Muslim Educators’ Pedagogies: Tools for Self, Social, and Spiritual Transformation

In this interpretive research study, Claire Alkouatli inquires into the pedagogical activities Sunni Muslim educators employ in sites of Islamic education that are often marginalized by stereotypes, misperceptions, and charges of anachronism and indoctrination. She invited thirty-five Muslim Canadian educators to share their perspectives on their pedagogies around teaching Islam to children and youth. Her thematic analysis of participants’ variegated descriptions coalesced into a three-theme pedagogical typology. Distinct from mainstream secular pedagogies at the levels of ontology, epistemology, and developmental psychology, Islamic pedagogies are situated within a wider conceptual paradigm. Recognizing their qualities of holism and “double cultural relevance,” they are functionally significant in teachers’ repertoires for helping young Muslims think across paradigms and may contribute to both sociocultural continuity and more equal inter-epistemic interaction in heterogeneous societies.