REFLECTION

I began this graduate certificate program with Professor Haque’s History of the Modern Middle East, and it was a strong start to helping me develop the independent reading and writing skills that would support my work through the rest of the program.  Each week, we would read from the course text and have thoughtful, diverse supplementary readings upon which we would develop our arguments. This routine helped me focus my reading and pick out important details to support a conclusion while seeking corroborating or contradictory evidence in the other sources that might further demonstrate the historical complexity of the argument.  These essays considered stereotypes about Muslim women, the debate over Israel in 1948, the hierarchy of clothing styles in the Ottoman Empire and their display of through a European lens in the 1873 World Exposition, and generally offered unique, engaging perspectives upon which I built and reflected in my written work. While I have often considered creating a history of style elective for our social studies department that focuses on American fashion, this course helped me realize that a more global course would help to show the interconnectedness of fashion, but also reflect my students’ heritage in a school with a large immigrant population.