Beyond the Classroom: Sawsan Jaber on Identity, Equity, & Inclusivity

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Mahaba and welcome back to Sithi Stories, the podcast where we amplify and celebrate the voices of Palestinian women. I'm your host, Leila, and our guest today is someone who has dedicated her life to education, justice, and advocacy. Dr. Sosan is an award-winning educator and scholar activist who's leading the charge in decolonizing education and making sure marginalized voices are heard in academic spaces. Beyond her impressive achievements, Sosen's story is deeply personal. She understands firsthand the challenges of navigating identity, representation, and resistance in Western education systems. And now she's using her work to change that reality for future generations. Sose said, welcome to Siddhi Stories. Thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate your time. I'm honored to be here and I love what this is all about.

SPEAKER_03 0:58

So thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_00 0:59

Thank you. We love starting off with a Siddhi-inspired question. Is there a book, a poem, a quote, or even a Quran verse that when you read it, you are instantly reminded of your grandmother?

SPEAKER_03 1:10

Yes. Last year I came across Muhammad al-Kur's uh poetry anthology called Rifka. It was dedicated to his grandmother, who was a 1948 survivor. And it's an anthology of a bunch of different poems that really exemplify the Palestinian experience, but also contextualize it in kind of like a world, not an international sense, where he compares, for example, displacement with people that have been displaced in other countries, or he amplifies his grandmother packing her suitcase with the intention of coming back. My favorite poem is titled, This is how uh Why We Dance, and it's about resistance that, like, even though Palestinians have been oppressed and suppressed, we continue to fight, we continue to dance. Our voices continue to echo for justice and for resilience and resistance. And so I love that so much because it reminds me of not necessarily my grandmother, but I am fortunate to come from a very beautiful long lineage of Palestinian freedom fighter, freedom fighters, and particularly women. So my great-grandmother, uh Siti Damir Allah, was the midwife of Ded Yassin. And um, when we were attacked in 1948, April 9th of 1948, she was the mother of nine, a widower. She was and a leader in our community in the village. Ded Yassin is in a little hilltop, and so it's really um central strategically to seeing all of Jerusalem from where it sits and is very close to Aqsa Masjid and to the Kud. And the attack happened in the early morning hours, and my grandfather's brother was going to the outhouse and heard the soldiers coming up the hill and woke up his mother and some of his brothers, and they were able to wake some of the people up. And so there's this story, but I have a picture of my great-grandmother in 1948 standing among a group of men, and she's holding a rifle and she's fighting. It's a beautiful picture. And my grandfather, who was 15 at the time, told us the story of how the mayor of Daddy Essene was injured and how she carried him on her back for miles and saved his life because he was injured. And so my great-grandmother raised my father and his siblings and raised her own children by herself and led in the community and was just this force to reckon with. And I love that picture and I love that story because not only does it dismantle the rhetoric of that Palestinians ran away, they fought, and everybody fought, right? Everybody who could fight fought. But it also dismantles the rhetoric about Arab women in general being these like domin dominated women. When you see a picture of a woman who's standing there with a rifle fighting for her village and for her land and for her people, like that is where all of the gusto that comes into the education and the need for justice and the work that I do really comes from that, that inspiration that my grandfather was able to preserve. I remember being a young child and my grandfather sitting all of his grandkids around him and feeding us and telling us I never had the privilege of meeting my great-grandmother, but I've lived with her my entire life through the stories of my father and my grandfather. Um, I feel like I'm very privileged to be able to call on my ancestors for a lot of those things and to have the ability to say, these are my ancestors, because I couldn't be more proud.

SPEAKER_00 4:04

Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. I think that's been such a common theme and thread of everyone who I've interviewed so far. Their grandmother was this super strong and opinionated woman, and it just goes against the rhetoric that everyone is trying to put on us. So I love sharing that. I'm going to link the book by Mohammed al-Kur. I would love to take a chance to read for our listeners to read it as well. So before we jump into other topics, I would love for you to share a little bit about yourself.

SPEAKER_03 4:34

My parents came here as refugees in the 60s, in the late 60s. Um, there's a difference between coming here as a refugee and coming here as an immigrant, right? Because refugees often don't have a choice. They have to leave because of circumstances in their home countries that force them to leave. And so I feel like just my experiences with refugees. I live in a a city currently that has a lot of refugees in it from different places. They tend to hold on a little bit stronger to their culture, their religion, the things that I their identities, because it's all they have left. And so that was definitely our case. I grew up in Brooklyn and my I always say I grew up in a little Palestinian bubble in Brooklyn. I had the fortune of also living in a very diverse community, like in our in our just on our little block, we had people from China, people from Italy, people from Mexico, people from everywhere. It was truly a diverse community. So I went to school with kids from everywhere, but we grew up with the intentionality of like knowing where we came from faith-wise, like as Muslims, and we knew where we came from as Palestinians. And we weren't only allowed to listen to Palestinian music. We were only allowed to speak Arabic at home. Going to school, I think, was our first exposure to actual like English because we only spoke Arabic. I remember even like if we tried to speak in English to my mom or to my grandmother or to any of anybody at home, they would not respond because they wanted to make sure that we could speak and understand Arabic. And that not only were we fluent in it, but that we were able to like pass that on to our own children and their children. I ended we ended up moving to New Jersey when I was like 10, um, but really stayed very connected to New York. And then um eventually I moved to Dubai for seven or eight years and then ended up here in Illinois after that. And so my journey has been quite an interesting one. I'm an educator. This is my 26th year.

SPEAKER_00 6:15

Wow, mashallah. That's incredible.

