Katayoun Hashemin is an Iranian teacher and political activist who views teaching composition and creative writing as two sides of the same coin. After earning her M.A. in TESL/TEFL from Colorado State University in 2023, she committed herself to supporting her home country through its ongoing national revolution. She writes nonfiction essays about Iran to illuminate lesser-known facts and life experiences that many do not normally associate with Iran. Her goal is to broaden non-Persian speakers' understanding of Iran’s cultural, historical, and political heritage.
What is the most important skill you aim to provide your students?
Many emphasize the importance of teaching students to read and think critically, but I believe that teaching students how to do so is even more important as there is usually more than one way to critical thinking and people’s approach and receptiveness to persuasion and being convinced varies highly with culture, personality, social priorities, identity and context. Therefore, I personally prefer to design activities and group work that reveal the processes of thinking and writing. By making these processes visible, students can compare and analyze their own and their classmates' approaches against each other. This comparison highlights similarities and differences in analysis and the level of detail required to become and emerge as a critical thinker and writer. Through these methods, students gain a deeper understanding of critical thinking and develop the skills necessary to apply it effectively in their writing.
Additionally, it’s very important to teach students to become independent writers, who are capable of spotting inadequacies in their drafts by using self-assessment checklists and predicting and responding to the audience’s reaction. As an independent writer, I teach them to craft revision plans, prioritizing changes and setting specific, actionable goals to enhance their writing.
How do you engage students in your course, whether f2f, online, or hybrid?
As a TESOL major, I've been trained to work with the SIOP (Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol) model, which I find highly effective for engaging students in various learning environments. The SIOP model was first developed to make content like math and biology comprehensible for second language learners through hands-on activities and by aligning lesson objectives with actionable steps that guide the progression of relatable class activities that keep students involved.
In a composition classroom, SIOP can be replicated by matching the two axes of content and language with rhetorical concepts and the act of composing, respectively. In other words, teaching rhetoric becomes the content, while the act of composing is the second language. In SIOP, the key to keeping students engaged is to ensure that the material is accessible and intelligible for them. Therefore, to make rhetorical concepts comprehensible for students, I introduce these holistic and abstract concepts by comparing their components with the rather tangible and familiar content of everyday activities. For example, in one assignment, I compare synthesis of academic sources to the process of baking a cake, where individuals need to decide what ingredients need to be mixed in what order to deliver an audience-friendly and convincing cake!
Moreover, I ensure that each lesson objective is paired with an action verb. This method not only clarifies the lesson's goals but also actively engages students in the learning process by specifying what they are supposed to perform and do, rather than just building theoretical knowledge. An activity designed around the objective “Today I will be able to convince my audience to approve my proposal” is more likely to engage students than a more general objective like “learning persuasive writing.”
This combination of actionable objectives, and real-life analogies helps to engage students deeply and effectively in their learning journey.
Katayoun's Assignment that Works
During the Bedford New Scholars Summit, each member presented an assignment that had proven successful or innovative in their classroom. Below is Katayoun's explanation of her assignment, Synthesizing Sources:
This assignment is meant to help students understand the meaning and process of synthesizing various sources for writing a research paper and apply it for crafting a thesis statement. Recognizing that grasping the idea of synthesizing can be challenging, I compare it to baking a cake! Just as a baker needs different ingredients to create a cake, students need to read a range of different sources to develop their own brand-new claim/argument. No baker can make five different types of flour into a cake, but they need milk, oil and other materials too! Moreover, a good pastry chef doesn't serve raw ingredients separately (that would make a horrible experience for the customers/audience!) but combines them in the right amounts and order to create a delicious cake that persuades customers to want more! The assignment uses numerous visuals to bring these steps to life and make the analogy as effective as possible. It concludes with students drawing a visual representation of what material each of their sources offer. This marks the beginning of the synthesis process for their own research. If all the visuals end up depicting the same scene, then perhaps the chef is using flour only and needs to consider using a range of different materials to make the research cake possible!
