The Department of Religion brought four Teaching Assistants to the University from Iran, Indonesia, Turkey and Tunisia.

Abdelkader Ben Rhit, Akbar Cheraghi, Zaki Nur’aeni and Betul Tarhan joined the staff this fall to teach their native languages for a year as part of the Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant Program.

Alan Godlas, a professor of Islam, Quranic & Hadith Studies, Arabic, Persian and Sufism, pursued the application process to bring FLTAs to the university.

He said TAs would benefit students – they would “gain additional insight from learning the language from a native speaker.”

The FLTA program is federally funded by the U.S. State Department. With a budget of $57 million allocated by the Department of Education through the National Security Language Initiative, the program brought more than 200 TAs to the United States last year.

For students at the University, additional sections of Arabic, Persian, Indonesian and Turkish and learning from a native speaker are available this year

Another benefit to TAs and students is the cultural exchange that takes place in and out of the classroom.

This exchange, Godlas said, is critical in today’s era of “gunpoint democracy.”

Teaching assistant Abdelkader Ben Rhit expressed his role as a cultural ambassador.

“I am here not only as an instructor of Arabic but also a cultural ambassador,” he said “My role is to teach Arabic, my mother tongue, through the context of culture and show culture through the means of language.”

These four teaching assistants will teach and live in Athens, fulfilling the first requirement of the program. They will return to their home countries afterwards.

Then it will be up to them and the university students they taught to, as Adelkader Ben Rhit said, “go back home and share their experiences.”