SPEAKER_03 6:18

Crazy. Yeah, I graduated from college when I was 19, um, and I've been teaching since. And um, I've worked every position in education that you can imagine from a classroom educator to a director of curriculum to a department chair to being in charge of um writing national standards and uh being in charge of training principals from 200 plus schools internationally, and just working with companies like Google and National Board and Microsoft and really just doing a lot of consulting work. My first co-authored book is coming out in June with my friends Shane Sephir, Crystal Watson, and Marlo Bagsick. I feel very honored to have that project and to have been chosen to work on that project with Shane Sephir, who's a legend. My side job, in addition to being a department chair right now, is my consulting. And that is a way that I can kind of normalize not just the work of global education and global citizenship in education, but just the fact that as an Arab Muslim hijabi woman, I have expertise and I have place in those spaces to lead people who don't look like me. I'm often the only one in a lot of educational spaces. Like I attended a conference with like 20,000 people, and I don't think there was another hijabi in that space. And I did the key for that conference and just standing up in front of people and like even I've been in a lot of equity spaces where so little is known about the Arab identity, so little is known about the Palestinian identity, so little is known in America about the Arab American experience. And that filters down into schools with this very grow, large, like quickly growing community. How are we actually supporting students that we don't know anything about? And so my doctorate, my dissertation was focused on the experiences of Arab American students in the public sector. I've published three or four chapters on that topic in pedagogical books. I do a lot of speaking on that and I do a lot of public speaking on just global citizenship and the need for us to really immerse students in experiences where they can read the world and understand it. And so educational spaces can be heart spaces, healing spaces where when we really ground our students in deep understandings about people who are different than they are, then a lot of the problems that we're seeing in our current context now more than ever automatically go away because people aren't operating from a space of fear, but they're operating from a space of understanding that can then breed love and humanity with communities that have been historically dehumanized. So that's been kind of the ethos of my work for a very long time. January of this year, um, I think it made it feel more relevant than ever. Or I should say just the last year and a half with everything that's been going on in our community as a whole, not that it started a year and a half ago, but I think the conversation in America became a very prevalent one a year and a half ago. And that makes my work feel like it's more relevant and more real and more necessary than it's ever been historically.

SPEAKER_00 8:55

Yeah, we definitely need more of that. Hearing about your upbringing and the values that shape you is so powerful, especially in understanding how identity plays a role in the way we navigate the world. Taking it back to 26 years ago when you first started teaching, what first led you to want to become a teacher and your role as a tea as an educator expanded to many different roles? Did you always have that vision in mind?

SPEAKER_03 9:18

I I know that I always wanted to be a teacher, right? Because I know that I was nine and I loved school. I was always under a table with a book, always. I read every back of the cereal box. I found myself in books. That's where I really found myself, even though I've never seen myself represented in a book, but I found myself in books. And that was my my favorite place to be in a book somewhere. And so I've always loved school. I felt like that was one of the few places where I could really be me and grow me and grow my mind. I was always enlightened with like his history and and and writing. Um, I remember reading um Dassan Barakat's uh uh book, Tasting the Sky, her writing about her being a refugee in 19 uh 67 at three years old, and because of the trauma, losing her ability to speak. And in the Onerwa school, her mother introduced her to gave her a piece of chalk and she wrote the letter Elif on the board. That was her journey to become a writer because she couldn't actually speak anymore, physically couldn't speak because of the trauma. And so writing became her refuge. And I just kept thinking to myself, I think that was me too, even though my experience wasn't traumatic, but I related to the fact that I really found my voice through writing and through reading. Um, that was something I was really passionate about. When I got married, and I got married super young. Arabs have dowries. My dowry from for my marriage, my father told my ex was she needs to finish her education. Like we don't care for gold, we don't care for money. Her dowry is her education. Unfortunately, I married into a family that didn't believe that women should get an education. I I had a full scholarship to Columbia University when I graduated from high school at 16. Wow. And I was a mom at that time. You were a mom at 16? I was a mom. I had my was pregnant with my daughter. I had her first semester of college. I was I was devastated because when I was supposed to start college, my ex-husband was like, Yeah, you're not gonna commute to a different state, even though it was Colombian, that was my dream. I was like really devastated. So I ended up going to a teacher's college, which was a really strong program, and I'm not upset about that. I subhanallah, like God had a different plan. It was a better plan than the one I had for myself. I ended up going to a teacher's college and graduating in three years because I had my daughter bang on in my first semester, and I was not getting the support in order to finish because the hope was that I would kind of get overwhelmed and give up, but I didn't. I finished faster.

SPEAKER_00 11:28

That's your ancestors, the gut scenes being like, take that. I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna do it even faster.

SPEAKER_03 11:35

It was something I really wanted. And I knew that I I loved English. I wanted to be that teacher that created space for students to find their voices in themselves and the power of writing. I was the first person in my family to go to college. And so when I told my mom I wanted to be an English teacher, she was so upset because like it was truly we were uh deceived into thinking that those who go into the humanities are failures, right? Like those who those who succeed are doctors and engineers and everybody else is a failure. That's that's the culture, unfortunately. I feel like that's part of oppressive systems because in some ways that led us to abandon our stories, these stories that you're trying to like preserve, right? When we abandoned our stories, we we left the grounds for other people to tell those stories in ways that were very dehumanizing and criminalizing. And here we are, right? So a big part of like my work with kids is let's reclaim those narratives, let's tell those authentic stories, let's show the nuances and the complexities of who we are and the beauty of who we are, and a beauty of a culture that is often so, so misrepresented that people are afraid of it. And it and then because of that fear, we're fine seeing 40, 50, 60,000 people, primarily children and women, massacred and we're we're not batting an eye until like months later, people start to to move on it. And it's like, oh, well, the tides are changing, but after what, right? So I ended up anyway doing my bachelor's. I got a full scholarship by the university because I was the youngest person to graduate from the program and with honors. So they offered me a full-time master's. My ex was like, absolutely not, you're done. And so I didn't do my master's and my doctorate until way later.

