Connecting with Iraqi Students through American Pop Culture October 11, 2007

Favorite:

Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2007/09/18/Classroom_Tales_from_the_Other_Iraq

Author Ian Klaus talks about using American pop culture to connect with Kurdish students in an excerpt from his book, "Elvis is Titanic: Classroom Tales from the Other Iraq."

-----

Ian Klaus delivers "Elvis is Titanic: Classroom Tales from the Other Iraq."

In the spring of 2005, Ian Klaus, a twenty-six-year-old Rhodes Scholar, traveled eight hours from Turkey, via broken-down taxi and armed convoy, to reach Salahaddin University in Arbil, the largest city in Iraqi Kurdistan. ELVIS IS TITANIC is the poignant, funny, and uplifting story of the semester he spent there teaching US history and English in the thick of the war for hearts and minds.

Inspired by the volunteerism of so many young Americans after 9/11, Klaus exchanges the abstraction of duty for an intimate involvement with individual lives. Among the Kurds, a perennially oppressed but seemingly indomitable people, he encounters both openhearted welcome and resentful suspicion -- and soon learns firsthand how far trust can go. With assignments ranging from Elvis to Ellington, from the mysteries of baseball to de Tocqueville, from Michael Jackson to Thomas Friedman, Klaus strives to illuminate the American way for students initially far more attuned to our pop culture than our national ideals. These efforts -- recounted in unforgettable vignettes full of hope and discovery -- also occasion his own reexamination of truths we hold to be self-evident, as well as the less exalted cultural assumptions we have presumed to export to the rest of the world. - Cody's Books

Ian Klaus, who now lives in New York City, wrote for publications across the United States while he was in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is currently pursuing a doctorate in history at Harvard.