Journal Articles by Natasha Hakimali Merchant (she/her)
This issue of Thresholds in Education, addressing teaching about Islam in U.S. schools, brings to... more This issue of Thresholds in Education, addressing teaching about Islam in U.S. schools, brings together a diverse set of articles each threaded together by a common desire to respond to the question: what does it mean to be educated about Islam? Though the articles speak to a variety of diverse platforms including textbooks, secondary classrooms, and institutions of higher education, they all call into question the ways in which Islam is currently approached and offer new frameworks for understanding curricula on Islam. After outlining a brief summary and the sequence of articles in this series, the author of this introductory essay asks the reader to consider how each of the articles addresses curricula on Islam through the lens of the curriculum box, including explicit, implicit, and null curriculum (Eisner, 1985).
Theory & Research in Social Education, 2018
Currently, a knowledge gap exists at the intersection of immigration, citizenship, and education.... more Currently, a knowledge gap exists at the intersection of immigration, citizenship, and education. We have little knowledge of how teachers teach about citizenship when they anticipate that some of their students are undocumented. Conceptually, we distinguish between formal and cultural citizenship and draw from immigrant political incorporation theories. We investigate how high school civics teachers navigated the tensions of teaching youth in settings meant to socialize them for future political participation when some students did not have formal citizenship rights. Based on 88 hours of observational and interview data, we analyze three cases of U.S. government teachers selected from a pool of 39 secondary social studies educators. We ask: How did skilled and experienced civics teachers who supported immigrants’ rights teach about elections in mixed-citizenship settings where some youth had formal citizenship rights and others did not? We argue that key features of teaching in mixed-citizenship classrooms were context, safety, and legitimacy. We also generate a set of propositions to be tested in future research. As scholars increasingly discuss what civic education should look like in light of immigration and globalization, we offer grounded perspectives about the situated roles of teachers in mixed-citizenship contexts. Understanding how skilled and experienced teachers address the possibilities of inclusion despite structural exclusions opens a window into how schools can be sites that defy the formal boundaries of citizenship.
Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education: An International Journal (DIME)
This case study investigates the experiences of Shia Ismaili Muslim girls as they encounter thems... more This case study investigates the experiences of Shia Ismaili Muslim girls as they encounter themselves as subjects of Social Studies curriculum on Islam. A post-colonial lens is used to examine differently empowered subjectivities and curricular epistimes within the high school World History context. In an effort to understand their experiences, this study focuses on how the students position themselves in relation to the curriculum, and ultimately asks, to what extent do students from minority communities of interpretation appropriate or resist the authoritative narrative of Islam offered in their classrooms, particularly around the question, “Who is a Muslim?” .The central finding revealed a paradox of representation and participation for these students, who found their practice and interpretation of Islam silenced in the classroom curriculum, and yet felt obliged to defend Islam and educate others against stereotypes of Muslims. The implications of this study compel educators to explore de-colonial approaches to teaching about the religious other.
Coinciding with the rise of Islamophobia in the United States, is a small but growing set of educ... more Coinciding with the rise of Islamophobia in the United States, is a small but growing set of educational scholarship around the curricular impact and response to Islamophobia. The qualitative case study discussed in this manuscript aims to contribute to this conversation by investigating how Muslim girls from minority communities of interpretation (n=6) made sense of and responded to curriculum on Islam in their Social Studies classes. The central finding describes how sample students responded to Islamophobia in the classroom by building bridges across differences. Ultimately, this study aims to learn from the experiences of students, and advocates a curriculum on Islam honoring complexity.
Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 2017
Political discourse on immigration policy often provides a window into a society’s boundaries of ... more Political discourse on immigration policy often provides a window into a society’s boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. Here we seek to understand how those in liminal positions respond to political debates that raise issues of boundary maintenance. Drawing from Bakhtinian concepts of authoritative and internally persuasive discourses as well as Gramsci’s concept of 10 common sense, we analyzed how a superdiverse sample of 26 immigrant origin adolescents (from Asia, Latin America, Africa, and Europe) responded to video segments of presidential debates from the 2012 U.S. election. Youth’s responses to presidential video clips about undocumented immigration policies fell along a spectrum from inclusionary to exclusionary, with 15 many voicing mixed responses to immigration policies. Half of the youth referenced their own family’s migration experience when discussing immigration policy, most frequently in empathetic ways; however, this did not preclude them from aligning with exclusionary immigration discourses. The theme of fairness was prevalent in their responses, yet it emerged in 20 distinct ways. This work highlights the need to interrogate common-sense discourses of exclusion.
