Course summary

Islamic Education: Theory and Practice MA facilitates a critical dialogue between Western and Islamic approaches to education and enables teachers and Muslim educators to become research-based reflective practitioners. Join Warwick's flexible MA and engage with a transformative teaching and learning experience that nurtures your academic formation and your personal and professional development. Course overview The programme is designed for opening up professional development pathways for diverse groups of educational practitioners, Muslim educators and faith leaders who work within the context of formal and informal Islamic and general educational settings. The programme is also open to religious education practitioners who wish to deepen their knowledge and understanding of Islam and be able to respond effectively to the educational and spiritual needs of Muslim children and young people under their care. Islamic Education is a new exciting interdisciplinary field of scholarly study, empirical research professional development. It has growing national and international interest among Muslim and wider education practitioners. The programme enables students to develop critical academic competence in theory and practice of Islamic Education facilitating reflective practice among a specialist community of educational practitioners and researchers. Students will explore diverse perceptions of education and pedagogic practice in historical and contemporary Muslim societies, engage with modern educational theories, pedagogic models and develop essential research skills necessary to be able to identify personal areas of further research in the field. The course adopts an integrative approach to teaching leaning which facilitates student engagement through strategies of self-organised learning and blended learning i.e. combining online resources, platforms as well as face to face workshops, seminars and lectures. The emphasis on the course will be on the importance of contemporary educational research into Islamic Education, especially research springing from the Social Sciences directed towards pedagogy and curriculum development. The course will enable students to develop the competence to ‘think educationally’ about Islam and critically examine the theory and practice of Islamic Education in the modern Muslim world and across the Muslim communities in the West. Students will have the opportunity of critically examining the existing Islamic Education textbooks, curriculum and the syllabuses. Furthermore, they will discuss the educational challenges facing Muslim communities in the Western Diaspora with special reference to exploring the educational needs of Muslim youth. The course will critically examine how best to develop appropriate educational strategies to tackle religious extremism and address issues concerning the faith development of Muslim young people in Britain. The course attracts a wider range of practitioners within the field of faith-based and religion-related practitioner education by explicitly identifying and responding to the professional development needs of practitioners engaged in Islamic Education. As such the programme, in a distinctive way, opens professional development pathways for diverse groups of Muslim educators, faith leaders and those who wish to engage with Islamic Education as an area of further academic development. This programme will also be of interest to RE practitioners and teachers who are interested in improving their understanding of Islam and the educational needs of Muslim children and young people under their care.