MENA-X After-School Program Empowers Students by Blending Middle Eastern and Northern African Culture with STEAM

by Ari Robin McKenna

At Beacon Hill International Elementary School (BHIS), Helin (Heln) Taskesen and fellow mentor Helina Takele lead an icebreaker in late 2023 on the first day of MENA-X, a much-anticipated afters-chool mentoring and enrichment program with a 15-person waitlist.

A first grader calls out, "Who can do a handstand?" A nearby fifth grader responds, "Me!" And they huddle together in case they can help each other with any unchecked squares on their bingo cards. Soon after, a third grader in a flat-brimmed, blue and yellow Mariners hat proclaims, "I won, bro!"

The students settle at tables, and the carpeted room returns to library silent as Taskesen takes them through slides of pyramids, ziggurats, and spiral minarets — all from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region — that will tie into a STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics) activity where they'll build their own version.

Because it's an afterschool program, it's a normally frisky hour for the students, yet Taskesen, a high school senior, commands their rapt attention. Her current charisma is a stunning turnaround for Taskesen, founder of the MENA-X after-school program, currently in two elementary schools in the South End, and later this year at Rainier Vista Boys & Girls Club. When in middle school, Taskesen felt forced to bury her heritage as she struggled to find a way to assimilate into American culture. Instead, while still in high school, she's built an after-school program using a relational approach, an engaging and culturally sustaining curriculum, and the lessons of her past.

Taskesen describes the MENA region as an area of cultural and ethnic diversity encompassing north and northeast Africa, west and southwest Asia, and Eastern Europe. The "X" stands for "exchange."

During the 2023—2024 school year, students from Maple Elementary, BHIS, and the Rainier Vista Boys & Girls Club are able to take Taskesen's MENA-X program, with student mentors drawn from Cleveland STEM High School.

At each session, Taskesen introduces students to aspects of the MENA region, tying those aspects to the breakout groups she and the other mentors run in engineering, robotics, coding, and art. The mentors are intentional about building relationships with students, crafting fun, collaborative tasks, and weaving in MENA culture throughout.

A Search for Identity

In middle school, Taskesen tried, methodically, to find her people.

Taskesen's family had emigrated from Diyarbakr in southeast Turkey when she was just 5 years old. Though she arrived with no English, she read paperbacks daily after school until she outgrew the English as a second language (ESL) program she was in. By upper elementary school at BHIS, she was reading above grade level and doing middle school math work.

But in a South End middle school, Taskesen was faced with an altogether different conundrum: how to avoid standing out. Headstrong, a head taller than many of her peers, and with distinctly Middle Eastern facial features, Taskesen noticed people being rude to her and didn't yet understand why.

"I started to see groups forming based on cultural similarities, and I realized that I didn't have a group. I felt that people would act towards me in certain ways, that they probably — from what I had seen — didn't to other people. And I felt that that was because I didn't have that cultural community, that strong group around me."

With a similar zeal, Taskesen joined the ultimate frisbee team, suppressed her Kurdish and Arab Alawite identity, and tried to be nice to her classmates — buddying up especially to other students of color who she noticed "were nice to" their mostly white teachers.

None of these efforts took effect. Instead of friendship, Taskesen says the best it got with her peers was, "We're both stuck here; let's make the best of it."

When Trump's "Muslim Ban" and the media's lingering obsession with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) impacted the prevailing attitude about students from Middle Eastern countries, her efforts became less about having friends and "fitting in," and more about "just not being the target."

The almost-defeated sixth-grade version of herself thought, "I'm just gonna leave behind my identity, as a whole — not just my culture — but how I like to have fun, the words that I use. Let me take everything out. And then I started watching people to see how they reacted, or how they worded things, or what they talked about. I was trying to assimilate. I was trying to be other people just so people would stop choosing me, you know?"

When her family visited home after sixth grade, Taskesen had to suppress fears that her family would "get murdered" on this trip home. Yet when she arrived, surrounded by her people, she had an epiphany:

"I really let this wanting to be American get into me, because I got so out of sync with my own culture and my own background. I was scared of my own people!"

