TE Research Talk: Dr. Youmna Deiri

The Department of Teacher Education
World Language Search Committee cordially invites you:

“Teaching Arabic to Children and Youth: Between Love and Indictment”

In this presentation, I describe an exploratory study with bilingual Arabic teachers using an anti-racist framework of understanding language that is focused on raciolinguisitics. In this talk, I bring classroom-based teaching practices into the conversation with social and political circumstances surrounding Arabic-language education. As part of this talk, I place a special emphasis on the importance of using qualitative methodologies in World Languages Education rooted in radically intimate epistemologies that privilege postcolonial, decolonial and indigenous ways of knowing.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Youmna Deiri, Ph.D. is a Deans Diversity Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Teaching and Learning at Ohio State University. Her scholarship focuses on community and multilingual literacies with a focus on language education and racialization. Her research methodologies are humanizing, bilingual, qualitative and ethnographic, with an eye toward issues of racialization, language, and immigration related to language teacher education. Her teaching experience is transnational. She has taught English as a Foreign language in Turkey and Syria, and English and Arabic learners as well as TESOL teachers in the United States. Youmna`s work straddles the intimate boundaries of a scholarship that is deeply personal and is informed by her being born in Saudi Arabia and growing up in Aleppo, Syria to Syrian parents, as well as her teacher, and experimental bilingual poet.