In Spring 2024, I chose to teach my History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict course. I felt it an important part of my mission as an educator to bring nuance to the discussions occurring on campus. My campus is in rural northern Georgia and many students identify consciously or unconsciously, as Christian Zionists. My university has a Corps of Cadets and is a Senior Military College (one of six in the US) which also tilt pro-Israel. There are few students with Arab, Muslim, or Jewish backgrounds. Although my campus has experienced little unrest, I learned quickly the students were also confused about or saw the situation as an inevitable, violent, and permanent feature of the Middle East. My course provides tools, frames of reference, context, and explanation using two innovative pedagogical practices—ungrading and the unessay. Susan D. Blum’s edited volume on Ungrading allowed me to recognize the emotionally and politically charged topic, allows my students to have and examine their biases and prejudices, and reward student engagement, rather than pushing them towards the “right” answer. Ungrading appealed because this is a controversial course, being taught during a horrific war. Ungrading brings students into the assessment process and forces reflection. There are feedback assignments throughout the semester, with suggested completion dates, but ultimately, all work is due in portfolio-form at the end of the semester. Reflections are embedded along the way with specific thought questions students must address. At the end of the semester, students create a summative reflection that allows them to advocate for the grade they believe they deserve, using the criteria we have agreed upon as a class. Within this, I require an unessay research project. Unessays enablethe rigor, sources, and methodology of traditional research, while allowing students’ interests to guide them and humanize what many see as the Other. In this semester, students are investigating and cooking food, learning about and creating Palestinian embroidery patterns, gardening and community gardens, exploring the role of non-profits or NGOs, and creating an inclusive travel brochure that helps visitors to Jerusalem recognize what they are encountering beyond the tourism companies’ agendas. Some are doing traditional research projects as well. At a time when campus politics and rhetoric can be so divisive, ungrading and unessays allow me to help students learn how to engage with controversial topics with rigor and integrity.

I have had several opportunities over the past few years to teach a course on the urban ethnography of the MENA region. While I am always grateful for the chance to offer a class that aligns so closely with my own research, I have struggled to develop a successful project for the students. Given the course’s topical focus on cities, its disciplinary grounding in anthropology, and the fact that my home institution is in New York City, I have been eager for students to conduct ethnographic research outside of the classroom. This has led me to develop a semester-long project in which the students undertake fieldwork in the Queens neighborhood of “Little Egypt.” While they have generally enjoyed spending time off campus (and in an area of the city with which they are often unfamiliar), they have simultaneously struggled to connect the assignment to the course content, which focuses on the sociocultural and sociopolitical dynamics of cities in the MENA region. In the past, some have even described the course as seeming to run on two tracks. The students’ concerns have always struck me as valid, but it is only recently–when I had the chance to offer the course again–that I revisited their feedback. Their comments forced me to query my own thinking around the project–and specifically, how I was framing Little Egypt vis-à-vis the cities discussed in class. What was the connection between Little Egypt and a city like Cairo? Was there even a link between the two spaces? If so, where and how did it manifest–what shape did it take? After wrestling with these questions on my own, I realized that instead of attempting to answer them (as a way of justifying the project), I could use them to guide the assignment. In other words, instead of presuming a connection between Little Egypt and urban spaces in the MENA region, I would let the students use their ethnographic research to query such. This shift in focus yielded rich results, with students engaging more deeply and with greater analytical nuance with their fieldwork.

In October 2021, I faced a situation that nobody wants to experience: the student scheduled to open my seminar course told me minutes before the start of class that he could not attend. My contribution to the roundtable will explore how I transformed this crisis into fresh ways to present ideas in the classroom and excite my students about the Middle East. I opened class that day with a video about camel racing, which, to my surprise, mesmerized every student, generating an intense discussion. They peppered me with questions about camels, while expressing intense enthusiasm for an animal that few had thought about before. “If I could get on a plane today to see them for real,” one woman said, “I would be there.” “Man,” a young man noted, “I would love to bet on camel racing!” It was clear that I had stumbled upon something that resonated powerfully with my students, and a friend, whose family owns a camel farm, provided me with a chance to build on that interest in a new way. He agreed to speak to my class, via Zoom, from the farm, introduce them to its many camels, and send camel milk for them to try in the classroom. But my class that semester coincided with nighttime on the farm, forcing us to try an approach to teaching that I had not done before: film a video, using my iPhone, during the daytime at the farm, so students could enjoy a near real-time vision of it and the camels. When we unveiled the video, my students were even more interested than they had been in the camel-racing video. The lecture and question and answer session that followed it, scheduled to last 30 minutes, went on for the full 85-minute class period. Every student asked a question and tried camel milk, with one, at home, successfully blending it with French wine. I subsequently have built on that class with new exercises centered on culture and everyday life in the Middle East: the arts, coffee, film, literature, music, poetry, shawarma, and sweets. These types of class sessions link short specially made videos to guest lectures and in-class discussions featuring things students can tangibly feel, smell, or taste. Ultimately, I hope to give students a richer feel and linkage to a region that we have all come to love.