SPEAKER_00 13:07

Wow. I've always like been like inspired by the work that you do, but hearing how much you had to like fight to like get an education, being so young, being a mother, and like working in a space that's not supportive makes me like even more inspired by you, mashallah. I'm sorry you had to like go through that.

SPEAKER_03 13:26

It all makes me stronger, but somehow that trajectory kind of led into as my education progressed, I felt like all throughout all of my degrees, even my doctorate, my methodologist really pushed against me focusing on Arab students. And I lived in the largest Palestinian community in the country. So by default, my student sample for my doctorate was Palestinian kids, and that wasn't my plan, but it just defaulted that way. She was really, really adamant that she wanted me to change my sample, and I dug my heels in the ground. And my my I was really fortunate that my chair also was very supportive and fought for me. And so I was able to keep my topic. But at the end of the day, like I felt like all throughout my educational career, I never saw a teacher who looked like me. I never read a book with a character who looked like me. I didn't understand equity conversations until late in my master's and the beginning of my doctorate when I started to focus on those things. In the back of my mind, I kept thinking, like, how different would my life have been, my personal life, have been if I was able to have these conversations in high school and really understand that I had a voice that was powerful enough to self-advocate, that I didn't need anyone to save me that I could save myself. And so that kind of got my wheels turning into like, how can I integrate that into curriculum for kids? And when I started to modify my teaching to give students the opportunity to like really understand the world and understand the beauty of their voices. And I think it's like just love themselves, because so much of the world tells students of color and students from marginalized backgrounds that they're not good enough. That by the time they get to us in high school, like there's so much self-talk and such a state of double consciousness that they don't really know who they are anymore. Their self-reflection is the reflection of societal standards, which is really problematic. So a big part of my work was like, let's delve deep into the intersections of our identities, our values, who we are, what the world says, how we view ourselves, how do those things match? How don't they match? And then, like, how do we start to really rebuild that inner self-love, that radical love for ourselves so that we can love each other? Because how can you fix the world if inside you're broken? And that evolved. And then I got my first opportunity. Somebody uh learned about my work and invited me to speak at a conference. And there was so much of like positive feedback from that. So that kind of spiraled into like the speaking. And then I started publishing my first chapter. And so it was like kind of a domino effect. I don't know that I ever saw this being my trajectory. I know I wanted to be a teacher, but I think being in this space and just kind of reflecting on my own lived experience, I realized that there were needs that weren't being met in some the educational sphere and just in the world as a whole. And one thing kind of led to another until like here we are in a world that now everything that we stand for, whether it's equity or Arab or Muslim or all of those things, is being attacked on a in a real way. And it's not what the world wants to hear for the most part.

SPEAKER_00 16:06

And you touched upon how kind of one thing led to another. We know that there's a need for it. So was that based off of fighting to push that, or was that because people were encouraging you and being like, there is a need, yes, come so soon, like let's push forward. How much of that was supported versus you fighting to be like, no, this is a space I'm gonna be in?

SPEAKER_03 16:26

I think it's a both and. I think it depends on the space and the time period. There were points in my life where people saw potential in me that I didn't even realize I had, and they gave me platforms that I was able to leverage and support. So I've had, I was fortunate to have a bunch of different coaches throughout my career and mentors that have opened doors for me and that have supported my growth. And then in many cases, people saw me and didn't see me in those spaces. I think one of the things that really pushed me into the public speaking realm too was the fact that I live in a community where someone who shows up the way I do physically is has a really hard time finding work as an administrator. And so my whole consulting world really grew because I knew I had the ability to have more impact and I couldn't have that impact through traditional routes because some gatekeepers wouldn't allow it. And so the only way for me to do it was to kind of carve my own pathway and create my own path. Um, so I think it was a combination of both of those things. I knew I wanted to do more, I knew I could do more. Um, and in some spaces I wasn't allowed to do more, so I had to find ways to be able to do more. And in other spaces, that was like something that people nurtured and helped me grow. So I would be a remiss if I didn't like acknowledge my mentors and the people that really opened doors and paved ways for me.

SPEAKER_00 17:34

Yeah. You also touched upon how you didn't see yourself reflected in books or textbooks. Was there a moment where you realized that education could be used as a tool of liberation? And how did you make that switch in your classroom?

