ACTIVITIES

and Interests

PREVIOUS PROFESSIONIAL ACTIVITIES

In recent years, my professional activities involve training secondary public school teachers. A major part of this work entails evaluating, supervising, and counseling secondary social studies student teachers, which includes teaching methods and content of American and World History, with a strong emphasis on how the arts and humanities and the social sciences inform eachother. My interdisciplinary academic work contributes in many ways to this latter endeavor, and I have been focusing attention on training well-rounded and engaged social studies practitioners who understand their multiple positionalities in a complex urban vocational milieu. Simultaneously, my work in American education has informed my contributions to Muslim school reform, both in America and abroad, where I have begun to assist Muslim professionals in their endeavors to develop post-colonial systems of education. Developing my methodological research interests in technology and human development, urban ethnography, and comparative epistemologies, all of which overlap in many ways with my teaching and academic work, has helped me to find the places where form and content intersect, especially with respect to teaching and professing. My contributions stemming from these pathways include fostering collaborations between different academic departments, training students to think outside the boxes of modernity to expand their pedagogical horizons, and integrating my various fields of research into multifarious courses across the disciplinary perspectives. Lastly, my journalism on Islamic and Middle Eastern issues has given me a keen eye for observation and presentation of current events, and has helped hone my writing and editorial skills, both of which I incorporate into my commitment to train students of all backgrounds to be respectfully empathic professionals and coherent expository writers.