Dr. Mohammed Fourazani
Assistant Professor
Foreign Languages - English Section
College of Arts and Sciences
Ishraqah, monthly, spotlights a personality who significantly impacts our university community. Dr. Mohammed Fourazani is our Personality of the Month. Ishraqah is getting closer to the personality of Dr. Mohammed Forouzani as academic, poet, and passionate educator.
Dr. Mohammad Forouzani was born in Tehran, Iran, on December 9th, 1964. He started his career in the mid-90s by teaching language and literature courses to speakers of other languages and simultaneously participated in several national and international professional development programs and workshops to keep pace with the recent trends in foreign language teaching.
Dr. Forouzani is an English Language and Literature educator with more than 25 years of experience in teaching and teacher training. He has been teaching at the University of Nizwa since 2014. Prior to his position at the UoN, he was a faculty member at the Islamic Azad University in Iran for 18 years. His literary bent formed in his early teens was his primary drive to apply for the English Literature program at the BA and MA levels. And his love of teaching led him to do his doctoral degree in English Language Teaching.
Dr. Forouzani is a poet who values “meaning” and the role it plays in human thoughts and interactions. His poems covered a variety of themes (nature, love, philosophy, religion, etc.). He was deeply moved by war crime, refugees, and victims of violent incidents, all of which are addressed in his late-2016 poems. Dr. Forouzani has published three collections of poetry titled Inside Out (2017) and Out Inside (2019) in the UK and A Louvre of Verse in the US (2020). Furthermore, he published a short story titled “A room for a decent burial of memories” in 34th Parallel Magazine Issue 80 in 2020, which Piker Press republished in 2022. He has also completed four novels that are in the editing process.
Dr. Forouzani has authored different books in language teaching and applied linguistics, the most recent of which is a comprehensive reference in semantics titled An Illustrative Dictionary of Semantics (ILLUDS), first published in 2019 by BookVenture Publishers in the US. The second printing is currently in progress by Austin Macauley in the US, and the new print is likely to be available in Fall-Winter 2022-23.
Since the beginning of his career, Dr. Forouzani has followed two main principles in his classrooms: promoting autonomous learning and developing critical thinking skills in students at different educational levels. He believes that without autonomous learning and critical thinking skills, students and teachers end up at a dead end called “graduation.” In his view, a teacher’s mission is fulfilled when students get to know their talents, develop their critical thinking skills and practice autonomous learning to achieve the primary purpose of all this endeavor-“education.”
Dr. Mohammed Forouzani is a passionate educator, who seeks to leave a memorable mark on his students' mentality through the questions he raised in lectures or the knowledge he shared. He is definitely a remarkable educator.
