"Presently, I am a visiting associate professor at Indiana University and am teaching two levels of Sorani Kurdish and a course on modern Kurdish political history," Dr. Benjamin Priest said about his efforts in Kurdish language and studies.

"I’ve been down to “Little Kurdistan” several times (and would have done more recently were it not for Covid-19) and am familiar with the community’s efforts at expanding Kurdish language education. As someone who believes that you can’t truly understand a culture without learning the language, I am extremely happy to see this expansion. I am hopeful that particularly within that community, these resources can help heritage learners maintain this part of their collective identities and interest their non-Kurdish friends to explore it as well," the professor said told KurdPress about his efforts in teaching Kurdish at some Nashville schools.

About ways to boost teaching Kurdish language and Kurdish studies, Dr. Priest stated: "In terms of furthering research in Kurdish studies, I also am a big believer that the most effective means for this is gaining a familiarity with as wide a variety of Kurdish dialects as possible, starting with the standardized ones; for instance, I’m quite comfortable with Sorani, but my Kurmanji is weak and this stymies my efforts as a researcher. The more brains and resources put toward creating corpuses and content, the easier it will be for the study of Kurdish to continue and grow. I consider them complimentary rather than competitive."

"The primary issues facing Kurdish pedagogy in Western countries is the lack of funding and demand. Particularly in a post-Covid-19 climate, I maintain that the primary means of Kurdish education will be electronic, ideally through synchronous online learning – a class wherein all students meet digitally with an instructor at the same time in different locations. This lowers the barrier to entering such a less-commonly taught language. Generating demand is a bit of a trick – most Kurdish language students are also students of Arabic, Persian, or Turkish and are interested enough to make that jump. I have yet to have a student whose first foreign language was Kurdish; it’s always their second, third, or fourth," he said about the hurdles on developing Kurdish language in the West.

"While Kurdish will always be something of a niche, I think the efforts of higher education programs like the ones in Missouri University, Indiana University, University of Arizona, and University of Central Florida, as well as potential secondary school programs in Nashville’s Metro High School system are very promising," he said about the status of Kurdish language teaching in the US.

About the best ways to develop Kurdish studies, Dr. Priest said: "I think the combination of number of programs and outreach (read: exposure) as well as the normalization of online teaching will yield long-term benefits for Kurdish studies."

Reporter's code: 50101