EdFix Episode 1: Muslim Youth Identity and the Promise of Public Education

Does the promise of American democracy still ring true for young Muslims in the United States today? And what role could schools play in addressing civic engagement for historically marginalized populations? Dr. Arshad Ali discusses his research on Muslim youth identity and the broader purpose of our American political and schooling systems. 
 

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TRANSCRIPT

ARSHAD I. ALI:
It's not enough to simply listen, but we have to figure out the right questions to ask.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
I'm Michael Feuer, and this is EdFix, your source for ideas and insights about the practice and promise of education. For our very first EdFix episode, I am delighted to be speaking with Dr. Arshad Ali. Arshad is studying, among other things, how Muslim youth in the United States find a sense of identity and meaning, in a very complex, and a political, and cultural environment. I'm proud to say that Arshad is one of our own, an assistant professor here at the Graduate School of Education and Human Development, at the George Washington University.

ARSHAD I. ALI:
Hi Michael, thank you for having me here.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
What exactly are you studying these days?

ARSHAD I. ALI:
Well, my research is around Muslim youth identities, politics, and more broadly, questions of youth participation, and kind of democratic engagement among young people from historically marginalized communities.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
I want to just understand a little bit more about what it was that attracted you to this particular line of research, and maybe one way to angle into that is for you to tell us a little bit more about your childhood, about your experience of growing up in a family of immigrants.

ARSHAD I. ALI:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Something perhaps, even about your parents experiences in India, and afterwards.

ARSHAD I. ALI:
For my parents, I think a number, they left India for a number of reasons. I think post independence India, particularly kind of where our family is based historically in Hyderabad, it was in many ways from what I understand a difficult place for Muslims to live, especially after Indian independence from Britain. They came to the US for economic opportunity, for academic opportunity. They both came for graduate school actually, to California to UCLA where they both attended graduate school. We grew up in a household that value and push education in really productive ways. When I think about my mother, who in many ways I think I'm continuing the work that she did, my mother did a number of things in her life. She did, with a group of friends and colleagues, started a nonprofit in Southern California that was doing ... they didn't use this language, but this is the language we would use now, but racial and gender equity training for K-12 teachers. They were training teachers on kind of anti racist, anti sexist curricula.

ARSHAD I. ALI:
I look at the work she was doing then and think about not kind of the direct ways in which we were taught that, but the indirect ways in which we were taught to be kind of accepting, taught to be really thinking about how all members for a society are coming together.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
There's a perhaps common misconception in the world of research, that we scientists approach our research without any personal commitment, connection, or impulse. In fact, I think for most of us it's probably true, that we bring to our research something of our own backgrounds, our own personality, our own cultural instincts. I wonder, to what extent you now looking back, would say that your work as an education researcher puts you in a situation where you are balancing personal and perhaps even ideological dispositions with the call of science, to look at the-

ARSHAD I. ALI:
Right.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
... data more objectively, so to speak.

ARSHAD I. ALI:
Right. Well, I think like you said, many of us are drawn to and come to our work because we have particular dispositions. I think even recognizing certain questions to ask come from our histories. We decide what's important to ask questions about, and what's not important to ask questions about. That comes out of the values we have in our lives, and I think we as scholars, we as people who are researchers shouldn't shy away from the fact that we come to this work with values, with ethics, with morals, in that we want to make our world a better place.

ARSHAD I. ALI:
In terms of my own work how do I come to this, I think this is always a really difficult balance. This is something we butt our heads against in our classrooms as well, because I think, I remind the students I work with that we should have clear ideas about what we believe, what we want to happen for young people. But, when we're doing research with young people we have to be able to hear their voices, and take a step back and say, "How did their experiences ... How are they unique, and how are my experiences different from theirs, and how am I going construct a study and build a project in which I'm not recreating my own ideas, or telling people what I simply think of the world?"

ARSHAD I. ALI:
But rather, really thinking carefully and creating opportunities for us to learn from the young people we're trying to learn from.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Say just a little bit about your doctoral training, and where it was, and what might have been some of the most pivotal moments in that trajectory?

ARSHAD I. ALI:
My training at UCLA was focused on anthropological research methods. What we call kind of micro analysis, and micro ethnography. Really, looking closely at the everyday interactions of people's lives, and asking what they teach us about how people interact with the world.

