I am a tenured Assistant Professor in the Department of Development and Education of Youth in Diverse Societies. My expertise is in the field of cultural diversity and inclusion in education, with a specific focus on dialogical perspectives. My teaching tasks include the coordinating role of the master's program Youth, Education and Society,  research and internship supervision, and the coordination and implementation of program-overarching educational innovation projects (see under the tab Education). 

My research focuses on community-based educational initiatives and parenting support, ethnic and religious identity formation, faith-based youth work, and research-practice partnerships. My current projects encompass topics around interventions countering polarization in education, parental participation in diverse schools, and mosque-based parenting support for families with a Turkish background in the Netherlands. In my work, I use qualitative methodology and adopt a multidisciplinary approach to studying issues of cultural diversity and learning. I welcome invitations for collaboration on these topics. 

Previously, for my Ph.D. research at the University of Amsterdam, I investigated the portrayal and practice (i.e. organization, learning goals, content, curriculum, and pedagogies) of mosque education in the Turkish Islamic communities in the Netherlands, with special attention to the role played by this non-formal religious education in the identity negotiation of the Turkish-Dutch children. Ongoing projects are described under the research tab.

Project-overarching problems, issues, and questions I am working with currently:

• Mapping the wider terrain of community-based learning and parenting support in the Netherlands (inclusive but not restricted to mosque-based initiatives): What kind of community-based education and parenting support initiatives exist, inventory of the ‘funds of knowledge’ contained in them, and identification of the transferability of the affordances coming from community-based initiatives to other educational/pedagogic settings.
• What are forms of meaningful collaboration between pedagogic stakeholders and schools, which collaborations contribute to creating inclusive and democratic school communities, and in what ways?
• Dilemmas of working in a research-practice partnership (RPP): How to organize research in a community-and-practitioner-relevant way, while simultaneously striving for academic relevance and innovation? And how can RPP collaborations be employed for the design and implementation of transformative (CHAT-inspired) interventions?

PhD supervision:

In 2024, together with my colleague Dr. Pomme van de Weerd, we have received the starter grant for research on community formation processes in secondary schools in the Netherlands, and are jointly supervising the doctoral research of Jiao Harmsen.

International research network:

I am a founder of ISPED: Research Network on Islamic Pedagogies and Education that brings together international experts in the field. Besides, I am part of the network of the American Educational Research Association, the Comparative and International Education Society, the European Educational Research Association, and the Netherlands Interuniversity School for Islamic Studies.