Nasser Rashidi obtained his BA in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) from Shiraz University in 1991 and his MA in TEFL from the same university in 1995. He received his PhD in TEFL from Shiraz University in 2002. He is presently a professor of teaching English as a foreign language in the Department of Foreign Languages and Linguistics at Shiraz University. His area of research is TEFL including language teaching and discourse analysis. He has written 5 books and published about 100 articles on topics in the areas mentioned in the international and national journals. He has participated and presented papers in more than 100 national and international conferences.
Objective
Professor Nasser Rashidi's work focuses on the status of critical pedagogy and its application by the university instructors in their teaching methodology.His comparative study will explore the teaching methodology in the University of California, Berkeley and Shiraz University within the framework of critical thinking. The theoretical framework of the study focuses on the concept of “constructive interaction” in which the primary objective is training learners to be effective citizens. The instructor frequently creates an interaction between classroom discussions and the society needs. He/she challenges and questions both others' thoughts and his own thoughts. The study is important for Shiraz University to see how close the two universities are regarding the instructors' application of critical pedagogy in the methods of teaching and learning in their classes at different levels.
