Just as Socrates considered himself as the midwife of soul and his mother as the midwife of body, I think of myself as the midwife for both body and soul. My eight-year professional training in midwifery seemed to be incomplete until I ventured into another area of professional training, i.e. Educational Psychology and Curriculum Studies.
Throughout my graduate studies, I have tried to remedy the inseparability of body and soul drawing on Freire’s ideas and trying to distance myself from “banking” analogy that he has rejected. My work experience in Africa furthered my concern in this area.
In 2010, I won a global online competition entitled held by Ashoka and the Maternal Health Task Force (MHTF). I submitted to Ashoka Changemakers® a proposal for conducting a training program and was offered the opportunity to promote women’s health literacy in Uganda. While in Uganda and based on my previous reading at Al-Zahra University I realized that Freire’s ideas are further enhanced by Dr. Jane Vella’s work on Dialogue Education (DE), a systematic approach to adult education. As a result, I requested that Dr. Vella become my field supervisor. Her constructive role helped me to win the “Young Champions Innovation Marketplace” in Accra, Ghana.
My practical experience in India, Uganda, and Ghana along with writing my Master and as well as PhD thesis on Dialogue Education made me more acquainted with the state of education in the health field. Inspired by the effectiveness of DE, I started a PhD program in Curriculum Studies in Iran to explore DE in detail. There, I found that teacher education in Iran is dominated by positivist philosophy. Furthermore, the teachers’ health literacy is inadequate since health education is a null curriculum.
My firsthand experiences in applying DE in the field of education and health testify to its effectiveness as a new way of promoting health literacy as well as achieving other educational goals. The coursework taken in Curriculum Studies has helped me deeply understand the curricular components of DE and inspired me to use DE to organize formal, informal, and non-formal learning designs.
Currently, I work as an Assistant Professor of Curriculum Studies at the Organization for Educational Research and Planning (OERP), in Tehran, Iran. OERP is a government-affiliated, scientific, learning organization that is in charge of designing, compiling, and developing educational materials for general and TVE education. Here, in OERP I use my learning of DE to design and implement different curriculums. I also use this learning in my work with teachers in schools as well as working with pre-service teachers at the National Teacher Education University.
I currently hold the position of Assistant Professor of Curriculum Studies at the Organization for Educational Research and Planning (OERP) in Tehran, Iran. OERP is a government-affiliated research organization responsible for designing, developing, and implementing educational materials for both general and vocational and technical education (TVE). Leveraging my expertise in Dialogue Education, I contribute to curriculum development and implementation within OERP. Additionally, I engage in teacher training at both the in-service and pre-service levels.
In my work, Dialogue Education is moving from an adult-learning focus (andragogy) to a child-centered approach (pedagogy), enabling K-12 students to enjoy effective learning experiences.