Books by Natasha Hakimali Merchant (she/her)
Myers Education Press, 2022
Social studies education over its hundred-year history has often focused on predominantly white a... more Social studies education over its hundred-year history has often focused on predominantly white and male narratives. This has not only been detrimental to the increasingly diverse population of the U.S., but it has also meant that social studies as a field of scholarship has systematically excluded and marginalized the voices, teaching, and research of women, scholars of color, queer scholars, and scholars whose politics challenge the dominant traditions of history, geography, economics, and civics education.
Insurgent Social Studies intervenes in the field of social studies education by highlighting those whose work has often been deemed “too radical.” Insurgent Social Studies is essential reading to all researchers and practitioners in social studies, and is perfect as an adopted text in the social studies curriculum at Colleges of Education.
Perfect for courses such as: Foundations of Education │ Social Studies Methods │ Multicultural Education │ Critical Studies of Education │ Culturally Relevant Pedagogy │ Social Education
Chapters by Natasha Hakimali Merchant (she/her)
The problem of the colorline: Social studies education and racial literacies , 2022
Insurgent social studies: Scholar-educators disrupting erasure & marginality, 2022
Martell, C. C. (Ed.). (2018). Social studies teacher education: Critical issues and current perspectives. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing., 2018
In the backdrop of rampant anti-Muslim sentiment, social studies teachers are well
positioned to ... more In the backdrop of rampant anti-Muslim sentiment, social studies teachers are well
positioned to make positive contributions toward increasing religious literacy within
the citizenry. After a review of the current state of teaching about religion more generally, and Islam more specifically, the chapter offers social studies teachers cautions
in their approaches to teaching about Islam. Finally, the chapter concludes with a set
of practices social studies teachers can employ in responding to overly-simplistic
notions of the Muslim-other
Critical Human Rights, Citizenship, and Democracy Education : Entanglements and Regenerations, 2018
In Chapter 10, Shenila Khoja-Moolji and Natasha Hakimali Merchant seek to decenter the discourse ... more In Chapter 10, Shenila Khoja-Moolji and Natasha Hakimali Merchant seek to decenter the discourse of human rights as the only possible language of justice, emancipation, and empowerment. The authors pluriversalize our knowledge field by drawing on work with adolescent girls and teachers in Pakistan to 9illuminate the existence of multiple idioms and vocabularies of justice, in addition to the language of rights. Specifically, Khoja-Moolji and Merchant hone in the ideas of farz (responsibility) and madad (help) that were grounded in religion and operated powerfully in local contexts setting the parameters for behavior toward others. In fact, the authors argue, Islam provided some of the most potent idioms for social justice. They, hence, propose that it is imperative to view UN-centric human rights as a historically and geographically specific body of knowledge that affords specific life-scripts and possibilities, and that we must make space for non-Eurocentric idioms of justice as well. Such a move will enrich our politics, afford the possibility of multiple life-scripts, and delineate the complexity of projects for social justice.
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Journal Articles by Natasha Hakimali Merchant (she/her)
Books by Natasha Hakimali Merchant (she/her)
Insurgent Social Studies intervenes in the field of social studies education by highlighting those whose work has often been deemed “too radical.” Insurgent Social Studies is essential reading to all researchers and practitioners in social studies, and is perfect as an adopted text in the social studies curriculum at Colleges of Education.
Perfect for courses such as: Foundations of Education │ Social Studies Methods │ Multicultural Education │ Critical Studies of Education │ Culturally Relevant Pedagogy │ Social Education
Chapters by Natasha Hakimali Merchant (she/her)
positioned to make positive contributions toward increasing religious literacy within
the citizenry. After a review of the current state of teaching about religion more generally, and Islam more specifically, the chapter offers social studies teachers cautions
in their approaches to teaching about Islam. Finally, the chapter concludes with a set
of practices social studies teachers can employ in responding to overly-simplistic
notions of the Muslim-other
Insurgent Social Studies intervenes in the field of social studies education by highlighting those whose work has often been deemed “too radical.” Insurgent Social Studies is essential reading to all researchers and practitioners in social studies, and is perfect as an adopted text in the social studies curriculum at Colleges of Education.
Perfect for courses such as: Foundations of Education │ Social Studies Methods │ Multicultural Education │ Critical Studies of Education │ Culturally Relevant Pedagogy │ Social Education
positioned to make positive contributions toward increasing religious literacy within
the citizenry. After a review of the current state of teaching about religion more generally, and Islam more specifically, the chapter offers social studies teachers cautions
in their approaches to teaching about Islam. Finally, the chapter concludes with a set
of practices social studies teachers can employ in responding to overly-simplistic
notions of the Muslim-other