In seventh grade, Taskesen was determined to gather people "on a cultural basis." She chose to confide in a counselor about her idea and to ask for tips on how to go about forming a club. Instead, Taskesen says she was grilled about whether her parents were "making you do this" and told that she would need to "wait until high school."

At that point, Taskesen says her mental health took a nosedive. By eighth grade, she'd begun to bicker with her mom at home and struggled with a growing sense of despair. Then the pandemic hit, and as school paused, it provided her relief from the need to "act a certain way."

Creating MENA-X

In Taskesen's freshman year at Cleveland STEM High School, Seattle Public Schools were held virtually, and she emailed her school counselor, Chloe Kimiai, about the idea of bringing people together around the MENA cultural identity. Unlike her middle school counselor, Kimiai was not only encouraging but also agreed to oversee the weekly club, along with school counseling intern Sandra Lopez.

Though initially a space of healing for Taskesen, the club quickly morphed into a thoughtful, careful planning space for what MENA-X would become. Taskesen explains the club's decision to develop a mentoring program for students in elementary school: "I realized that I needed it most in elementary school. So middle school was the hardest, but in elementary school if I had been taught to love my culture and learn about people who look like me and give myself that sort of drive, then middle school wouldn't have been as difficult."

Taskesen wanted to "provide a space where people who look like you were the ones teaching you." She knew she wanted to make it a mentoring program centering the MENA cultural region, but she felt "it's harder to take things in when it's just culture." She wanted it to be hands-on, multidisciplinary, unlike school.

Her longtime best friend Kevin Chen created an engineering curriculum that involved hands-on building activities. As everything was online at the time, Taskesen wrote a coding curriculum on Code.org, and a robotics program that she knew would attract and engage students. Yet Taskesen wanted to ensure the program provided students with "a chance to relax instead of always feeling the pressure to do," so she added an arts element, as a curricular space where students could "try things out" and shed their fear of making mistakes.

But for Taskesen, who is working on a documentary film on the Abbasid Caliphate as she awaits word from the 20 colleges she applied to, everything comes back to the MENA region.

Blending Culture, Science, and Art

Each after-school session begins with a profile of someone influential from the region, whether it's the father of algebra Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi; the MIT professor Canan Dadeviren, who, along with her team, developed conformal piezoelectric mechanical energy harvesters; or the Kurdish man Ismail al-Jazari, the "father of robotics" who also created the first advanced systems for water pumping.

Students break out with those close in age to themselves to go to "stations" where engineering, robotics, coding, and art are happening, each led by a mentor. Taskesen likes to meet students where they're at; for example, in the engineering curriculum, they start with pyramids, which most students associate with the MENA-X region. Then, they move on to castles, and then skyscrapers. She says students almost uniformly had no idea there were skyscrapers in that part of the world, let alone two of the world's five largest.

Robyn Mariko, the site coordinator at Maple Elementary last year, admits to having been "very skeptical" when initially approached by Chen — until she saw their lesson plans. It was clear Taskesen and Chen were prepared "and knew exactly what they were doing." Mariko says she has merely had to take attendance and supervise, but there haven't been any behavioral issues, despite the full roster, because kids were "highly engaged the entire time."

When the fliers circulated initially, Mariko says, "all the teachers would tell me, 'Oh, my god, my whole class wants to sign up!'"

A recent alum of the Southeast Seattle Education Coalition's (SESEC) Youth Participatory Grant Making (YPGM), Taskesen makes it all look easy: the marketing, the planning, the attention to detail, the building of her team, and the delivery of her curriculum. Mariko was left feeling like she wished she'd done something like that at Taskesen's age.

"It just made my heart happy to see a young person go through so much effort to share her history and her culture with a group of kids. I'm biracial, and when I was in school, I did not see my culture and my people in our curriculum or anywhere in any of my classrooms that I learned in," Mariko said. "I noticed that, and I was very bothered by that, and I could have done something about it. I'm doing something about it now that I'm an educator, but as a kid, I could have done something. … But I just didn't have the same ambition and the same drive and the same passion that she does."

