Islamic Middle East, but against a background of critical study of Western political agendas and policies.
Teaching Methodology: Lectures Moved Along Through Questions
My teaching method is a combination of lecturing, interactive discussion and multimedia presentations. I begin the class by providing a general framework for the discussion, pointing out why the topic at hand matters in the backdrop of the greater picture of the study of Islam, giving the students the necessary framing needed to build the bigger picture I want the develop by the end of the course. I then pose a preliminary (sometimes controversial) question that is meant to create a backbone for the lecture and also transform the tension into a process of discovery. All along the lecture, I make sure to pose extra questions that not only help frame the lecture but also add signposts towards where we are going. Each question is designed to stimulate the student’s independent thinking. The students are also encouraged to ask questions throughout the lecture. These questions draw out contradictions and points of confusion and also allow the students to reflect on what we have been talking about.
Detailed Example of Teaching: Two Classes
This Fall semester of 2011, we covered the redaction and promulgation of the early Qur’anic codex in my Qur’an class. The first writing assignment was a 2-3 page response paper based on the readings and discussions in this week of class. In the introductory lecture of this series of two classes, we covered the contemporary popular story of the Qur’anic collection process as presented by a contemporary conservative thinker, Yousef Qadhi. I started the second day of lectures, however, by informing the students that the information they heard last time was not the critical history but a popularized version of the legend of the redaction of the Qur’an (which could very well be true for the most part). Today, I said, we will proceed by looking at scholarship around the issue, scholarship that revolves around a cache of documents dated to the oldest Qur’ans in existence, found in Sana’a, Yemen in 1972. The main question for the day was: Does the newfound cache affect the validity of popular history and hence the belief that the Qur’an is incorruptible and the ultimate authority? Are the early versions of the Qur’an problematically different from the version we have today? That question was designed to challenge both devout and skeptical students. How far off from the popular story is the critical history? While the school of thought which follows in the tradition of John Wansbrough, holds that the documents further bolster their theory of Islam as a Jewish/Christian heresy, another school of thought sees the Sana’a cache as proving the integrity of Qur’anic authority (materials from both schools had been given to the students for the second day). During the second day of lectures, I did a thirty minute introduction of the concept of Orientalism and informed the class the parts of Said’s book (like to lecture about Said before asking the students to read him) and a video of an interview with him, would be placed on the classes online resource management site.
Students as Intellectual Contenders
What I find most rewarding is the chance to mentor students and contribute to their intellectual growth. My favorite days are when a student subverts what I considered to be a challenging question and complicates the issue even further. When a student stands up to whatever perceived authority the teacher holds and with self-assurance adds something new to the discussion, my acknowledgement of that flash of brilliance means the world to them, and it gives me a chance to watch them flourish. It gives them confidence and makes them get better at what I was trying to get them to do to begin with: learn how to think critically with confidence. I have then become the coach in a student-centered classroom that makes them better intellectual contenders as independent learners.
Using Media as Data
I believe that film and music promote cultural understanding as a primary data source. Towards that end, I use interactive media for teaching purposes whenever possible. For instance listening to different recitation is an important part of the Qur’an class. In fact, one of the extra-curricular assignments for the Qur’an class is the option to memorize one of the shorter chapters of the Qur’an and recite it in the classroom.