“Where is the country of Taliban located?” a high school girl asked me in class one day, after watching part of the movie Osama (which, incidentally, is about a girl living in Afghanistan during the Taliban’s reign in the ’90’s).
I quickly realized that this student (and many others) were confused by the historical events in Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, which we are reading right now. I devised activities on Afghanistan’s history; I brought in movie clips of more moderate madrassas; I explained the different forms that Islam can take. Tomorrow, however, my students have a chance to learn about these things first-hand.
One of the strengths of a large school district like Nashville Metro lies in its diversity. Yes, it can lead to racial and ethnic tension in school, but it also enables classroom discussion to be that much richer. Four older students will be visiting tomorrow to participate in a panel on being female, Muslim, and Middle Eastern. They come from Iran, Iraq, and even Afghanistan itself. My classes have prepared questions to ask, and I have as well. I hope that my students’ horizons, as well as my own, will be stretched out just a little further after tomorrow.
–Katie Harris
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