SPEAKER_03 17:49

So as an English major, I always looked for classes whereas like women's rights or like Muslim women's literature, and I took like all classes that I felt like I could find myself in, and in every class it was a disaster. And I remember being in a women's studies class and it was a lecture hall with 360 plus students, and the teacher gave us a novel that was um Arab Muslim female protagonist, but a really stereotypical book. It was the first time I read an Arab character, and it was so stereotypical. I was so offended. And she came to class on Wednesday and she said, I want to know what you think. And she pointed at me. And so I stood up in the class and all I said was, This book is really offensive to me because it doesn't represent me and it doesn't represent anybody that I know. I reflect back at that moment so often, and I'm mad at myself. I'm mad at my high school education for not preparing me to be able to like really self-advocate in that moment and plant a seed of doubt and 360 plus other students sitting in the classroom for them to understand that that book was problematic and stereotypical. I think that was a turning point for me, right? It was a turning point for me to realize that I wasn't given the tools as a high school student, nor was I given the tools midway through my college degree to be able to speak on these topics or to understand them in depth, to be able to like really help create like a critical, like a consciousness about why these types of texts and these conversations and why the single story that exists in media and in the news and in the American kind of general ethos exists and how that's problematic for me as someone who shows up this way and who is the mother of daughters, how that impacts how they show up in spaces because of what society is constantly telling them. And so I think it was that experience that I feel like really kind of got me into looking at how can I first develop that skill set in myself? Because it was something I had to learn on my own. And then how could I take that and package it so that it is developmentally appropriate for middle school and high school students? Because my motto is if they're old enough to experience it, they're old enough to talk about it and are experiencing those things every single day in a lot of ways, both positively and negatively, more negatively in today's context. And so if they're not grounded in who they are, oftentimes we're pushing them to abandon their cultural and linguistic and religious identities and assimilate. Research shows that a student who's really grounded in a self-concept that's very strong shows 25% higher gains than a student who isn't. And so when we're sitting here talking about all these wonderful teaching strategies and all these big words, the true equity is giving students a space to feel like they don't have to leave who they are at the doorstep, but inviting them into a space that says, I love all of who you are. As an English teacher, I invite my students to write poetry using their native tongue. I always tell them, you're not writing for me, you're writing for yourself, right? So what do you want to create that's an actual depiction of who you are and what do you want to put out in the world? Like, really think about what's important to you and what you want to communicate and who you want to communicate that with. And then just let your pen flow, right? And the multiple writing kind of comes naturally. Even when I teach grammar, I tell kids like a period's not the end of a sentence. A period's a place where you force your reader to stop and really sit in your word. So think about how you want to use a period. Think about where you want to start a sentence, think about the word you want to use because your voice is power, right? You're manipulating your reader. And we can see that through great writers like Edgar Allan Poe and just other writers who really, Clint Smith and Hamad al-Qud, like there's so many writers who really show us how to paint with words. Elizabeth Acevedo really comes to mind too, how to paint with words so that our students can read these mentor texts and really implement and kind of adopt those strategies for themselves. And so I it came from that experience. It started there. And I think as time progressed, I saw the power with my students. And now as a department chair, we're writing a program that kind of takes that model and stretches it out to a four-year program. And I keep in touch with kids and the things that these students are doing, the ways that they're advocating for each other, for themselves, the changes that they're making at a college level, the things that they're thinking about, the conversations that they're having are very different than the conversations and things that I was thinking about when I was their age because I wasn't able to. And a lot of it is having the opportunity to develop that toolbox and that repertoire of skills when they were in high school so that they can carry it into a world where they really understood who they are. In education, sometimes we feel like we're creating safe spaces for them, but students are very good at finding. Their people among each other. And oftentimes when they're in high school, they create these safe spaces with each other. But then when they go off to college, it's like a whole different community of people that are very diverse. And it becomes very real for them that I am perceived very differently in this space where there's more people that are different than me than in my school community, where if you live in a state like Illinois, we're so redlined that if you're Arab, you're going to school with a lot of other Arabs. If you're a Latin A background and primarily like Mexican, you're going to school with a lot of kids who speak your language, have your short cultural standards, and then all of a sudden you go somewhere else for college and it's like a reality check. So how can we get the kids to really understand the context globally, not just nationally, so that they're able to operate, empathize, love, lead? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:42

So how do you do that? You touched upon letting them write in their native language, but what are some other ways that you implement in your classroom to build their confidence with their identity and their heritage?

SPEAKER_03 22:54

The first year we focus on identity, freshman year. So it's all about really kind of doing a deep dive and not like what sport do you like to play? That's important, but it's more like how do you identify? What are the intersections of your identity? Where do your values come from? What do we inherit versus what comes from our own lived experiences? Because sometimes we inherit things that we should abandon, right? And so, like really getting them to think about what have we inherited? Do I really believe this or is this something that was passed on to me? What are things that really shape who I am as a person? Let's think of some micro moments or micro stories in your life that really have shaped you. Stories you're gonna tell your grandkids. And let's think about how lived experiences shape who we are, shape our beliefs, and shape our values. We keep talking in education about mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors. Like how important it is for us to give students accurate mirrors that then serve as windows, right? Here's a window into understanding a culture that's not necessarily yours. And then what do I do with that information as far as sliding glass doors are concerned? So when I'm deciding as a gatekeeper what's a mirror for a student who doesn't identify the way I do, I'm often missing the mark, right? Like I just keep thinking about that teacher who said, This is book represents you and it didn't represent me. And so I'll never say to a kid, here's a story that I think you might connect to. No, I want you to create a story that is representative of you. Because in that way, then we're able to show the complexities and nuances of different identities and people can own their stories. And when kids are co-creating and designing these stories, they're serving as tools for other kids to really learn about each other. And then we can create these communities of like, hey, I can have a different faith than you, I can have a different belief than you, and we can still coexist because I understand that your lived experiences have impacted you in this way, and my lived experiences have impacted me in this way, and we can still share space together and work together in community. And then sophomore year, it's about really elevating marginalized voices. And so we talk about Native Americans, not as extinct people, but people who are still here today and what their conditions are. And then we backtrack and say, well, how did we get here? So we try to think about like as many marginalized voices that are not represented in our curriculum and amplify those and give kids the opportunity to research and really understand who these people are. How did they get into the situations that they're in today from a historical standpoint, but really looking at it from a contemporary contextualized vision through literature? And then in junior year, we define activism in all of its forms. And so really thinking about like art as a form of activism, reclaiming your story as a form of activism, poetry, painting. In my previous district, even planned a conference for students called The Day of Action, where I had professionals from finance and from urban planning and journalism and education come in and talk about how activism doesn't mean I have to stop my job and kind of do the side thing, but activism is also recognizing that systems of oppression live in every field. As a professional in that field, I can use my voice and my expertise and my professionalism to troubleshoot these things. And then by senior year, they're choosing passion projects and creating. And all throughout that, they're really using technology and communicating with authentic audiences and creating products for students by students. And it's a very untraditional curriculum. Their assessments are often like podcasts or documentaries or TikTok videos or just really leveraging, like now that you know, what are you gonna do with what you know? How are you gonna communicate that to an audience that you think should hear this message? What is my voice and how am I gonna put it out into the world in a real way?

