Diversity Statement

Language prejudice shaped my earliest social experiences. As an Iranian-American who passes for white and presents as a man, I learned from an early age that my skin color and gender presentation gave me access to privileges denied to those who could not pass—family members included. I learned to bring attention to my Persian identity and language, to speak up for those who are silenced, and to challenge the access conditioned on skin color. Having a diverse identity is sometimes dangerous, and is often alienating, but, so long as one is brave enough to speak openly about it, it teaches powerful lessons that have shaped my life as an educator, a colleague, and a community leader.

Language prejudice is built into many of the ways we understand non-native and first-generation students. As a young writing tutor, I noticed that many manuals instruct writing tutors to have non-native speakers abstain from speaking or writing in their native languages, but standard language usage does not correlate with intellect. With this in mind, I wrote an article about the importance of letting tutees think critically and constructed a method to help English language learners scaffold thoughts composed in their native languages into English. This article has since been anthologized in the Oxford Handbook for Writing Center Tutors. As I developed intellectually and professionally, I strove to help my colleagues see how language variation communicates racial, class-based, gendered, and social identities. Serving as Assistant Director of the Academic Writing Program at the University of Maryland, I helped introduce to our standardized First Year Writing textbook Vershawn Young’s “Should Writers Use They Own English?”, a text about whether academic arguments can be developed in non-standard dialects of English. Moreover, I crafted material for teaching register and genre variation across contexts and cultures so that students and instructors alike could understand the relationships between variation, identity, and power. Learning more about language helps us understand not only which voices matter in academia—an institution that houses a plurality of voices, perspectives, and experiences—but also how these voices can perform the rhetorical moves necessary to thrive in academia.

This awareness has served me well working with students and colleagues who live different levels of privilege, and especially working in diverse classrooms, where the goal is always to persuade your students that, contrary to what they have been taught by their circumstances, they are not a problem, they are not stupid, they are not broken, and education can help them. In New Mexico, I  worked with students trying to get out of gangs, a student who was called out of class to identify the body of his estranged father, Deaf students who moved to Albuquerque because of its Deaf school system, 17- and 18-year-old single mothers with no access to childcare, terminally ill grandmothers, students attending remotely from a juvenile detention facility, formerly incarcerated students, and a corrections officer from the same Santa Fe prison. Back in Maryland, I built on these practices, recognizing that disability doesn't always announce itself, that accessibility requires us to build systems that set everyone up for success. The student who struggles to get work done on time because of undiagnosed ADHD, who fears a diagnosis will shame his family, needs accommodations as much as the student who has gone through official disability student services. Working with students with disabilities, I've learned to incorporate Universal Design features into all my teaching—how I compose my LMS, how I structure due dates, how I send out emails, how I show videos and describe images in class. 

Outside academia, my striving to teach and learn through inclusion has shaped the way I build communities. For the past four years, I worked as one of the directors of Corpus Arts, a non-profit queer literacy center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, devoted to helping people understand and celebrate queer identity through education. LGBTQ2+ community spaces often create barriers to entry, such as educational status for college queer spaces or age for night clubs, but at Corpus, I wanted to create a space that would have helped me when I was in grade school and college to understand and express my identity in productive, intellectual, and creative ways that were inclusive of any and all the myriad ways to be queer. Through language and literacy in particular, I sought to bring awareness to lived experiences that are often outcasted. On National Coming Out Day in 2018, for example, I ran a workshop where I taught participants about the English pronoun system, how the Old Norse þeir made its way into Middle English to fill a hole in the English pronoun system, and how the current development of "singular they" has filled a similar hole for nonbinary people. The message of the workshop was that standardized language doesn’t dictate who we are; we borrow it, shape it, and remix it to secure our  identity. I understand that we all need genuine support and inclusion to thrive, and I attend to this need as an educator both inside and outside of the classroom.

At all points—from my family upbringing, to my education, to my academic life, to my community leadership—I’ve striven to forge a project where language awareness, literacy, and diversity are liberatory. In many ways, this project is my life as I’ve lived it. And it’s a project I will bring with me to Cornell.