teaching with media

Laughter is an important ingredient in my classroom. I bank on my ability to make students laugh with my often-droll sense of humor, but I also frequently rely on professional comedians through the magic of the Internet. The status of Islam and Muslims in political satire, specifically in the genre ...

Some time back, I wrote a blog post called “Teaching Islam and gender: why we need to set an ethical agenda for the classroom.” It described how, working collaboratively, my class on Islam, gender, and sexuality drew on the work of Lila Abu-Lughod to articulate an ethical approach to our ...

I want to pick up and develop here a theme introduced in my previous blog – the idea that students in the field of Islamic Studies – and indeed Theology and Religious Studies more broadly – often have to demonstrate through their assessed work, an awareness of the way in which multiple perspectives ...

My primary objective as a professor is to nurture my students’ ability to think critically. Given the rising tide of Islamophobia and the increasingly acerbic rhetoric targeting Muslims in national political discourses, however, I consider developing their empathy and compassion an additional imperative. In my courses, I have increasingly turned ...

A week into the spring semester, the fall term seems like it was forever ago! In my last post, I talked about the informal evaluations my students took, and since writing that post, I have thought about some of the suggestions they made. Looking back at the semester, I see ...