SPEAKER_00 26:07

I love that. If we had more of that curriculum in other schools, the world would be such a different place. How can we promote this type of curriculum on a wider scale?

SPEAKER_03 26:17

That's where my public speaking comes in. That's what I'm trying to do. All of my keynotes and my workshops because I feel like this is the work that we need to do to heal our world, right? Hate comes from fear and we fear what we don't understand. And so the real antidote to hate is education. I always tell teachers when I speak to them, I'm like, you're the most powerful people in the world. You really are. And our power is in our classrooms. It's not Capitol Hill that controls our country, it's educational institutions that control the country because every person who is in Capitol Hill and who owns or sits in a position in a chair of power, sits in a classroom first. And so if our classrooms were doing more of this work, if one of the five police officers in George Floyd sat in a Floyd's murder, sat in a classroom like this one, how would it have changed that situation? Just one, right? It would have changed the entire trajectory. He could have still been alive today. It's unfortunate that we're not there as a country. And if anything, right now we're running backwards.

SPEAKER_00 27:11

Our cities usually are our first educators and our first teachers and shaping the way that we see the world through others. You shared about your great-grandmother. Can you share with us a little bit about your cities?

SPEAKER_03 27:23

So my cities Lebanese, um, El Hamha, she passed away not from COVID, but during COVID. And I get emotional when I think about her because she was such a beautiful human. She was the kindest.

SPEAKER_00 27:34

I'm so sorry for your loss.

SPEAKER_03 27:36

Thank you. She was the kindest person. She was just, you could never go to City's house without her giving you some marmalade that she made or chocolate. She was so generous. Um, we say in Arabic Madala. Like, sh nobody could cook like her.

SPEAKER_02 27:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 27:50

Nobody held a house like her. Nobody like was a mother like her. Nobody was a grandmother like her. It was all really earnest and honest and just like from the heart, like was effort, it was effortless. Like it was just who she was, right? And I am very privileged that I got to grow up with my my grandparents. Like they were very much a part of the fabric of my life and very much a part of my memories. Um, my grandfather still is, thankfully, Allah al Amda. He's 92 today, and he's with us. And so, like, he's somebody that I think is just so central. I always attribute my love to education for my with my grandfather. I remember him sitting next to me as a child when I would we would go for drives and he would just keep quizzing me on signs and words. Education was such a central thing to him. And my grandmother was just heart. She was all heart, and she raised us to love, really love, like deep love. Um, and showed her love. It wasn't just like I love you in words, but like you show your love to each other, and family is everything. She was the fabric that held the family together.

SPEAKER_00 28:43

So then you know what's so crazy is that I have a whole list of Siddhi-inspired questions, and I like go through and I like take like three or four for each person that I think like would resonate with the person. And literally on my script, I have how did your sitti show her love? I never asked anyone else that question. And the way that you're describing your Siddhi is someone who just outpoured her love and her heart for everyone, that's so special. Like, and I think it carried on through you and your family, you especially, how you show your love is by educating people because that's something that you love to do, and how you see that that can create a more like love, lovable world to live in. Um that's so special to see like where that came from. I'm so happy that you got to spend so much time with your grandparents. Did was there a specific story about her childhood or about one of your other grandparents' childhood that really sticks out to you?

SPEAKER_03 29:36

My grandmother's whole story, because she got married young too and moved to Palestine from Lebanon and lived the Palestinian experience as a Lebanese woman. Even her dialect became very mixed. She still had a little bit of Lebanon Lebanese twinge in her dialect, but became very Palestinian in her cooking and in everything else. I don't know that there's a specific story that really stands out other than like just her resilience, moving without parents, without anybody and really growing up at a time of war, right? They lived through the war and their story is a story of survival. My grandfather's entire story is a story of survival. And I think that's one of the reasons why it was really important for them that we knew where we came from and that we appreciated all the privileges that we had growing up in a country where we had to just exist and really hold on to things, but we weren't tasked with surviving the way they did. Our uh challenges were different, preservation and pride. And in a world that kept telling you that who you were wasn't good enough, right? Research shows that Arabs are failed citizens and not failed citizens because we have failed to become citizens, but because the world has failed to accept us as citizens. And that no matter how many generations of us are here, oftentimes when people want to be not nice about things, the first thing they'll say is, go back to your country. Like you weren't born and raised here, right? There's just such a lack of understanding. So when I think about my grandparents and I think about like their stories, I think about my grandfather being 15 and his earliest memories are in the neck band, Dad Yacin, carrying his youngest sister, who was two on his back, and his other sister who was seven, holding her hand and running away, walking over the carcasses of his brothers who were killed that night, and being separated from his family until they were reunited to escape the massacre in Dad Yassin in 1948. And then just thinking about how they were displaced again and again and again and just kept rebuilding themselves. They moved to Puerto Rico and they moved to Brazil and then they came back to Palestine and they then came to America and they moved back to Palestine. And then the apartheid wall went up and then they had to move again. Just the Palestinian experience, right? Always having to pivot and plan and react and respond and survive and still being able to preserve who you are under all of those circumstances and be proud of it and raise your children to love that identity. I think that is the testament like to who they are. My grand grandfather is a great grandfather now. Um, and our children's children are still speaking these words and these sentiments and really holding true to that identity. And so that is their ancestry, their lineage, their legacy that they've passed to us. I I can't really narrow it down to one story because I feel like I'm so lucky that I got to really know and learn so many of his stories. And they're intertwined with mine. I can't think of my childhood without thinking about my grandfather and my grandmother as a big part of my childhood.

