Safia Jama is the author of Notes on Resilience, included in New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set (Akashic Books, 2020). Her full-length poetry collection, Crowded House (Beltway Editions, 2023), was selected for Slapering Hol Press’s Eight Debut Poets. She is a Lecturer teaching first-year writing at Baruch College.
Introduction: As part of our Spring 2025 issue of Pedagogy in Praxis, we present a series of conversations with Graduate Teaching Fellows and seasoned faculty, reflecting on the evolving landscape of pedagogy in higher education. These interviews explore diverse approaches to teaching, critical engagement, and the lived experience of navigating the classroom as both scholars and educators. Conducted over Zoom, the discussions have been transcribed and edited for clarity and focus, while preserving the texture and nuance of each speaker’s voice. This interview features Professor-Poet Safia Jama.
Joe: We’re so excited to have you for our interview series! We’ve been interviewing some Grad Teaching Fellows, some first-year teachers, others rounding out their teaching fellowship, and we’re so excited to be able to get a range of different perspectives and experiences teaching at Baruch. So just to start off, how long have you been teaching in general, and then at Baruch?
Safia: I confess I kind of lost count of the years that I’ve been teaching. So I just say, 20 years and still counting. This is my eighth year teaching at Baruch. I was adjuncting for a good number of years. Maybe six teaching here and elsewhere. And this is my second year full-time at Baruch.
Joe: At other places, were you also teaching English at universities?
Safia: I spent ten years as a high school English teacher in both private and public schools, and then went back to do my MFA in Poetry at Rutgers Newark, and then started teaching there. So that was my first college teaching gig. I also taught at BMCC and a small private college, ASA College. A lot of poets were teaching in the ASA college. I’ve taught some poetry workshops here at Adelphi out in Garden City, and some workshops here at Baruch. I did a community workshop for Cave Canem, the Black poetry foundation. Lots of little workshops over the years, at libraries, with literary journals.
Joe: It’s great to see so much breadth and in such a variety of institutions, from university workshops to community workshops, and to see it as so foundational for your pedagogy too, these different forms of community-facing work. So, I want to ask what motivates you to teach? Considering teaching in different places and to different degrees, has your motivation changed over time?
Safia: I really like this question because, especially in the last couple of years, that word “motivation” has been on my mind lately. I think initially the desire to teach came from really wanting to find work that felt meaningful to me. I am not motivated clearly by money. [Shared laughter] However, I am realistic enough to know we do need some money to get by in the world. My mother was a teacher and my dad taught as his first job. And I was very touched by my experiences with my own teachers who made such a difference in my life.
Really, it was after 9/11 when I lost my job at an ad agency. I was working as a junior copywriter and had a crossroads moment where I thought, “Gosh, what am I going to do with my life?” I took some time to reflect and came up with the idea to teach. That was my story for getting into it.
And then, of course, once you’re in it, it’s very sink or swim. Like diving into water, your motivation becomes staying above water and getting somewhere. Once you’re in it, you have to do the thing and have the experience of being in the classroom. In thinking about what motivates me, I want to have a good experience while I’m teaching, and I want that to be the case for my students as well. It’s just a mind-bogglingly big question – what motivates us to teach? They say for some people certain work is a calling. How do you explain that? Maybe it’s a spiritual thing.
Immediately, I want everyone to have a good experience. However, it’s not entertainment. It’s a very complex, nuanced thing we’re doing in the classroom. I don’t think it can be easily boiled down into something as simple as motivation. However, it’s something I reflect on each and every day, and it changes depending on the day. What motivates us today will not be true tomorrow, you know—a lesson we teach today may not work tomorrow because of the different mix of students or what happened in the news that day.
But yes, to have a good experience, really—and then the question is: what constitutes a good experience? That’s another question entirely.
Joe: Yeah, I think we can think about what makes a good experience through maybe some of the questions that bring us more concretely into the classroom. But I’m really struck by that question, and I think it would make a great writing prompt: how do you explain work as a calling? In my brain, when you said that, I was like, that sounds like a job for a poet. How do you say to someone, “I just feel like I’m supposed to do this”? I was also touched that you come from a family of teachers, thinking of who inspires us. If you could think of a specific teacher, maybe a couple who made an impression or made a difference on your life or your education?