ARSHAD I. ALI:
In that training I was blessed to work with really wonderful scholars in the School of Education, as well as the department of anthropology at UCLA. After my doctoral training I continued my training and my research in New York City, where I focused specifically on questions of linguistic ideology, as well as participatory action research at Teacher's College. That's where I conducted kind of a long [inaudible 00:06:16] ethnography in Brooklyn with Arab American Youth. After I had a couple of years of doing that, I had another really wonderful opportunity to move to London, and to continue my training there. That's where I focused specifically on kind of multi modal research methods, as well as I focused on de-colonial, and post-colonial theory. It was a wonderful opportunity to be on a different continent, where there is a different body of literature, there's a different discourse happening.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
I'm going to press you on some of these long words that you've used here. You've mentioned that you became more expert in multi modal-

ARSHAD I. ALI:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
... research. Unpack that one for us a little bit.

ARSHAD I. ALI:
Right. I think the question of multi modal is really thinking about the different modes, or the different ways in which both people are engaging in the world, as well as the different ways in which we can see people engaging in the world. When we think about multi modality, we think about looking at not just at the words people say, but their physicality, their intonation, the speech patterns. But, what we're also looking at is the different forms of discourse. A lot of the contemporary multi modal research is really often times focused on video discourse, or websites for example. It's on digital discourses. So, what does it mean, and how can we think about how a young person presents themselves physically, as well as what they say? How can we look at things like posture, gaze, intonation, as part of understanding what someone is really telling us beyond the words that they say.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
What years were you actually starting to do your research?

ARSHAD I. ALI:
I started my doctoral program in 2004, and I began my work that became my dissertation research and eventually continued to a nearly decade long kind of ethnographic project in 2007 or so. Those were in the years obviously, immediately after 2001. When I initially entered graduate school I didn't come in with the intention of doing research on this topic. I had been working in doing youth education, youth organizing, and really kind of after school political work with young people. I went to graduate school with the intention of really learning about how young people got involved with, and participated in political movements.

ARSHAD I. ALI:
While I was in graduate school I began working with Muslim students from a variety of kind of immigrant backgrounds on the college campus. One of the things that the students often shared with me was that, there weren't documentations of their history and their experiences. We read histories, and we read experiences about Indigenous students, about Latino students, about African American students, about Asian American students. But, often these students said their histories of migration, their histories of displacement, weren't recorded anywhere. That got me thinking about how we could think about this community of young people not just as having kind of experiential knowledge, but what can research do to help us understand kind of their lives or their context in more productive ways.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
And of course, there you are coming of age at least as a doctoral student.

ARSHAD I. ALI:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Two, three years after the horrors of September 2001.

ARSHAD I. ALI:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Would you agree that in your work with these young Muslim students, you were giving them a chance to explore their identities, and their histories, and their lives through a different lens?

ARSHAD I. ALI:
You know, my work was really predicated on the idea that one of the places we need to begin before we start thinking about solutions, is we have to understand where people are situated. I think what my work began as and continues to be organized around is that, it's not enough to simply listen, but we have to figure out the right questions to ask. And, how do we create opportunities for young people, and for adults, but for all of us to think through our perspectives, our lives, our experiences in complex ways? In ways in which we might not have had the opportunity to do so just through our every day interactions. But, how do we give people the time and the space to reflect, to make sense of, and to theorize their own lives?

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Yeah, you know it's funny. This podcast is called EdFix, which suggests that we have already formulated the question and now we're going to find the solution.

ARSHAD I. ALI:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
You're saying that asking the right question is itself, a very important first step. I wonder, what kinds of questions did you start posing as you were interacting with Muslim students?

ARSHAD I. ALI:
In that work with kind of Muslim American youth, but more broadly my work is I often start every day, the mundane. And, asking people to walk me through those every day experiences of their own life.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

ARSHAD I. ALI:
What I find is, when we ask people their perspectives on the world, or their perspectives on schooling, people haven't thought that through in a careful way. Maybe many of us who sit in halls of schools of education spent plenty of time thinking about our experiences in schools. But, often times young people, and most of us go through our lives without deconstructing those experiences. Often times the work begins with the everyday. "Tell me about a time when ... Tell me about a time when you felt included. Tell me about a time when you didn't feel included. Who was in school with you? Who were your friends? Who came over to your house after school?"

