Teaching Philosophies

Project-Based Learning

I have increasingly embraced a project-based approach to teaching. Instead of “banking” my expertise into the heads of students, and then evaluating their mastery in an exam or paper produced for an audience of one, I present students with a challenging real-world problem that they share publicly. I then invite them to research, design, develop and construct a solution. I then offer the space, scaffolding, the human and intellectual resources for them to explore their own creativity and claim their agency in the process. For example, students in my “Islam in the African- American Experience” course this semester are producing “art activations” – creative verbal engagements with artworks from the exhibition “Powers of the Unseen,” which opened at Express Newark in February 2025. The “problem” is framed as the need to communicate complex ideas about Muslim theology, Muslim aesthetic and literary traditions, the experience of exclusion and oppression, and the formal description and analysis of art to a wide public audience. Students began the semester by identifying what content knowledge they needed to acquire, and what skills they needed to develop. They then practiced project management by setting goals, defining criteria of success, and establishing a timeline that would allow completion by the end of the semester. This approach has turned me as an instructor and students into team members working towards a shared goal. Students have organized public talks with several of the exhibition’s artists and relevant area experts. The course has required patience and care as I have had to resist letting my own expertise getting in the way of student learning.

Close Reading in Class

In my classrooms, we read. I have adopted this method of teaching from my own research practice of reading Kamara, inextricably linking my scholarship and pedagogy. Deep reading is the core skill we focus on because of its inherent benefit, its capacity to encourage life-long readers, and its effectiveness as an encompassing, root metaphor for humanistic understanding. In our present context, when the instantaneous processing of information by computational algorithms favors a narrowed capacity of interpretation, reading that is slow, close, and multiple stimulates the imagination, encourages generosity, sharpens the critical faculty, and makes empathy possible. We approach reading rigorously in an open and iterative process of noticing, describing, and questioning. I did this with students, for example, with an essay by Kiese Laymon, “What we owe and are owed,” in the “Black Religions” seminar. After everyone in the class read a paragraph aloud, we collected what we noticed about the text. This ranged from formal attributes like the essay’s conversational tone, to identifying the theme of revision as a means of reparation, to student’s affective response to the author’s reflection. We then synthesized what we noticed into the description of the text as vulnerable, reflective, and as testimony. Finally, we posed questions based on these descriptions such as who is and is not worthy of repair and restoration, and when does revision end? And most importantly, we asked if Laymon’s understanding of revision as an ethical commitment could serve as a generative theory of religion. These questions then sent us back into the text itself to find answers on one level, but on another level to notice and describe anew in ways we were not yet prepared for upon our initial reading. This approach encourages readers to read creatively, mindfully, and independently instead of as a means to a pre-determined end. 

Since 2018, I have independently designed five new courses and collaborated in the development and teaching of four others. These were both undergraduate and graduate seminar and survey courses, delivered in person and remotely. While on my post-doc at Northwestern, I taught two advanced undergraduate seminar courses in historiographical methods. The first, “Islam and Blackness in Global History,” used the central question, “how has the meaning of Blackness changed over time in relation to Islam?” to show students how professional historians do their work. Each student produced a final paper that responded to a historiographical debate about the historicity of racial difference in Muslim settings by interpreting primary documents. In “Shari’a in Global History,” we historicized the development of Islamic law in the Middle East, South Asia, Africa, and Europe and asked if the jurist’s conceptual tools were useful for rethinking historical categories. Similarly, students wrote papers that responded to major debates on the topic by interpreting primary sources. 

  Also, while on my post-doc, I co-taught a graduate seminar with collaborators at Gaston-Berger University (UGB) in Saint-Louis, Senegal, as mentioned above. In that course, we addressed theoretical and methodological questions to explore how subject-focused research can be used to reflect on socio-religious change. This three-week course involved a week-long practicum where students conducted fieldwork on socio-religious change. I also co-organized a conference in Dakar with faculty and independent researchers where their students presented their fieldwork. 

  During my first semester on campus at Rutgers, I was named a Mellon faculty fellow to develop and teach a humanities capstone course for the Honors Living-Learning Community. Entitled “Approaches to the Black Archive,” this advanced undergraduate seminar introduced honors students considering graduate study in the humanities to the current theory and practice of archival research on communities of color. Because this course was taught remotely, due to the needs of physical distancing, the course emphasized accessing digital archive materials. I also adapted my “Islam and Blackness” course to fit “Islam in the African-American Experience,” a course that has long been on record at Rutgers-Newark. In the first iteration, I presented the topic as being part of a larger global story. Subsequently, I narrowed the scope to take an African-diasporic approach that assumes a Western-hemispheric perspective. Deeply interdisciplinary in nature, this course attends to both the histories and cultural expressions of Muslims of African descent, and the place of Islam as a horizon of consciousness for Black communities more broadly.  

     More recently, I have introduced a new writing-intensive seminar on Black religions. Taking a comparative religions approach, the course explores the study of Black life through the religious responses to Black death. This is a media-rich course that culminates in both a multi-media project and a publishable online think-piece. I also began teaching the department’s introductory courses to better connect with the broader but fundamental questions of Africana studies. Finally, I designed and delivered a graduate seminar for students in the PhD programs in American Studies and Global Urban Studies entitled “Fate of the Humanities.” This course surveys scholarly debates on the nature, value, history, and future of the humanities as a domain of knowledge.  After considering foundational statements on the nature of humanistic knowledge, we read critical histories of knowledge formation, examinations of disciplinarity in the modern university, Black studies critiques of the human, and examples of emergent digital and public forms of humanities scholarship.