Safia: Definitely. I’ve had many teachers who made me who I am in many ways, starting with my mother, but definitely starting in elementary school. I have a very clear memory of my first-grade teacher asking me to write something, like a sentence about my summer. I have a very clear memory of looking at the blank page and then looking at my teacher Ms. Hickey and saying, “I can’t do it,” and she just literally looked at me and she’s like, “Yes, you can do that.” And that was the turning point, you know?
And then fast forward to like a tenth grade teacher I had, Ms. Knox, at UNIS (UN school in New York City). I remember Ms. Knox really seemed to appreciate my doodles I had adorned my reading journal with. And she just made a big fuss over my doodles which I had just spontaneously done. And that really made a difference in my life – just by seeing me.
She also did an activity which I realized inspires what I do now in the classroom, where I make time just about every week for the class to sit in a circle. After we freewrite, everyone shares a line or a thought or a story from their writing. We just patiently wait for everybody to share. We did that in my class with Ms. Knox. She had a provocative prompt: “If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?” Everyone went around, and I said, very seriously, “I wish I didn’t take everything so seriously.” She replied, “Oh, you should watch movies. I watch movies like every day.” I don’t follow that advice, but it was wonderful. She was just so playful and wore black and taught drama. I was too shy to take her drama class.
Later in life, of course, I learned a lot in college, but when I was in the MFA program, it was really refreshing to learn from creative writers who were very collegial with us. They would tell stories and talk about their jobs. I found it very refreshing to work with people where the focus was the practice of writing, and they would empower us to go forth and write. We would give each other feedback in workshop.
I really love workshops for that reason, where there wasn’t specifically too much of an agenda. It was very bare bones, but then we could fill that space with our own ideas.
Our professors, like Rigoberto Gonzáles, who was a great poetry mentor of mine, would just be very real with us—very no-filter, very real and honest, but with a lot of heart too. Those were some of the teachers who inspired me.
Joe: I really love this “blank page” first memory as a writer and a writing instructor, for that to be such a formative moment. It’s really fun when we’re like, “oh, I’ve done this activity as a student before and want to implement it in my class.” I wonder if there are moments where you have that strong realization where you’re sitting in that circle with your students and you’re like, “I’m Ms. Knox right now.”
Safia: I didn’t realize that until literally last week – maybe I was thinking about this conversation we were going to have – that I hadn’t really drawn a line between those two experiences. I was aware of both, but to connect the two in a very conscious way, I really had not done that. So thanks for giving me this chance.
Joe: Of course! Now thinking more about teaching at Baruch, I’m curious what has been the most rewarding aspect of teaching at Baruch? And what has been the greatest challenge teaching here?
Safia: So my most honest response to that question is that it is what just happened. As teachers, as professors, we’re very much creatures of the present moment. I know this is a cliché, drawing from someplace—I’m not sure from where, if it’s acting—but you’re only as good as your last lesson. If you have a great class, you feel great. And if you have a class that did not go well or something happened or you made a mistake that you can’t immediately undo, then that is exactly what’s on your mind.
For me, my greatest reward is the great class that I just taught, which for me was yesterday afternoon. I felt really good after my class, and I could tell you about that class. But I also want to get my arms around the other side of the question about the greatest challenge, which I feel like they’re both. Maybe it’s the yin and yang—there’s always gonna be a little bit of that challenge, that difficulty like the grain of sand in the oyster. That’s the tough part of this lesson, but then here’s where we can really create something meaningful out of this class. So I love that you put the two questions together because I think they do relate.
To give the example of this recent class—and hopefully I’m not violating FERPA, we can anonymize or I won’t mention names—I’ve been working with the pedagogical tool known as the fishbowl discussion model. I heard about the fishbowl when I was a student teacher prior to teaching in the secondary school classroom. Basically, a group of students sit in a circle in the middle of the room and have a discussion, and then everyone on the outside of the circle listens. Perhaps they take notes and then at a certain point—I’m not sure if this is official methodology—but at a certain point, I like to have the students on the outside of the fishbowl participate in some way, engage or respond.
The first time that I really did this was last year, and I was really learning how to do it through trial and error, seeing what worked and what didn’t. So this year I felt a bit more solid on it, and I was really pleased because yesterday afternoon a group of students planned and prepared for their discussion and followed through beautifully.
There was one little snafu where one of the readings they sent me was not the correct reading from my list. So I informed the student who had written to me, saying I’m not going to distribute this reading because it’s not the correct one. When I went to teach the class, I didn’t know if it was gonna work. I had a plan for what we were gonna do that day, but I didn’t know if the piece that the students had planned would be ready.