SPEAKER_00 32:15

Oh, I love that. That's so special that you got to have that because they really share so much wisdom. Like you said, it's not just one story, it's just their central being of who they are is so resilient. And that's why this podcast to me was so important was because I really wanted to showcase that. And I love like looking back at our Siddhi stories and being like, yes, I'm going to derive some inspiration from them and keep pushing forward. Like, do you feel you are inspired by their life and were able to push through through them?

SPEAKER_03 32:43

100%. I I keep thinking about like how no matter what we experience, it's nothing compared to what they experienced. And they still were able to breathe and survive and raise and love and laugh and celebrate and do all the things, right? I feel like these stories, preserving these stories, sharing these stories, right? It's giving people the opportunity to see us as people. I don't think people see that, right? When you're talking about Palestine, particularly in today's context, Palestine-Israel, it's often from a war standpoint, it's often from the genocidal standpoint. We are people, we have lives, we have memories, we have laughter, we have culture, we have family, we have love, we have survival. We're not limited to the oppression that we have sustained and survived. There's more than that to who we are as a people. And we've we existed before oppression, we existed before occupation. It's really important for people to know those stories too, in order for them to recognize who we are. So I feel like these stories are so important to share.

SPEAKER_00 33:36

Yeah. And was there a favorite food of your cities that you loved eating by her?

SPEAKER_03 33:41

My city, I swear to you, Leila, my city fried fries, they tasted different. Like I keep telling. So I, when I got married, my mom and my dad moved to Chicago and I stayed in New York. And the only people that were still in New York were my grandparents. So I would take my daughter Bayanne and go sleep at my grandparents' house every Friday to Saturday. And my grandfather would go to sleep early, and I would stay up with my Siti, and we would watch really dramatic Arab series. She would always make steak and fries and salad. I would tell my mom, I'm like, she would literally pull it out of the freezer and she would marinate it and cook it. And she would, she would be like, Are you hungry? And then she'll pull out her shrock, put libban on it, put nana, roll it up, and it was the most delicious thing. So, like everything she made from her makluba to her like shrock sandwiches to her steak and fries, I just feel like her hands had baraka in them. They were black. And everything that she put in our mouths was from her heart, and so it just tasted so different.

SPEAKER_00 34:32

Yeah, yeah. And I I I'm sure, I'm sure it tasted great. But I think it's when you love someone so much, anything they give you is like gold, you know? I love that. It's incredible how much wisdom and resilience our Sithis passed down to us, whether through their stories, their actions, or just the way that they carried themselves. Those lessons often become the foundation that helps us navigate the hardest parts of our own journeys. Is there like um what have been some of the biggest challenges that you faced in your career? And have you been able to work through them?

SPEAKER_03 35:03

I feel like we're facing them now as we speak. There's just such an attack on equity work. There's such an attack on diversity, there's such an attack on um, particularly since October of last year, like being Palestinian in an academic space and very vocally Palestinian in academic space has been there's been some attacks um on your integrity. I don't think that I could be as steadfast and resilient if it wasn't for the roots that I come from. And and just knowing that this is my calling, right? I can't ask students to show up authentically if I don't show up authentically in front of them. It's really hard for me to not be who I am. And in today's context, I would even wager to say that it is somewhat dangerous to show up that way in academic spaces. Academic spaces are sometimes the most violent spaces towards who we are as people. If they weren't, our world would look very different. And so I would say the challenges are definitely there. I think, I think the last few years have been some of the hardest years for me professionally, because the more vocal you are with social media and publications and like alhamdulillah, I've won six, I was awarded six awards nationally and internationally for my work. And so my work is very much very, very public. And I think that the more attention it gets, the more the pushback I get as well. So trying to find a balance between finding those spaces where you're able to continue doing the work and really inspiring the young adults and the young people in our lives to continue doing that work, but also being true to who you are and what you what's important to you at the same time. Showing up authentically is something that I'm always trying to figure out how to do that in order for me to really be living what I'm asking my students to to do and experience by example.

SPEAKER_00 36:38

Has there ever been a moment where you thought to yourself, let me just be a little bit quieter, let me tone it down? Did that voice ever creep in your head?

SPEAKER_03 36:46

No, I don't I don't know that I'm able to do that because then I I feel like a fraud. But it took me time to really grow into myself and to know what this looks like. Once I I felt once I felt that and and really liberated myself from the fear of showing up authentically, especially in educational spaces, it's really hard for me to think about another way of being. I can't imagine myself being anything other than this.

SPEAKER_00 37:07

Yeah. I love that. How were you able to liberate yourself?

