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Rashné Jehangir
Assistant Professor
Briefly describe your job:
While I have been part of the GC community for almost 10 years, the role of assistant professor is new for me as of fall 2005. I am delighted to be part of the faculty but must note that I still carry in my head the roles of TRIO advisor, SI instructor, and teaching specialist that I played prior to this semester. It sounds like this cacophony of “voices” inside my head would drown out any chance for productive work but, to the contrary. I have found them to be useful guides as I immerse myself in my new faculty role. My teaching and research interests revolve around learning communities and access to college for first-generation, low income, and immigrant students. In many ways, GC has been my community, my place to learn and better understand what our students bring to us and what they need from us. Each role I have played in GC has added to that sense of community and understanding.
As a teacher, I have worked with the multicultural relations course and, more recently, Contemporary Literature: International Perspectives. Much of my teaching involves engaging students to use the coursework as a mirror for self-examination, but also as a lens from which to see the lives, positions, and perspectives of others. The capacity for introspection, connection, and outward looking has been enhanced by teaching in learning communities. In fact, learning communities for me have become the direct link between my scholarship of teaching and my scholarship of discovery or research.
Since fall 2001, I have worked with the TRIO program and GC faculty members Pat Bruch and Pat James teaching and collecting data on students’ perspectives of their experience in multicultural learning communities. This work has focused on creating interdisciplinary links between three courses that ask questions and explore the notion of identity, community, and agency. Along with others in GC, I am seeking to triangulate data collection on learning communities using student reflections, surveys, and focus groups. I am interested in doing longitudinal interviews with students to see if learning communities had any long-term impact on their collegiate career.
In the past few years, the idea of interdisciplinary learning communities has taken root again in GC. In June 2005, I had a chance to go to Evergreen State College Learning Community Summer Institute with four other faculty members and one student services staff person. Our experience is best described as a learning community boot camp—we lived in dorms and ate, slept, and dreamt about learning community design, outcomes, development, and challenges.
We also had real conversations about the obstacles and rewards of such an endeavor and came back with an exciting proposal for building learning communities as a centerpiece of the new GC department’s curriculum. We continue to move forward with this vision, which has grown to include the creative ideas of other teachers and ideas in GC.
Most interesting place you've lived:
Mumbai (Bombay), India, my birthplace and home for 18 years, is one old and interesting city. In Bombay you encounter the breadth and depth of humanity, and an equally vast array of aromas. Taxi drivers work the streets like NASCAR drivers and can talk to you about politics and daily affairs with analysis that would rival most talk show hosts. In some places, at least when I was growing up, your word still counted for credit, and even today you can see a bullock cart and a Mercedes Benz parked on the same block.
Favorite restaurant:
Taste of Thailand on Selby Ave. in St. Paul. You are not there for the ambience; you are there for the food, so go with take-out.
Favorite book:
I can’t name any one book, but among my favorites are The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
by Anne Fadiman and A Fine Balance by Rohington Mistry.
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Rashné Jehangir
Assistant Professor
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