Am I Now Literate? A Literacy Autobiography of an Iranian PhD Student

About This Session

Description

In this session, “Am I Now Literate? A Literacy Autobiography of an Iranian PhD Student,” I explore literacy not just as a skill, but as an evolving, deeply sociocultural experience. Through personal storytelling and reflection, I invite participants into my journey—from trying to become literate in Iran to navigating academia in the United States. I attempt to ask critical questions to realize how literacy is defined differently across cultures.

Grounded in critical pedagogy, this session reexamines traditional definitions of literacy and challenges participants to expand their perspectives. The session is designed for adult educators, ESL instructors, and literacy advocates who work with multilingual and immigrant learners. Together, I aim to encourage educators to examine their own literacy narratives, as well as the hidden biases and expectations within the systems they teach in.

Participants can be informed to reframe classroom practices to better validate the lived literacies of their learners, particularly those navigating multiple languages and cultures. This session offers both research-based insights and experience-informed tools to build more inclusive, culturally responsive learning spaces.

All and all, this is not only my story—it’s an invitation to rethink what literacy looks like. Because literacy lives beyond test scores and textbooks. It lives in migration, silence, resilience, and voice.

What we'll cover:

“Am I Now Literate?” challenges participants to expand the way they define and engage with literacy in adult learning spaces, moving beyond standardized notions of reading and writing toward a more inclusive, identity-centered understanding.

Though I have taught English, earned multiple degrees, and now pursue a PhD in the United States, I still experience moments of “feeling illiteracy”. This session uses that tension as a starting point to discuss how immigrant, multilingual, and non-dominant learners navigate similar contradictions in literacy and identity.

Session Objectives:
Participants will reflect on their own literacy journeys and how these shape teaching practices, critically examine dominant definitions of literacy and how they affect learners from multilingual and immigrant backgrounds, explore sociocultural and emotional dimensions of literacy, including migration, language, identity, and power, and engage in storytelling, reflection, and discussion activities that can be adapted to various adult learning contexts. We’ll begin with the narrated story of my own literacy development journey in Iran, tracing early English language encounters, the sociocultural norms surrounding education, and how my understanding of literacy evolved through migration and academic life in the United States. I’ll reflect on the emotional tensions and persistent moments of feeling “illiterate,” despite being a PhD student and former English instructor.

Following this, participants will be invited to engage in a guided reflective activity to surface their own literacy journeys. Through dialogue, or small group sharing, we will explore questions such as: When did I first feel literate? Who decided that? What shaped my sense of being literate or not? We will then examine specific cultural, familial, and institutional factors that have influenced our literacy development, paying close attention to how race, class, language, migration, and gender intersect in those experiences.

Finally, the session will shift toward application as we’ll explore how these insights can inform the ways we design and facilitate adult education. Together, we’ll discuss how to integrate critical literacy into adult learning spaces.