My intersectional identity as a cross-cultured first-generation Yemeni American woman compels me to challenge the status quo of citizenship and to think critically both inside and outside of the classroom about what it means to be inclusive. My personal lived experiences such as being the first in my family to marry outside my race and culture, the first to graduate from college, and to navigate academic spaces as an underrepresented minority, are necessary to understand for the advancement of social change and for applying culturally relevant and inclusive pedagogies in and outside the classroom. Further, it was while working towards my undergraduate degree in Anthropology and my M.A. in TESOL that my cultural competence would be tested.  Having to work closely with people who come from different social-cultural backgrounds, gendered identities, language proficiencies, and cultural institutions compelled me to evolve into an interculturally acute and adaptable person. Moreover, my personal and scholarly understanding of how culture can teeter between equity and oppressive nature compels me to respect and challenge different ways of knowing and being; therefore, it is my goal in life and in teaching to continue to be a culturally competent and emotionally empathetic citizen of the 21st Century. 

My sustained efforts to foster equity and global citizenship can be demonstrated through my teaching practice, which is influenced by feminist epistemologies and critical theorists of education whose teaching practices are rooted in social and human activism such as, Paulo Freire, Louise Dunlap, belle hooks, and Norman Fairclough. I frame my pedagogy as a teaching practice that looks at language, culture, society, and education critically. In addition to raising students' consciousness of how to practice language and literacy for specific social contexts, I also raise students' consciousness about sociopolitical aspects of language, culture, image, and metacognition. For instance, I ask students, how does culture, texts, and image shape our beliefs, and perceptions about people, language, and society?  I use my classroom as a brave space to explore this question through multiple multimodal assignments and digital literacies that provide my students with diverse learning opportunities to uncover the many ways language and power are exercised in media, history, image, public discourse, education, and government policy. 

Further, I prompt my students to think about how we might use language, writing, and digital communication to promote social change in our everyday lives. I spend the first week of class nudging students to look inward at themselves and outward at their culture to explore what keeps them from writing, speaking, and digitally communicating for social change. For instance, to engage my students in critical conversations about language and power and to provoke students' inner mental dialogue on how our thinking manifests itself into writing, I ask students: What keeps us from writing to make a difference?  With the help of Louise Dunlap, who is a beloved teacher, facilitator, writer, and Buddhist activist, I use her text, Undoing the Silence: Six Tools for Social Change Writing to promote awareness of silencing culture and activist writing. 

Together my students and I share how we have dealt with silencing culture and we discuss how we might use Dunlap's (2007) literacy and communicative tools to be assertive advocates for ourselves and others. This kind of intimate sharing and collaborative shared thinking acts as a gateway to co-construct reasons that contribute to oppressive culture. Further, we learn to distinguish that voice in our head that silences us individually versus the systemic voice rooted in oppressive mainstream culture and language. After we have constructed language to process and distinguish the oppressor in our heads versus the oppressor that is sustained by mainstream rhetoric, I facilitate a critical inquiry of specific language and texts.  For instance, I have students examine the power and purpose of pop culture by examining the rhetoric of music and art, and students discover how music and art speak to social issues and inequities in our society. 

Moreover, students engage with and collaboratively respond to critical Ted Talks relating to controversial topics such as race, cognitive and confirmation bias, the politics of language, identity, culture, and history. Further, to foster student agency, critical inquiry, and global citizenship, I also introduce Critical Discourse Analysis tasks to train my students how to critically read and evaluate texts to uncover inequities in language policy and public discourse. Thus, students discover the nuance of political communication and investigate the who's and how's of dominant rhetoric and narrative(s) of historical and contemporary societal issues. 

For instance, students in my class explore and unpack the linguistic landscapes surrounding them, investigating how geographic spaces use language and signs to communicate ideas, values, and norms. Further, students use Critical Discourse Analysis and the study of semiotics as a tool to uncover the inclusivity and inequities of texts, spaces, and cultural symbols. Students do not merely examine the rhetoric and purpose of different genres and discourses, they also produce rhetorically engaging multimodal projects that educate their intended audiences on their academic findings, too. For example, in the Writing for Social Change Podcast project, students research a prevalent social issue that they feel is underreported in mainstream rhetoric. Students engage in their own academic research including primary, secondary, and scholarly perspectives on their social issue to later adapt their research notes into a podcast script, and broadcast their findings on the app Anchor. 

Through critical self-reflection and collaboration, my students and I engage in a critical inquiry of language and communication, negotiating input and output of ideas and life experiences, fostering mutual engagement of interest and reciprocity between me (the instructor) and my students. Moreover, the intellectual work of my students is curated into a visually engaging Google Sites portfolio that demonstrates their abilities to produce multiple academic and professional multimodal projects. Ultimately, inspiring their audience to become assertive communicators about complex societal problems. I have found that this kind of teaching fosters emotionally intelligent and culturally competent citizens of the world.