By Riyad A. Shahjahan When graduate students and early career faculty struggle to clarify an argument, I always give the same advice: find a model to follow. Look for an article, proposal, or dissertation that resonates to help articulate and organize your own ideas. Study how it builds its case, what kinds of evidence it uses, and how it structures its ideas. This is exactly what helped me develop a concept I call decolonial…
By Riyad A. Shahjahan Why do we write what we write? This question kept tugging at the back of my mind when I sat down to draft a piece about how I use popular culture in the classroom. At first, I thought I was simply documenting my teaching strategies—something practical, maybe even replicable. But as the words unfolded, I realized: I wasn’t just writing about pedagogy. I was writing through it—using reflexivity to ask deeper…
