Adi Raz, Middle Eastern and North African Studies, Center for (CMENAS) | 2022-2023
The Middle East is divided by political and social rifts, but it is equally true that the diverse peoples of the region have much in common. Still, politics and regional policies have placed emphasis on dividing forces rather than commonalities between Middle Eastern peoples. This project offers the first curriculum innovation of its kind: a course that will bridge the Armenian, Hebrew, Persian, and Turkish languages and cultures of the Department of Middle East Studies (MES) at the University of Michigan (U-M), encouraging students to recognize both differences and commonalities among the people of the Middle East, while providing a blueprint for other language programs in the United States to implement our collaborative program elsewhere.
Few American universities teach this combination of major languages of the Middle East: Armenian, Hebrew, Persian, and Turkish. Seeds of Peace: Cross-Cultural Talk on the Middle East will leverage the existing strengths of our curriculum in MES by bringing together instructional faculty in all four of these languages to offer a common curriculum around coordinated thematic units, each focusing on shared dimensions of life in the Middle East. Students in each of these language tracks will explore a common weekly theme, shared across all sections, in their own language. Once a week, students from all sections will meet in a plenary class session to discuss these themes together in English. A primary goal of this project is to inculcate the values of inclusion, mutual understanding, and tolerance within the pedagogy of language instruction, while acknowledging that differences remain. Seeds of Peace thus aims to produce a new pedagogy of language instruction that rethinks the insular manner in which the languages (and, through language, cultural knowledge) of the Middle East is taught at U-M.