
Criminology and Criminal Justice Assistant Professor Amny Shuraydi is known for her hands-on classes. In one of her courses, Shuraydi’s class partners with the Monroe County Sheriff’s Department to examine cold cases.
“It’s important to try to make lessons applicable when you can. When figuring out what you want to do with your life, getting that experience can be really affirming to a career choice, or it can help you shift,” says Shuraydi, who co-teaches the cold case class with Criminology and Criminal Justice Lecturer Gregory Osowski. “Film and media portrayals, like ‘Law & Order’ and ‘Criminal Minds,’ are different from reality. We want students to see the reality of what they are learning in class.”
The College of Arts, Sciences and Letters educator is also known for her thoughtful teaching style. Her web reviews note her constructive feedback in class and include the phrases “she cares about all her students,” “she keeps you engaged,” and “one of the greatest professors I’ve ever had.” In an interview, Lorjon Ali, Shuraydi’s former student at the University of Texas at Dallas, called Shuraydi a “great mentor” and noted that she “has provided me with many years of guidance, support, and advice.”
One of the reasons Shuraydi, who grew up in Dearborn and went to Fordson High School, knows how to reach UM-Dearborn students? Because she once was one.
The daughter of a UM-Dearborn alum, Shuraydi turned down scholarship opportunities to larger institutions, explaining, “I chose UM-Dearborn because I wanted professors who knew me — not giant, intimidating classes. I had so many amazing professors who taught me so much through hands-on lessons. I had journalism classes — I originally wanted to be a print-based journalist — where I was taught about investigative reporting by Pulitzer Prize winners,” she says. Shuraydi also had a class where she met and talked with women in the Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility. “It was the first time I did anything like that and it stuck with me. It reminded me that good people make mistakes,” says Shuraydi, who is a 2011 CASL alum. “These are the types of experiences that I had as an undergraduate that helped shape me.”
Now in her third academic year of teaching at UM-Dearborn, she sometimes feels very much like that student when walking down the CASL hallways. “I even catch myself wanting to call my colleagues by doctor or professor since I had some of them when I was a student,” she says with a laugh.
But Shuraydi now has nearly 15 years of work and teaching experience. She has her master’s degree in communications and social justice from the University of Windsor and her doctorate in criminology from the University of Texas at Dallas, where she taught before her hire as an assistant professor and graduate director at East Texas A&M University. She’s conducted research and learned from some of the top criminologists in the world. She credits these experiences to shaping her into the professor she is today.