History of the Middle East and North Africa is a recently introduced elective at Cincinnati Country Day High School in Ohio. Launched for the first time in 2022, the course is still in its initial stages, and I am working on shaping its content with a primary focus on how to maintain students’ interests in the subject. In essence, the key question is: How can we employ pedagogical frameworks, activities, and resources to keep the students engaged? Based on analyses of surveys conducted at the end of each semester and in-person discussions with my students, I have drawn some conclusions that I would like to share with graduate students, college professors, and experts in the field. Firstly, students show less interest in reading academic books; instead, they prefer summaries of scholarly writings and engagement with activities such as interactive maps and games. Secondly, the students are intrigued by court culture and Islamic practices. Any activities exposing them to the diversity of life, religion, and culture in the Islamic past prove to be effective in maintaining engagement. Thirdly, the students express fatigue with continuous emphasis on diversity and inclusion. They prefer opportunities to experience cultural diversity in less supervised circumstances independently. Projects allowing them to step out of their cultural comfort zones and explore the Islamic past and present tend to engage them more effectively. Finally, my work emphasizes the importance of collaboration between American high schools and colleges to bridge the gap in Middle Eastern curriculums. High schools require the support of colleges to underscore the importance of the Middle East from a humanistic and cultural perspective raising cultural awareness among young Americans. In the current global context, discussions on the culture and identity in the Middle East can be overshadowed by discourses of war, violence, and terrorism. Therefore, creating educational pathways that emphasize cultural understanding is crucial.

This proposal, "Utilizing Graphic Novels and Films to Teach Arab and Middle Eastern Studies in the Classroom," advocates for integrating graphic novels and films as transformative tools in teaching complex socio-cultural themes of the Arab and Middle Eastern world. Highlighted graphic novels, such as Riad Sattouf's 'The Arab of the Future,' Magdy El Shafee's 'Metro: A Story of Cairo,' and 'Lissa: A Story about Medical Promise, Friendship, and Revolution,' blend personal stories with broader socio-political contexts. Films like 'Yomeddine' and 'The Nile Hilton Incident' provide immersive cinematic experiences that complement these explorations. Specific content of the chosen graphic novels and films offer diverse and nuanced perspectives of the Arab and Middle Eastern experience. The proposal argues for their potential to enhance pedagogical approaches, cultivating a more informed, empathetic, and critically thinking student body. This initiative aligns with broader educational goals of preparing students as informed global citizens with a nuanced understanding of diverse cultures and global issues.

In this presentation, I discuss the opportunities of “Students as Partners” (SaP) projects to redesign, evaluate, and/ or otherwise improve classroom engagements of the Islamic past. I root this discussion in my experience as the faculty partner of a SaP project that resigned an ‘Abbāsid history course at a Canadian university. My two student partners and I were interested in two key research questions for this project: (1) what is the student experience of diversity and cultural learning in this course and in what ways can we support students across different positionalities and experiences? (2) What pedagogical interventions can we include or modify to support students across different disciplinary backgrounds as they engage the Islamic past, often for the first time? To address these questions, our project analyzed student feedback from the original course cohort and redesigned the course through a SaP approach—a pedagogical method in which the student partners collaborate equally with the faculty member and contribute their own valuable sets of expertise to the project and in which all decision-making is achieved collectively. We then evaluated the impact and success of our interventions based on feedback and survey data from the student experience of the redesigned course. This presentation will summarize our collective pedagogical interventions, evaluate the results of our project, and offer some reflections on our respective experiences of the SaP approach. In doing so, I argue that “Students as Partners” work is uniquely positioned to transform a classroom experience and is also poised to impact more than pedagogy. I argue that SaP is also a powerful, practical mentorship and professionalization tool for all partners involved, especially for those who may otherwise have limited access to such opportunities. The key issues and debates that this project raises have important implications for students and instructors who engage with Islamic history and the history of the MENA region. Firstly, this work takes seriously the intersection between pedagogy and research and positions collaborative pedagogical work as an important form of academic research and knowledge production. And secondly, our project demonstrates the importance of teaching cultural competence and sensitivity in and beyond the classroom, a powerful space for students who culturally identify with the Middle East to feel seen on campus and for students who do not culturally identify with the region to become more curious and invested in challenging harmful biases towards the Islamic past and present.

In today’s interconnected world and the rise of global challenges, the need to build students’ intercultural competence and equip them with the necessary knowledge of and respect for cultural differences proves to be of utmost importance. Hollywood’s history of vilifying Arabs, undermining their diverse identities, and reinforcing stereotypes of violence and fanaticism (Shaheen, 2003) and the media’s selective news about Arab society call for the critical need to reshape students’ knowledge and cultural awareness. Meanwhile, learning about the other’s culture requires “strategies to interpret, to understand, and to put into perspective” (Schulz et al., 2005, 172). Equally important is to develop students’ “intercultural citizenship” (Byram & Wagner, 2018, 147) by reflecting on social justice within a comparative cultural setting. This study explores the pedagogical model of engaging undergraduate students at an American institution in synchronous and asynchronous sessions with Arab peers in an Arab institution with the objective of building intercultural competence with a focus on minority issues. Using qualitative data, this paper examines the impact of the students’ engagement in those sessions and the effectiveness of the tools used in changing their preconceived notions about Arabs and minority concerns to a deeper understanding of the complex social, political, and cultural intricacies of the issues addressed.

My talk outlines strategies for anthropologists and researchers to communicate effectively on the Arabian Peninsula, with a concentration on Southern Arabia. Using first-person ethnographic accounts, as well as scholarly texts from the fields of history, anthropology, political science, travel writing and literature, this presentation will give clear advice so non-locals can create successful interactions. Rather than discussing a particular theory or place, the focus is on how to meet, interview, explore and write up notes about locals. By reviewing how the practicalities of research intersect with cultural norms, this talk will help scholars navigate the intricacies of fieldwork in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries and Yemen. The impetus of this presentation is various problematic interactions with other researchers, such as a graduate student telling me that they planned to lie to their Arabian Peninsula informants. “You can’t do that,” I sputtered. They shrugged. Several researchers have told me about that they were going to lie about their living situations or deliberately set up testing situations to try to get “real” opinions. I have also been in situations with researchers and locals in which the researcher infuriated the local, who never showed their anger. These types of events have caused me to shift my concentration from writing about local cultures to investigating how people successfully (and unsuccessfully) conduct research in the GCC and Yemen. As I have lived on the Arabian Peninsula for more than 20 years, this talk is a distillation of observations, academic research and a longstanding, deep involvement within local communities. I have taught cultural studies classes at the graduate and undergraduate level, given lectures about local cultures to visiting expats, done orientation lectures for new faculty, published scholarly and non-fiction articles about cultural interactions, taken classes taught by locals and lived in local communities.