Arabic in Practice: Experiential Learning, Task-Based Inquiry, and Cultural Analysis
Why the Center for Cultural Analysis (and not a department)?
Departments (e.g., AMESALL, Education) are organized around disciplinary training – proficiency standards, literary canon, or pedagogical methods. The CCA, by contrast, supports interdisciplinary experimentation with how cultural knowledge is produced outside traditional classrooms. This working group uses Arabic not only as a language to be taught but as a site for theorizing embodied, task-driven, and community-situated cultural analysis. By bringing together faculty in education, gender studies, media, and digital humanities, we ask: What happens to “culture” when learners cook from an Arabic recipe, navigate a Cairene market simulation, or co-create a digital story with diaspora speakers? These questions are cultural analytic first, pedagogical second.
Description of the Working Group (2026–2027):
This working group unites faculty and graduate students to investigate how experiential and task-based learning with Arabic generates new forms of cultural analysis.
Our guiding question: How do task-based, embodied, and community-engaged encounters with Arabic (as a language, script, sound, and cultural practice) reshape our understanding of cultural analysis – beyond what text-based or proficiency-driven models can offer?
Rather than focusing on literature or classroom pedagogy alone, members will collaboratively design, document, and critique small-scale experiential projects, such as:
- Task-based fieldwork: e.g., conducting an oral history interview with a local Arabic-speaking
community member, then analyzing stance, code-switching, and narrative structure.
Embodied learning: calligraphy workshops as entry points into debates about adab, aesthetics,
and authority. - Digital-experiential hybrids: using AI translation tools in a simulated transnational media task
(e.g., dubbing a short film clip), then critically examining how gender, dialect, and power emerge. - Public-facing cultural tasks: co-organizing a student-led “Arabic Culture Lab” with performance,
poetry, and food, analyzed as acts of cultural production, not just language practice.
Organizers:
Doaa Rashed
Co-Lead: Jehan Mohamed, AMESALL (Lecturer – Arabic Language Education)