Therese Kumasaka, the BHIS and MENA-X site coordinator, agrees, and adds that what sets Taskesen apart from other students, and even adults, is "she has that confidence and belief in herself." She also points to the impact that not being seen in the curriculum had on her. Kumasaka, who is from Guam, said, "One of the reasons why I became an educator is because I remember being in elementary school, and the history of my people was like a sentence in a book that was related to World War II. So it was just like this blip."

Both educators point to the lack of professional development opportunities in ethnic studies, but say they find ways to sustain their students of color — even when they aren't being paid for it. As many Seattle educators already know, students want representation in the curriculum. Otherwise, as Kumasaka says, "It's just history about people that they can't relate to." After surveying students about what they want to learn about, she wrote a unit about Filipino history and connected it to the esteemed local chef and restaurateur Melissa Miranda, whose award-winning Musang is just a few blocks away from BHIS.

Aliyah Mcrae, a MENA-X mentor and coding expert last year, is now a sophomore in the University of Washington (UW) Paul Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering. She remembers discovering her love of coding in high school when students were asked to design a website and she created a Lil Baby fan site. While she laughs at how her music tastes have changed, she is clear why she contacted Helin, because she felt "I could be of use."

Now a TA in her programming class at the UW, Mcrae remembers learning about Black history in February, but she also remembers learning about "all the dope people from the region" while mentoring at MENA-X.

Mcrae, who feels she could have designed a website back when she was in elementary school, and who took her time to get to know students on a "personal level," said, "I wish someone had come in and explained coding to me. I feel like it would have eased my journey."

The students I spoke with after the opening session of the BHIS MENA-X session were matter of fact about what they were learning. One fifth grader, who said she'd like to be referred to in the article as Ros, said she was having fun and liked her mentors and being taught by young people who "say things differently." She acknowledged that it was "fun to learn about other cultures."

Alex, a third-grade cousin of Taskesen's, mentioned he'd signed up because he has an interest in coding. After the first session, he was appreciative of having young people teaching him and his cousin's "clear instructions." He also added, "It just feels good learning about where my culture is from."

The Uncertain Future of MENA-X

With Taskesen likely going out of state to study computational and applied mathematics or industrial systems engineering, the driving force behind the MENA-X after-school program will no longer be around. Though she is considering starting something similar wherever she goes, she'd love it if students of color here were to take the mantle, or to take similar programs that reflect their culture back into the elementary schools they attended, like she did with BHIS.

Taskesen said, "Taking the MENA-X curriculum and bringing it to your elementary schools could help other students not go through the same things I did, to be proud of their backgrounds." While willing to advise and support anyone who decides to do so, Taskesen also points to the perks of being a mentor. This year, mentors working at both sites earned over 60 service hours.

Without an elementary curriculum centering the identities of the majority of the students in Seattle Public Schools, and without adequate ethnic studies training opportunities or funding for South End elementary educators who spend unpaid time writing curricula that will sustain their students, programs like MENA-X will be sorely missed.

As Mcrae put it, "It always feels like one story is missing, one story is not being told. I don't think it's on purpose by educators, because it can always be said, 'We don't have enough time to talk about everyone.' But if your classroom is full of everyone, then everyone's identity should be shared and represented in the curriculum."

In using her innate ability as a problem solver to address what had driven her to despair, Helin Taskesen — in creating MENA-X — became a paragon of healing yourself through service to those who will follow in your footsteps.

If you're a student interested in starting your own MENA-X-like program or are interested in mentoring at future MENA-X sites, or if you're a teacher wanting bring MENA-X to your school, You can reach MENA-X (and Helin) at Info@MENA-X.org.

Editors' Note: In an earlier version of this article, we incorrectly identified Kevin Chen in several photo captions. The correct name should be Matthew Chan. We are committed to accuracy and regret the error. The captions have been updated on 02/12/2024 to reflect this correction.

Featured Image: MENA-X mentor and engineering curriculum designer Kevin Chen working with students at Maple Elementary School in South Seattle. (Photo courtesy of MENA-X.)