SPEAKER_03 37:11

It just it was something that happened over time. Maybe first it started with liberating myself from a very oppressive marriage. And then my education and really fighting for my education and being able to like achieve that. And then standing in front of people and recognizing and realizing that people do want to hear our stories, right? Like there's this idea where we're kind of told that people don't want to hear our stories. But the reality is that I've been in many different spaces and I've never really had pushback in 3D from people they want to hear and they don't have the opportunities to often hear stories like ours. I feel like there's an appetite for it. I feel like there's a desire for it. That also is very empowering. It gives you the opportunity to really find those spaces and leverage them for yourself. And I think about my daughters, right? I always think to myself, like, as an ancestor, what's the legacy that I want to leave behind? Yes. What kind of a world do I want to leave for my grandkids? This definitely isn't it, right? We're we're fortunate to have diants as ancestors. And like, so when we think about what are we leaving our kids in the future as ancestors, what are we leaving our grandkids when they remember us? What do we want them to remember us by? So, like, I hope that my children and my children's children and their children can look back and say, My sitosan, like this is the thing, this is how she fought. Like when they're when George Floyd happened, not just for Palestine, but for everybody who's oppressed. I want them to see me as someone who really did the work that we say that we're about and that we stand for selflessly and really understand that our oppression is linked and that our humanity is linked, and that our work to get rid of those systems is also linked. And it's super powerful when we stand together and we dismantle those silos and those boxes that the systems of oppression have created around us and we are in solidarity, true solidarity with each other. It's so powerful. And so I want them to look back at me and see that as my legacy. I hope that that's the case.

SPEAKER_00 38:56

I love that. I have three daughters now, alhamdulillah. With each kid, I became more and more empowered and more and more who I truly am. And it's because of the fact that I look at them and I'm like, I want to move better in the world so that they could see me through that lens. You juggle a lot on your plate, mashallah. Like you're, like you said, you're a mom, you're an educator, a speaker. Um, where do you you kind of keep that motivation going and that determination, especially in like such emotionally taxing roles?

SPEAKER_03 39:25

That I don't know. So I had Bayon when I was young. I finished my bachelor's degree. I did my doctorate while I was working full-time as a single parent with three children. I finished my national board certificate, I think, towards the last year of my doctorate at the same time. I I think that it's just like I can see the end goal and I know how important it is. So I feel like I can't let myself take that break. I can't hide in my privilege being in America and not being under that direct fire that other people in different parts of the world are living through. So I feel like this is my work. Like this is my work here, right? And this is my work in classrooms, and I love what I do. There's a lot of intersectionality between what I do in the classroom and then my public speaking and my publishing, and it's all kind of interlinked with each other. And I think they're all passion projects and they're all really important to me. And so I I don't see it sometimes as work. When I'm writing, when I'm publicly speaking, when I go to conferences and I get to connect and network with people, it doesn't feel like work to me. It feels like like my life. Like hamdah, my kids are there. So I have time now to be able to do some of that stuff. There's no babies in the house that need me. Everybody's driving. So this is my my baby now. I feel like I'm nurturing this baby and and who knows where it'll go.

SPEAKER_00 40:33

I think that's the key is to figure out something that you're passionate about because it really shows to other people that's when real change can happen. Can you share a moment that reminded you of why you do what you do and an experience that made you be like, this is all worth it?

SPEAKER_03 40:47

I don't know if it's a positive experience. One of the things that I'll I'll share is um when Bayanne was in 10th grade and we just moved back from Dubai, her English teacher made her apologize for 9-11 in front of her English class. And that was in a district where a good 30 to 40% of the kids look like her and came from a Palestinian background. And this is a teacher that was retiring in a year, and so my immediate thought was like, how many kids have been subject to like a microaggression or a macroaggression by this teacher and for how long? And like we don't come from democratic backgrounds, and so we don't really self-advocate. We're not taught to self-advocate, and that's something that's learned, right? I think that was a big, big thing for me. It's like when you're reading research, right? It's of course it's people that are represented in the statistics and the numbers, but when you're literally dealing with that at home, it's very, very different. And so that was a big thing for me that reinforced like why I need to needed to do this work at a much larger scale. I think that was a big one. Another one was I was standing in front of my class teaching first period, and a teacher came to my classroom and she put her hand on my shoulder and she said, I just want to know how you feel after what your people did in France. And I remember being so appalled. I was so upset. Literally upset because I was like, Who are my people? And you teach kids who look like me every single day. How does this show up in your classroom if this is what you perceive me as, right? And then the audacity of her to have this conversation in front of students while I'm teaching. She couldn't even wait until we saw each other at lunchtime, but felt the need. And so I had to do the repair work of talking to my students and doing all of the damage control from that moment that was a micro moment, which probably didn't mean anything to her, but it was a life-defining moment for me. I think things like that always reminded me that there was a need because when educators who are responsible to make creative safe spaces for our kids are perpetuating these very harmful narratives in their classrooms and not intentionally, right? They're not doing it on purpose, but they're they're coming from what they know and what they know hasn't been disrupted. I just keep thinking to myself, like, how does that shape that student's self-concept? If I was a student in that moment, how would that have shaped me and my perception of myself? Because it was hard for me as an adult. I can't imagine like my daughter and her feeling about herself in that moment. It was a life-defining moment for her. And so um, I think it's moments like that that really kind of kept me going and realizing that. And then hearing students come back and say, like, this changed me. It changed who I am as a person. Uh and I watched that kind of that journey for with a lot of my students, even in a year's time. I had students who were super quiet at the beginning of the year who then ended up leading things like student equity boards at the end of the year and talking to administration about things that they felt like needed to be different in schools and creating communities around themselves that were rooted in equity and in conversations. The real-time impact of the work keeps you going because you're like, okay, yeah, it's it's having an impact. It's working. This is why we do this work.

SPEAKER_00 43:26

I think that's what people don't get is that a lot of people want a general curriculum for all, no politics, nothing different involved in their curriculum, but there are teachers who are showing up with these biases that exists out there, anyways. And so might as well just give them a knowledgeable way to like actually function within this curriculum because it's gonna show up either way. Um, and I don't think people like really understand that. Like, for those who want to advocate for more inclusive curriculum, what are some actionable steps that we can take?

