In one of Naeem Inayatullah’s classes, the desks are shuffled into a circle and he strolls around them. Soon after a morning greeting, wild debate ensues, and to an outsider, it is uncertain who is learning from whom.

“My style is hugely a collective improvisation,” the associate professor of politics said. “It has a degree of anarchy that most people would consider chaos. I don’t lecture, period. I will if students ask me to, but it’s been seven years since a student asked me.”

Inayatullah said his seemingly untamed discussion-based classes defy traditional teaching methods by challenging notions of classroom authority — the professor learns from students, and students learn from each other.

“You design a class with a question in mind that you yourself are having trouble with — a living question that’s burning in your mind,” he said. “Then show your students how you got there, why that question is important, and then tell them … ‘Let’s work together on it.’”

Before coming to Ithaca College in 1996, Inayatullah taught at Syracuse University, the University of Colorado at Boulder and the International School of Kuala Lampur in Malaysia. He has taught classes on many topics, including international relations, world music and politics in literature and film. This semester he is teaching an international relations course.

Every class, Inayatullah greets his students, asks if they have questions about assignments and throws out a topic for discussion.

“Then boom — it’s open,” he said. “Anything can happen.”

Inayatullah said he tries to read his students’ body language during class.

“Sometimes I look at students very carefully, and I can tell that they’re ready to talk, so I might go to them,” he said. “And I make a habit that the students use each other’s names. I’m relentless about that.”

Junior Sophia Morris has taken  Afghanistan and the Origins of Global Fury and an honors junior seminar course with Inayatullah.

“It’s kind of easy to get addicted to his classes,” Morris said. “But they can be painful sometimes too. He’s really good at using you all against each other and with each other.”

Inayatullah has developed his style through more than  21 years of teaching.

Politics professor Asma Barlas has known Inayatullah for 25 years, when they first met at the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver. Barlas said during her time as chair of the politics department she observed him in class several times.  

“I would sit in his classroom and it would begin very low key,” she said. “Then miraculously a half an hour into the class, it would just become very intense. He challenges them to look very deeply at themselves, maybe more honestly than they’d like.”

Inayatullah said course material is secondary to teaching students how to develop “learning communities.”

“That’s the ultimate goal for me — getting these students to learn from each other,” he said. “If I can get them to see how that’s done, they can learn anything, and they’ll be able to do it without me, without the classroom, without professors, without this institution.”

Barlas said she sees Inayatullah as a truly skilled professor.

 “He is ... truly gifted in the sense of being able to reach even the most immobile students,” she said. “[He] dress[es] up his classroom into a deeply charged, intellectual, political arena for his students to engage in.”

Inayatullah said professors should always motivate their students’ learning processes by engaging in it themselves. He said he will almost never teach a course he has already taught unless he has new material.

“The teacher has to go into that classroom thinking there is something for the teacher,” he said. “If nothing is happening for the teacher, there’s nothing happening for anyone else either.”

Inayatullah said he understands that most students have certain expectations for classroom order that his style bends.

“The intensity I bring to the classroom space is often felt, at least initially, as too much,” he said. “It’s an odd combination of this anarchism on the one hand and on the other, this in-your-face-stuff.”

Barlas said he is a strong asset to the politics department and to the academic community.

“He is a deeply enriching presence on our campus,” Barlas said.  “I feel very fortunate to be his colleague.”

Inayatullah said as long as professors walk into the classroom everyday with a question in mind, the teaching style does not matter. “Five years from now they [students] won’t remember the tests, the essays or the books,” he said. “What they will remember is the feeling they had [and] how learning took place in that classroom.”