ARSHAD I. ALI:
And, beginning with those experiences, I think we can get young people to think about how particular experiences have shaped their life, and then building out from that. Building out from the everyday experiences, to then begin to ask, "How have these particular experiences that you've shared, how did they begin to shape how you've made decisions about your future? How you think about what opportunities are available to you, but also what opportunities might not be available to you?"

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Now, when you were asking some of your subjects, your Muslim youth that you were working with, what were they feeling and to what extent where they able to bring to those feelings, and to the environment in which they were living? Which, was obviously a very, very challenging one. To what extent did this line of inquiry open up for you and for them, new ways of coping with those realities?

ARSHAD I. ALI:
What I'm hearing, and I think we hear lots of different things from young people. But, I think the macro narratives have changed over the past decade. What I saw and heard from young people in 2007 in some ways is very different than what I'm seeing and hearing from young people in 2017. Part of that shift I think is because young people are growing up in a different cultural context today.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

ARSHAD I. ALI:
The young people who I worked with a decade ago, they lived in some ways, most of their life in a context pre 9/11.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

ARSHAD I. ALI:
Teenagers, and people in their 20's now have lived most of their life, and particularly most of their formative life if not all of their formative life, in a context that's post September 11. If we want to kind of divide the world into those moments, although I think that's an uncomfortable division to make because I don't think the world is that simple.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

ARSHAD I. ALI:
The work I did was asking questions, but it was also just spending time. It was doing ethnographic work, spending time with students on their campuses, in their social life as part of their kind of student organizations. I think often times what I saw a decade ago was this deep tension between feeling this promise of, we might say the highest ideals of American democracy. This notion of participation, this notion of some notion that kind of the project of America will result in greater democracy, greater equity, greater participation.

ARSHAD I. ALI:
That was coupled with feeling like they were stuck on the outside of that. For many of the young people, I think what I heard from them a decade ago was this idea that, that promise has truth to it, and there's some utility in trying to really invest in it, and really believing in that. What I hear a decade later is something really different. I think for many of the young people I work with now, that promise falls on deaf ears.

ARSHAD I. ALI:
Because, of a lifetime of experiences where those promises are simply kind of written on paper, but they have no expression in daily life. I think what I hear from young people today is more often a notion of resignation that, their life will often function as second class citizens in the US. And so, what does that mean in terms of how they make decisions, and how to live, and what they want to invest their time in, what they want to do professionally. I think it's more complicated than that. I don't want to reduce things to a singular narrative, because there's also tons of young people who believe the exact opposite of these things as well.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Yeah.

ARSHAD I. ALI:
I think this question of resignation doesn't necessarily have to be a disempowering one either, but it means people are often working-

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

ARSHAD I. ALI:
... for a different society, and actively working for a different society, and a society that they can be full participants in.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
To what extent do you think that Muslim youth in particular, but perhaps other-

ARSHAD I. ALI:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
... minority populations in the US today, are feeling that things are unsafe, uncertain, and that maybe this dream of the big integrative, pluralist society that we talk about in our text books isn't exactly happening? Are you picking up on some of that even more today than in the first decade of the century?

ARSHAD I. ALI:
The short answer is yes. I think this concern about this project of kind of American liberalism, this is a concern that ... And, kind of in many ways, believing that story I think is a story that those of us who have been privileged to succeed within the project of education, people who have done well in society. I think it's an easier story to believe.

ARSHAD I. ALI:
I think it's a harder story to believe when people are struggling for a decent education, struggling for a decent job, and struggling to kind of make ends meet. I think what we're seeing in this moment is, in really destructive ways, and in ways that are kind of tearing at our social fabric. But, we're asking the question, both for communities of color, for immigrant communities, but also for majority communities, who is the project of liberalism actually serving? I mean, I think to me that's what we're seeing most broadly in this political moment, in very kind of unsettling ways. But, we're asking the question of, what is the broader purpose of our political system, what's the broader purpose for our schooling system?