The archives of the Franklin Book Program (FBP) offer a unique opportunity for undergraduate students to work with primary documents and conduct original research. The American-led FBP operated from 1952-1978 in the Middle East and elsewhere. The program’s purpose was to translate English (mostly American) books into a number of languages, among them Arabic and Persian, as part of an initiative to counter cultural programming from the USSR during the “Cultural Cold War”. This talk covers two ways archival Franklin materials have been used in the classroom to enhance student learning. The first of these is a podcast students created about Franklin’s activities in the Middle East to fulfill the requirements of a final project in a course. The second, part of an ongoing project, involves the creation and teaching of an undergraduate course based around an engagement with archived FBP correspondence with and between its offices in the Middle East. The primary goal of the course is to familiarize undergraduate students with the politics, ethics, and practices of archival work in Middle Eastern Studies. Students learn about archives through a combination of preparatory reading (from, for instance, the online resource Hazine’s blog posts on specific archives in the Middle East to chapters from recent academic work such as Rosie Bsheer’s Archive Wars and the Tahrir Documents archive of paper ephemera from the 2011 Egyptian uprising) and hands-on experiences with FBP correspondence in the archive, which holds tens of thousands of letters, telegrams, reports, and other material. Overall, the paper offers a model for getting undergraduate students to work with archival materials available on their campus and elsewhere, e.g., in a digital mode. An accompanying slide show will showcase some of the unexpected finds students have made in the archive, including a document with Gamal Abdel Nasser's signature sent to FBP President Datus Smith, Jr., in the aftermath of the 1956 Suez Crisis, a letter from Hubert Humphrey to Franklin's Tehran office sent on the morning of June 6, 1967, and others.

Students who take a Middle East History class for general education credit vary widely in their level of investment. Some relish the opportunity to satisfy their curiosity about a region they only know from the news, others just want to get their credit and move on. Most struggle to envision how they will ever use the knowledge and skills gained in the class in a practical way. I will present a Cultural Expert project employed in my Middle East class to explore ways of tying the knowledge and skills of the Middle East classroom to a variety of professional contexts.

How to introduce to students an agricultural ingredient, hummus (or chickpeas in English), that is originated from the Middle East, a strategically important-yet-under-taught geographical region in China, that most students are unfamiliar with, let alone understanding its nutritional values, positive environmental impact, significance in MENA peoples’ everyday lives, and even symbolic meanings in the Arab-Israeli conflicts? In Fall 2023 at New York University Shanghai, when teaching MENA food culture and history, I first invited the students to read scholarly articles on the history of hummus, how it spread to the West, and the metaphoric Hummus Wars between Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon. As most students from China and East Asia had no idea what hummus was, I brought some dried chickpeas to the classroom to give them a visual idea about the subject in discussion. They seem unimpressed. After that, in collaboration with the university cafeteria, I invited a chef to demonstrate how to make a hummus dish from dried chickpeas. Having seen the demonstration, the students were then divided into groups to make their own hummus with the same recipe that the chef provided them. Out of curiosity, they tasted each other’s dishes to compare and contrast the nuanced differences in the texture, flavor, and mouthfeel due to slight variations in implementing the recipe. After this experiential learning activity in the kitchen, the students went back to the classroom for further reflection. This time they could articulate and retain much more new information. Some even plan to spread their learning to friends and family members in China. The student anonymous feedback shows that this was a memorable and educational experience. Outside the classroom, this teaching experiment also led to the new additions of Middle Eastern food options (such as hummus, falafel, and shawarma) at the university cafeteria halal cuisine station. The Hui chefs, i.e. Chinese-speaking Muslims living in China, who have never had a chance to visit the MENA region, were initially at a loss with the unfamiliar ingredient as well, but later reflected that they enjoyed the learning process too because it gave them new understanding and inspiration about the halal food beyond what they are familiar with among Muslim communities within China. The Middle Eastern students community at NYU Shanghai particularly welcome the new meal options that can bring them a small taste of home far away from China.