That was the challenge—when you give up some of your power as a teacher in the classroom and you share it with the students, that could go in many different ways. But I think that’s where the reward happens when you give them that chance to show leadership, to have an experience.
We were able to have a little chat while the rest of the class was doing their pair share for the freewriting. I had a little chat with the group and I was like, “Listen, so what happened?” And then everything was out in the open. They explained, and I asked if they wanted to send the reading now so their classmates could know what they’re talking about, or if we should delay it until another day. They seemed very game and ready, so I said we could go ahead and find a workaround. This is a real-life scenario and they’re working as a team.
They went through with it, and I thought it was successful. It was wonderful to see a small group of students having a real discussion with a manageable number of people.
There were seven of them, all participating and talking about specific readings. I had given each student a role—that was something I had added. One student is the question generator who generates questions. One student is the facilitator who guides the discussion. One student is the text expert who cites quotations from the texts. One student is the devil’s advocate who presents an opposing, possibly controversial viewpoint. And there’s also the theorist who generates compelling bold claims that emerge from the question and the evidence.
They really magically adhered to these roles and then discussion emerged. It took a little time—it was almost like a squeaky propeller jet or something, but then at some point there was a lift, where suddenly they were talking to each other and it was a discussion. I could feel the students who were maybe a little distracted suddenly paying attention. They were like, “Something’s happening.”
So that experience embodied both the great challenges as an educator wanting to give our students chances to rise to the occasion. I definitely had some anxiety prior to this experience that I had to sit with, yet it was very rewarding.
The challenges involve being able to tolerate the uncertainty of whether or not any given activity will work or may fail—not just because of the students, but because maybe instructions weren’t clear enough or maybe the activity needs some tweaking. So yeah, just being able to tolerate failure is important, an important quality in the classroom.
Joe: I think it’s really helpful thinking about the unknown of a class. You’re nervous about what could happen, but you still trust your students to show up in the ways that they can. And then seeing them take charge in their own way, and in the ways that their curiosities and conversations can go. I would love to try something like this, to really engage conversation. And thinking of engagement, how do you engage or encourage your students?
Safia: Well, it starts with us, right? As educators, we need to find ways to feel engaged ourselves in whatever the given work is. So that’s where we start. I am very focused on engaging myself, each and every day, and I lead with that. So I lead by example. If I can show my students that I’m engaged, then they can see that as a model. So I find that to be a powerful way to engage.
For example, some days I’ll freewrite with my students. And then I’ll read what I wrote, so I’m very transparent in that way. That’s one idea.
Another thing, though, I think I would rephrase or question maybe this “ideal” that we may have as teachers that we’re all sitting around and we have, let’s say, a poem or short story or an essay, and we’re sitting around and it’s going to be this elevated experience of having a conversation about this text. To expect to have a successful, open discussion where you have between 27 up to 30-odd students – it’s just not possible. So it becomes a game: who’s going to get the chance to participate and who’s expected to stay silent so that we can appear to have a free and open discussion? I feel like we need to forgive ourselves to a certain extent if the discussion is not going so well.
That being said, once we know the lay of the land, we can come up with methods where we can still give students a chance to speak every day and to engage in or at least witness some discussion. I find the fishbowl to be an authentic discussion that can happen logistically, given the numbers we have. It is logistically possible to have a seminar discussion utilizing the fishbowl model.
I’m very old-fashioned, so I write a lot on the whiteboard. I’m still searching for the perfect marker—haven’t found it yet, but the struggle of markers is real. I write on the board, and then sometimes I’ll say, “Okay, Group One, you covered the first three pages. Send someone up to the board, write it on the board. Let’s see it.” So they have to write the quote and then the page number. Then I’ll say, “Okay, everyone, write it down in your notes.” It’s very old-fashioned, but I feel that they need that kind of hands-on practice because of the realities of technology that are changing our experience of literacy today. I don’t know if I completely answered your question about engagement, but I think—
Joe: I think you absolutely did! Firstly, we need to think differently about expectations, especially as we may have had those smaller seminar experiences as students. This sort of romantic, “oh I can’t wait to sit with like eight people and talk about this novel.”
