Teacher of Reading and Writing

I'm Danah Hashem, a reformed chemical engineer who, after a few years working in the biopharmaceutical industry, altered my trajectory in order to pursue my lifelong passion for literacy and language arts education through the creation of dynamic, relational, and student-centric learning communities. Since that time, I have earned my Master's degrees in English and Teaching from Salem State University and continue to pursue my scholarship in these fields while also integrating that scholarship into my work with high school and undergraduate students.

I currently teach composition and literature in a variety of contexts and communities where my students and I enjoy daily explorations into rhetorically complex texts from diverse authors while developing our own identities as composers and readers of multimodal texts in a globalized world.

My areas of scholarly interest and work include:

• Digital Literacies and Multimodal Composition with a Focus on the Audio Mode. While I do not believe multimodal composition belongs exclusively to digital realms, I do believe passionately in the importance of integrating digital composition and tools into ELA curricula as a crucial component of training students to be nuanced, flexible, and insightful readers and writers in our current world. As I pursue these ends for my students and my pedagogy, my research focuses predominantly on sonic rhetoric, or the use of the audio mode, which allows me to strategically integrate sound texts including podcasts, performance poetry, archival interviews and speeches, advertisements, and a host of other audio genres into my work with students, both in teaching reading and writing skills. I am currently in contract negotiations with NCTE on a book intended to promote the use of sound texts in teaching rigorous and relevant 21st century literacy skills to high school students, and I relish the ongoing pursuit of my study of the audio mode’s capability in the composition classroom.

• Interdisciplinary Writing. My pedagogical stress on interdisciplinary writing stems not only from my background as a chemical engineer, but also from my experience with Salem State University's Writing Intensive Curriculum (WIC) program, where I worked to promote and facilitate the teaching of writing across the disciplines at the undergraduate level. Building on the tools and experience with which my work in the WIC program equipped me, I went on to serve as the Director of Advanced Senior Research at my Lexington Christian Academy for 3 years. In this role, I worked with high school seniors who applied and were accepted to this program to design and execute independent research projects across a wide variety of disciplines, culminating in a final product and written report on that product. Through directing this program, I have been able to partner with faculty from a variety of departments to work alongside students as they navigate the intricacies of composing within different disciplinary contexts for varied audiences. These experiences inform not only how, but also what I teach in my classroom, as I seek to equip students with the skills they need to be successfully literate in any situation and career path.

• Identity Inclusive Pedagogy. My thesis for my Master's in English focused on contemporary Middle Eastern women processing their wartime traumas through creative composition, which fuses my love for culturally diverse texts, my background in Arabic literature and culture, and my identity as an Arab-American woman. Since completing this thesis work in which I experienced firsthand the richness of immersing myself in non-Western, non-canonical literature, I have actively pursued an intentional and rigorous inclusion of texts that honor the voices of a diversity of genders, ethnicities, races, and abilities into my classroom curricula. As a part of this process, I have come to identify as an antiracist, feminist educator, consistently and proactively working to create inclusive classroom environments that promote equity and justice.

• Rhetoric. I list this facet of my pedagogy last because it undergirds the entirety of my work. Classic Aristotelian rhetoric both explicitly and implicitly provides the framework for all my work with students as well as the mindset with which I approach my research. Beginning with a basic awareness of rhetorical situations and appeals, I seek to encourage my students in their understanding of devices, strategies, and use of logic and structure in their work with texts, modeling the ways in which these concepts direct my personal work outside the classroom.

All of these areas of study interact with and inform one another in dynamic and complicated ways, heavily shaping the way my work unfolds in the classroom and my identity as a teacher and scholar. To see more about my teaching philosophy or academic background, please browse my site. If you would like to reach me with any additional questions, you can use my contact form or email me directly at danah.hashem@gmail.com.