SPEAKER_03 43:57

I think a more responsive curriculum comes from the Community, right? I teach in a primarily Latin A community now. I'm not Latin A. I don't identify that way. I would never come in and say, here's the book list that I think represents this community because that's not my lived experience. A lot of it comes from talking to kids, what we call street data by Shane Sefiro, having community conversations with the community, with the students, co-creating with students, really being involved. Oftentimes we see that our marginalized communities tend to not be as involved because of so many barriers in their school communities. But like that involvement through parent advisory boards, through bilingual boards, through all these different opportunities to advocate for, through PTAs, just so many different opportunities for parents to be a part of those communities and really have a voice in shaping their students' experiences and insisting that that needs to look different. But also it's the hard work at home of reinforcing that our kids should always be proud of where they come from and who they are. I think it's a combination of both. And then the schools have a responsibility, right? To go out there and really have those conversations and do the research and the work to make sure that they're meeting the needs of their communities as well.

SPEAKER_00 44:59

Yeah. What would you say to a parent who's like, well, I'm just one person. How am I going to make that change within the school?

SPEAKER_03 45:07

One person is powerful, but also find your people. Find your there's if there's one person, there are more. But one person is super powerful. Like one voice is enough to make change. If one voice here, one voice there, right? But also there are people out there. Like I have communities of support that are beyond my where I live. Technology today makes the world so big. So when I am working on different projects, I lean into different people within my professional learning community from all over the world. And so we have larger mechanisms for support now and for community building that we really need to leverage.

SPEAKER_00 45:37

Before we wrap up, what's a project or initiative you're working on right now that like you're really excited about?

SPEAKER_03 45:43

At the moment, I we're wrapping up the last bits of uh work on the book. And I think we're gonna start putting together some professional development modules for schools on that. And I'm really excited to just hold the book in my hand because it's a project that we've been working on for quite a while. And I think it's a it's it's definitely a uh a kind of like product that that would that came from really deep within the four of us. So I'm excited and I feel like it's gonna be transformative in the world outside. And so I really can't wait until the book is in my hands and in other other educators' hands, and to make sure that the book is implemented and adopted in ways that are authentic and impactful.

SPEAKER_00 46:17

Yeah, inshallah.

SPEAKER_03 46:18

Do we know when it's going to be able to roll out? Um, goal is for it to roll out in July, inshallah, of this coming year. And I'll share the link with you too if you want to share it with the notes. Anybody wants to pre-purchase or sign up for it, discount it right when it comes out.

SPEAKER_00 46:30

Yeah. So where can everyone follow along with your journey?

SPEAKER_03 46:33

My Instagram is where I'm at right now, unfortunately, because of really intense doxing. I had to deactivate my Twitter.

SPEAKER_00 46:40

In our closing, I'd like to go back to how we started with a Siddhi-inspired question. So if your Siddhi was here with us today, drinking her shade, listening in on our conversation, what part of your story do you think she would smile at and be most proud of?

SPEAKER_03 46:56

That's a tricky one. I think I think my sitti would be really proud of a lot of things. I think she would be proud of like my daughters and how we were able to raise like such good kids, like beautiful humans who are rooted in their culture and their identity. I think she'd be so proud of like just my impact in the world. I know she was proud of me when she was alive, so I can't imagine that she would even be more proud of me now. I think she'd be proud of how clean my house is, for sure. No dust on the fan. Yeah. The whole thing. Like, I think she would be so proud of how clean my house is for sure. I think she would definitely comment on that. She would be proud of like my cooking. She'd be proud of like the things that, you know, were important to women in her time period and in her generation. I think that they've really passed those things down to us too. We're we're well-rounded, alhamdulillah. And I attribute that to their them the way they raised us. And so I feel like she would be proud of a lot of things, but I think most proud she would be most proud of the fact that we were able to like really extend our values and and pass them on to our children and our grandchildren.

SPEAKER_00 47:52

That's part of her legacy, is what you have been able to build for your kids, because that that's all kind of where it came from and where it stemmed from. So I love that. I'm I'm sure she would be proud of you. So Sen, thank you so much for sharing your story, your wisdom, and your passion with us today. Your work in education and advocacy is not just about teaching, it's about reclaiming narratives, empowering students, and making sure the next generation sees themselves reflected in their learning. And the impact you're making is extremely measurable and very tangible, mashallah. Um, thank you so much for being here.

SPEAKER_03 48:21

Thank you so much for having me. I I look forward to listening to more of these episodes with more um powerhouses.

SPEAKER_00 48:27

So thank you. Thank you for listening to this episode of Siddhi Stories with Dr. Sos and Jabir. Her story, rooted in resilience, identity, and generations of strong Palestinian women, is a reminder that education can be a tool for liberation when it's grounded in truth, love, and justice. If her words moved you, I invite you to explore the resources she mentioned and the stories that continue to shape our understanding of self and community. I've included the books that she's mentioned in our show notes. They are really awesome, and authors like Muhammad al-Kurt, Ibtasan Barakat, and Shane Safir. And make sure you keep an eye out for Dr. Jabeda's upcoming book. I've also included the pre-order link in the show notes as well. To follow along and support Dr. Sosan Jabeda's incredible work, make sure to follow her on Instagram at SJEDUCA, us on Instagram at sipties.stories, and please rate and review anywhere where you listen to your podcasts. It really goes a long way and really help us grow in the future. Until next time, stay rooted, stay resilient, and keep sharing your stories. Mahasalama.