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

ARSHAD I. ALI:
What we're beginning to hear the ramblings of if we move outside of the context of my research is, we're beginning to see this, right? These fissures, deep critiques, and maybe they're not fair critiques of the concept of a university, right? We're seeing this often times from majority populations, from kind of working class communities that universities don't serve, universities are left-wing, ideological spaces, and I think ... or, at least for many of us, we would love that to be true but that's not the case. Universities are places in which we have a variety of thoughts, and competing ideas, and people engaged in serious discourse and debate. But, they're predicated on the idea that, that discourse and debate is based on knowledge and not just based on what we decide the world should look like.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Help us understand a little bit about how a place like a university has a special role in grappling with these big, social, economic, political, historical, cultural changes, number one. And, within universities, what is it about schools of education that make them at least appear to be particularly focused on these issues.

ARSHAD I. ALI:
I think as we think about the role of a school of education and the role of a university, they are places of thinking, they're places of evidence where we have to make cogent arguments. But, they're also places of values, they're places of ethics, and they're places of morals. By definition, I think schools of education are focused on creating educational, or at least supporting educational opportunities for all young people in our society.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Is there a base for optimism about the way in which this kind of scholarship could actually quote/unquote, "Fix," some of the problems that we are experiencing?

ARSHAD I. ALI:
Well, I think if we think about this on a macro level that's a difficult question. But, on a micro level I think when people do research with young people, particularly I think about the research I do. Whether it's kind of long term research with young people in communities, or even sitting with them for shorter periods of time, creating opportunities for them, for those young people to think about their situations and their context. I think it helps them. It helps those particular individuals whom we're doing research with.

ARSHAD I. ALI:
What I think the bigger fixes are is, how do we ... what lessons do we take from this research, and how can we construct learning opportunities, taking those lessons into account? How can we create the context for civics, the context for a participatory democratic engagement within K-12 education? How can we teach young people what it means to be a citizen in the most robust sense, or to be a participant in society rather than being a citizen, in the most robust sense? And, what are we going to do as educators, and as scholars to help our young people have the opportunities to do that, in kind of in the ways that make sense to them?

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
There's a bit of a misplaced, shall we say, abbreviation of what people expect from education. That is, that it enables you to get a good job. Now, that's certainly one of the goals we have-

ARSHAD I. ALI:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
... in educating our youth, is to prepare them for productive work when they get out of school. But, so much of what you've said here suggests that we are, that we have a bigger mission even than preparing people for jobs. That is, helping people cope with a very challenging, complicated world, feeling good to be quote/unquote, "Citizens," in a changing environment. Those are all parts of the picture here, do I have that right?

ARSHAD I. ALI:
Yeah. I mean, what you're saying reminds me, it takes me back to the work of Neil Postman, who was an educational scholar who wrote about the notion of the Gods of education.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

ARSHAD I. ALI:
It reminds me of his work that I used to read back in undergraduate days. I think there's some deeper residence in his ideas, that continue to kind of haunt. When Neil Postman wrote about the Gods of education he said, "What is the purpose?" There was a historical point where education was about knowledge of divinity, and there continues to be that within parochial schools, within the context of the US, particularly in the 20th century, and the growth of mass schooling. The God of education was this notion of democracy-

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

ARSHAD I. ALI:
... This notion of participation in society. At that moment in the mid 90's, Postman was very critical of the economic God of education.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

ARSHAD I. ALI:
I think what we're seeing 20, 30 years later is, if all schooling should be about is learning to get a good job, we're doing schooling very poorly.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

ARSHAD I. ALI:
If we want to train people to be programmers, they don't need 12 years of K12 education, and then four years of undergrad, and two years of a master's degree. We can probably train them to be good programmers by the time they're 12 years old. But, we think school should do something more than that. School should be about ... And this is, I think the promise of public education.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

ARSHAD I. ALI:
Of, how young people relate to one another across difference, across ideological difference, racial difference, class difference, and how we come together to create a society that's livable for everybody. Because, in this moment it might not be wonderful for everybody, but can we make it functional for everybody? Maybe that should be our goal at this moment.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Well you give me a lot of optimism, I have to say, thinking about your past, your family's past, your experience, and what you're already doing for us here at the university gives me great optimism. I want to thank you for indulging me in this conversation. It's been fascinating for me, hope to have you back for future episodes of EdFix. Thank you, Arshad.

ARSHAD I. ALI:
Thank you.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Thank all of you so much for listening to EdFix. For more information go to our website, Go.GWU.EDU/EdFix. If you like what you've heard, write us a review on iTunes.

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