My name is Fairuze Ahmed Ramirez but my close friends and family members call me, Rosie. I am many things; I am a mom, a wife, a tree lover, an amateur painter, an avid reader, explorer, cooker, yogi, and runner. I believe language should be used to share human experiences, express human needs and it should be used to connect people from all walks of life. 

I received my B.A. in Anthropology and my M.A. in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) from Sacramento State. Because anthropology was birthed out of colonialism, I was trained to be a critical anthropologist. Studying anthropology gave me permission to ask critical questions about the world around me, starting with the history of the discipline. To be very honest with my readers, I have been asking critical questions since I was a little girl, and I am still discovering the truths or layered truths to some of the personal questions I have. While I am trained to dig into the past, and always question our ways of doing and being, I consider myself to be a passionate, compassionate, critical educator and culture text critic who is committed to raising students' consciousness of language and power by incorporating interdisciplinary epistemologies and different ways of being and knowing into my teaching practices. 

While I have an M.A. in TESOL, which has supported how I instruct my students to develop effective literacy practices, I am specifically interested in developing students' critical reading practices and instructing them how to critically engage and respond to texts. My students have learning opportunities to compose texts using digital multimodal mediums and read and write for personal, academic, and professional purposes. I pride myself on constantly revising and adapting my teacher practices to respond to different leaner needs and contexts, and truly enjoy the challenge of creating authentic teaching materials from scratch. Overall, my goal as an educator is to meet students where they are, be inspired by their questions and ideas, and create a learning environment that enriches our collective learning experiences using reading and writing to navigate our social world. 

Outside of teaching, I am currently developing a personal blog to bear witness my personal observations, and personal life experiences navigating the intersections of my life; naming and reframing what it means to be me--all of me. Me as an academic, a reading and writing educator, an emerging writer, a mother, and a multi-cultured Yemeni Arab American Woman. Some of my personal writing explores what it means to be multicultural, and what it means to negotiate dual identities, and what does it mean to engage the soul? I am also very interested in exploring both as an academic and personally through my everyday encounters, how power is exercised through language; specifically, how language is used in both implicit and explicit ways to re-enforce power and social inequities.

 Further, I am also developing a podcast where I read out loud my writing, some critical essays and some poetry as well--my dream is to have this podcast evolve into a space where I can invite brave people to talk about complex societal issues, one conversation at a time. I believe interviews have the potential to fill in the gaps of knowledge that writing cannot always capture; so, it's a space that I hope can fill in gaps of knowledge through brave storytelling, and truth sharing.