Teachers’ Perspectives on the Education of Muslim Students: A Missing Voice in Muslim Education Research

Abstract

This article builds on an extensive review of the comparative and international literature on teachers’ perspectives on the education of Muslim students in public, Catholic, and Islamic schools. Bringing the teachers’ voices and practices to the attention of researchers, policy makers, and general readers, the authors emphasize the centrality of teachers’ roles in the education of Muslim students, highlight the constructive and positive work that teachers do, and point out the challenges they face and the support they need in fulfilling their moral and intellectual duties. We situate teachers’ perspectives in the context of the upsurge of global interest in Islam and Islamic education and the increase in Muslims’ challenges to multiculturalism and the existing education system dominated largely by Eurocentric, Hellenic-Judeo-Christian heritage and modernist values. The article examines and challenges the research, media and publicly produced contradictory and overlapping statements about Western teachers’ work with Muslim students. Predominantly pessimistic, these pronouncements implicate teachers in (1) racism and Islamophobia; (2) an unwillingness and inability to include Muslims’ historical and contemporary contributions and perspectives into the existing school curricula; (3) a lowering of expectations about their Muslim students and channelling them into non-academic streams; (4) cultural and religious insensitivity; and (5) an overall lack of knowledge about Islam and Muslims. The article problematizes these observations by engaging with them conceptually and methodologically, and by bringing counter-points from research. The article concludes by proposing a balanced portrayal of teachers’ work and the inclusion of teachers’ perspectives to improve policy, research, and practice in educating Muslim students within a multicultural society.

Notes

Notes

1 It is important to note that not all Muslims fare equally well. In the United States, for example, 29% of Afghan American, 26% of Iraqi American, and 22% of Pakistani and Bangladeshi American children of immigrant families were living below the poverty line.

2 This paper does not discuss the education experiences of the indigenous black American Muslims, organized around the Nation of Islam and Warith Deen Mohamed’s community. Suffice to say that this Muslim community’s experiences have been very different from those of the immigrant Muslims in terms of academic achievement, race and class aspects (for more, see Jackson, 2005).

3 Orientalism in this case refers to a new twist given to the term by Edward Said. In his book, Orientalism (1985), he describes orientalism as a tradition, both academic and artistic, of hostile and deprecatory views, and essentialized and prejudiced depictions of the Eastern cultures and people by the Europeans in the 19th century. Said was critical of this scholarly tradition and its neo-colonial disciples. We also acknowledge that Orientalism has many forms. In addition to the above negativities, it also contributed to our understanding of the non-Western people and cultures and, in some cases, had little connection with colonialism (e.g., Turner, 1994).

4 In this article, Muslim education refers to all forms of formal education of Muslim students at primary and secondary school levels.

5 There is an unnoticed irony in the issue of Muslims’ call for inclusion of their historical contributions to Western curricula. On the one hand, Muslims complain that their contributions and perspectives are not represented. On the other hand, Muslim scholars unanimously concur that the current Western achievements in all fields of knowledge (e.g., science, theology, arts, music, food) would have not been possible without Muslims’ contributions. Questions such as “Is Western knowledge a culmination of humanity’s collective contribution across histories and places?”, “Could a knowledge based on Islamic contribution be entirely un-Islamic or anti-Islamic?” beg for response.

6 That is, lower track, non-academic stream.

7 In 2007, Niyozov obtained a Social Science and Humanities Research (SSHRC) grant from the Canadian government for his research on “Teachers’ perceptions on the education of Muslim students in public, Islamic, and Catholic schools in Toronto.” The preliminary analysis provides many examples of the positive work these teachers do to help their students succeed academically and socially. Most of the public school teachers in the study mentioned that Muslim students are among their best students and that they have wonderful professional relationships with them, including those who wear hijab or abaya.