Especially when so much of our English classes is learning how to talk about literature, you can’t just be like, “So whatcha think?” and expect an hour and forty minutes of discourse. But thinking of engagement in the classroom, especially after online teaching some years ago, it’s such an embodied experience in the classroom, too. That kind of social annotation on the whiteboard. It seems silly, but students are very excited to use markers on the board! And to fill the space of the class together like that.
Safia: Oh! I have one thing I want to mention about plays. I confess I haven’t taught Great Works, but I did have the chance to observe a class. I love to incorporate a little drama in the class. So whether I’m teaching a play or not, I will sometimes have students dramatize a novel, a story, or imagine a dialogue between two literary figures.
They write it up together on a Google doc and share with each other, and then read to the class. So I’m very interested in those types of engagement with the text, somewhat playful but somewhat serious. Like you have to stand up in front of everyone and present a scene. There are a lot of different skills involved. And there’s always a moment where students are like, “wait, we’re really, wait, we’re really doing this?” and then they’re like “Okay, yeah” and they get into it.
Joe: There is so much we can do, so much fun we can have, with our class content. And I’m reminded of your teacher, Ms. Knox, who was also a drama teacher!
So another idea of this interview series is also to be a resource for new teachers. Maybe for an incoming teaching fellow who is also a student themselves, or an instructor entirely new to Baruch but has been teaching elsewhere. So, it doesn’t havevto be class-specific advice, but do you have any general advice for new teachers?
Safia: I feel like there’s so much to learn when you’re newly in the classroom. I think it’s important – it sounds very basic – to prioritize your health and your well-being. For example, getting enough sleep. Really taking care of your body, because as you mentioned, it’s this embodied experience being in the classroom. And I think that the way we take care of ourselves has a direct impact on our students because then we can be more present and we can give them our best attention. So it’s less intellectual advice, but I think that it really can have a profound impact on the rigor and the level of questions that you ask when you prioritize your well-being as a teacher.
The second thing I would say is, in addition to what I had said earlier about ensuring you are engaged in the material that you’re teaching so that you can transfer that enthusiasm to your students—don’t expect it to come from them. Bring your enthusiasm and be yourself as much as possible, too, because I know that we are often advised to have a teaching persona. And I think we do need to have some level of boundaries with our students about what we want to share and what we don’t want to share with them about our personal lives, but I think that the more that you can authentically be yourself in the classroom, the more your students will feel it’s a good idea to be themselves and to show up more fully in your class. And that takes a lot of personal work, so for me, my own personal development as a person, as a poet, has always served me well in the classroom. All that back-end work that I did served well on the front end of being in front of a classroom. So those are some of my philosophies on that topic.
Joe: I’m so glad we got to end on that question – this answer just feels like a much-needed deep breath and a wonderful space to end the interview. Thank you so much for your patience with the interview planning and for agreeing to speak with me.
Safia: Thank you for your patience with my process of doing things. There’s, of course, so much more that we can talk about, but we could save that for future conversation.
Joe: Perhaps over pizza in May!
Closing reflection: Our conversation was a much-needed reprieve from the busy-ness of the semester. It was a joy to take time and reflect together. I could tell just from this conversation that Safia carries a gentle grace and kindness that I’m sure her students are deeply grateful for. There is such a deep level of care in her pedagogy, like from caring for the self in order to care for our students. Sometimes we may forget that we need to rest in order to show up in the best way for our students, to invite them to be themselves alongside us. And that is no easy task. I am also grateful that Safia shared concrete examples from her classes. I’m definitely doing fishbowls next semester!
Something I loved from this interview is thinking about the ways that we carry our past teachers with us in our present, whether we know it or not. By drawing a line between those teachers who greatly influence us, it feels almost cosmic to remember that we bring that lineage to our classrooms. As Safia said, perhaps it’s spiritual, the calling of tteaching. There is always so much more to say, as we often feel after one of those great classes or great conversations, when you wish you can just keep going. I deeply appreciate this opportunity to speak with, and learn so much, from Safia.
Key takeaways: What motivates us today may not be true tomorrow; “I can’t do it,” “Yes, you can do that,” that’s the turning point; Who’s your Ms. Knox?; The reward happens when you give students the chance to lead, to have an experience; Tolerating failure is an important quality in the classroom; It starts with us, lead by example; Get enough sleep; Bring your enthusiasm and be authentic; Still searching for that perfect whiteboard marker (the impossible quest?).
Find Safia here: thesafiajamaexperience.com and her Pedagogy in Praxis 2022 article “The Mindful Freewrite”