I was born and raised in a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, and a multi-linguistic society. Since childhood, I was exposed to a social garden of different flowers of religions, castes, and classes. I grew up celebrating festivals of almost all religions of the world and that presented me with a diverse perspective of life and humanity. In 2008, as a linguistics graduate teaching assistant, I witnessed firsthand diversity in the classroom that was not limited to class, caste, and religion but also individual differences, learning abilities, and personality traits. That classroom dynamic was my starting point to see different abilities and requirements of individuals. I began with personal communication and made notes of abilities and learning styles of each student in my class.
When I moved to America in 2010 and started teaching Hindi-Urdu, I was further exposed to diversity in the classroom. I had students from different countries, linguistic backgrounds, races, and ethnicities. My background and experience as a graduate teaching assistant in a diverse classroom helped me a lot in this new environment. I began with something that I strongly believe is the most essential thing to understand a diverse community, to listen without judgement. I started a teacher-student group meeting that took place during the last week of each month during the semester, in which we not only focused on my teaching style, materials, and learning of the language, but also my students’ requirements, their reportable incidents during that month, their challenges as a student, and their learning styles. These meeting gave me an emic perspective of my students and brought me into their inner circle. They knew that they can come and talk to me about anything. This helped me bringing my students together where they understood that their success depends on the success of the group.
When I joined the University of Iowa as a graduate student in SLA program, I was appointed as a senate member representative of international students’ community, which required me to understand the needs of international students on campus and bring those concerns to the higher authorities. In addition to this, I also started a group “UIowa-Fulbright students and Scholar group.” This group helped many Fulbright language teaching assistants come to our university and thrive. The club started to understand their needs and helped them to navigate in a socio-culturally diverse society.
Recently, I received a grant from College of Arts and Letters at MSU. The grant is to find language partners for our Hindi-Urdu classroom learners. I currently have six language partners from diverse backgrounds, and they are making significant changes in my students’ lives. Those changes are not limited to their language proficiency but also in their perspective of life. If I were given a chance to continue serving the MSU community, I would continue to engage students and scholars in bi-weekly “conversation hours,” meetings during which everyone can express their thoughts and share their experience with cultural gaps and their strategies of negotiations. I would also like to start an MSU-Fulbright scholars’ club that would help our Fulbright teaching assistants to sail smoothly in our community and, in return, we will learn about their countries and cultures, further advancing our department goals of inclusive excellence.
