Introduction

In adapting resources and teaching to be relevant to Arab audiences Nizar Farsakh has found it effective to use culturally and contextually relevant materials in teaching public narrative such as using:

• poetry by Mahmoud Darwish and Tamim Barghouthi (see below) whose poems evoke agentic narratives
• movies like The Message, Cairo 678, The Judge as examples of how events happen and how we make sense of them is up to us
• the themes of Narratives of Change and Narratives of Power Inequality (see exercises below) to teach how narrative can be strategic and help people understand how talking about themselves can lead to inspiring collective action.

Slides

Slides – Public Narrative Training in Arabic (21 slides)

Exercises

• Exercise – Narrative: Loss, Change, Challenges (Speaker)
• Exercise – Narrative: Loss, Change, Challenges (Listener)
• Exercise – Narrative: Difference, Loss, Power – Inequality Challenges (Speaker)
• Exercise – Narrative: Difference, Loss, Power – Inequality Challenges (Listener)

Videos

This video of a Lebanese woman speaking is a good example of her choices revealing values. (2:36 mins)

Tamim Al-Barghouti’s Poem – ظهر الحوت والثور الناجي

About the Instructor

Nizar has been teaching Public Narrative for over 10 years with broad experience across the Arab world as well as in the US. He was a TA with Marshall in 2010 for a year where he was responsible for 16 students each term, running weekly section meetings, reviewing written work and guiding learning. Along with the rest of the teaching team, he developed and refined course pedagogy and content, as well as contextualizing it for Arab audiences. Since then, Nizar has led training sessions in Iraq, Palestine, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Morocco. He also ran several online training sessions with trainees from across the Arab world. Nizar worked with other Arab public narrative trainers to develop materials and collect examples relevant to Arab audiences. In 2020, he co-found Inspire Leadership School with his Vietnamese American colleague Sandy Dang where they have been developing a variety of ways to teach narrative online and in different formats that accommodate the learners’ circumstances including creating an array of asynchronous teaching materials. – https://www.inspireleadershipschool.com/pages/instructors