Romeena Kizilbash Kureishy

Romeena has been teaching Urdu in the US since 2008. She taught at the University of Pennsylvania STARTALK Urdu Program from 2008-2014 and has been with New York University Hindi Urdu Teacher Training Institute as an Urdu Pedagogy specialist since 2015. She has also served as Urdu Program Coordinator and Lead Instructor for Kean University’s Global Project-based Learning STARTALK Urdu Program since 2017. She has taught Beginner and Intermediate Urdu courses as an adjunct at the University of Pennsylvania. Ms Kureishy has extensive experience in curriculum and lesson development and provides teacher training to Urdu teachers in the US. She has also served as an Independent Urdu Specialist for the American Councils for International Education in Washington D.C. since 2012, working on proficiency tests for the Urdu language. She recently developed an online proficiency test for NYU. She is a consultant to US-based Urdu schools where she oversees curriculum development and teacher training. She is passionate about bringing Urdu teachers to an international standard and wants them to be the leaders in 21st-century language pedagogy in Pakistan and beyond. She has been conducting teacher training workshops in Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad, and Swat. Since December 2021 she has trained over 650 Urdu teachers from 140 schools. She organized a collaboration between NYU and AKU-IED which resulted in a 40-hour Urdu Pedagogy Training program in July 2022—the first of its kind in Pakistan. She was recently appointed as an honorary research associate/visiting faculty at AKU-IED. She has also collaborated with Karachi University to hold its first-ever Urdu Pedagogy Training certificate program in February 2023. Romeena holds a BA in Psychology and an MA in Urdu and is pursuing an MPhil in Urdu from Karachi University.