Warwick Islamic Education Summer Schools

The first Warwick Islamic Education Summer School, held in September 2016, marked the formation of a learning community consisting of practitioners and researchers, coming from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, interested in exploring issues related to education, Islam and Muslims within the context of contemporary and historical Muslim societies. In reviving the Muslim educational tradition of taaruf, openness to learning from one another, the Summer School offers a collegial academic space within which critical inquiry and reflective practice are encouraged.

The goal of the Warwick Islamic Education Summer Schools is to contribute to the generation of a new transformative Muslim culture of learning and reflective inquiry through rethinking Islamic Education within the context of a secular and culturally, religiously diverse Western Europe and the wider Muslim world. Education is a critical catalyst for facilitating effective civic engagement, social welfare and economic prosperity. As such a further central objective is to improve the quality of educational thinking and pedagogic practice within the diaspora and global Muslim communities. Participants will also have the opportunity to learn more about the Islamic Education initiative at Warwick, research expertise within WRERU, and the wider research and taught programmes at the Centre for Educational Studies at the University of Warwick.

The Summer School has led to the establishment of the Warwick Islamic Education Research Network that has over two hundred members and encourages cross disciplinary exploration of Islam/Education intersection within diverse Muslim minority/majority contexts. The Network facilitates critical dialogue between the educational narratives of Islam and the West through fostering collaborative research and transfer of knowledge and skills among diverse groups of Muslim educators and the wider community of researchers, practitioners and policy-makers in Education, Social Sciences and the Humanities.

Themes for the 4th Islamic Education Summer School

This year’s Summer School aims to explore traditions of education in Islam and the West, examining their historical encounters and contemporary issues hindering their engagement with the view to generating a new critical dialogue between Islamic and Western pedagogies. The focus will be on exploring the nature and characteristics of classical Islamic pedagogy, its role in the formation of Muslim theological, scientific, philosophical, poetic and spiritual traditions. The significant role of critical, prophetic pedagogy, utilised in the Muslim sacred discourse, in transforming the cumulative human heritage in Late Antiquity into a polyvalent, synthetic yet distinctively ‘Islamic episteme’ and imagination will be analysed. The impact of Indian, Persian and particularly ancient Greek pedagogic ideas in shaping the epistemic space and ethics in classic Muslim educational thought, that is often expressed with the concept of ‘adab’ , equivalent of Greek ‘paideia’, will be discussed. Distinctive Biblical accounts of ‘human formation and flourishing’ have clear resemblance with Islamic ‘tarbiyah’, Islam’s vision of becoming a mature human being (alinsan alkamil), will be critically compared. The degree to which these faith-embedded models clash with human autonomy and agency-focused humanistic pedagogies, grounded in the narrative of Western secular modernity, will be examined. The link between ‘pedagogic creativity and educational reform’ in facilitating positive social change in Muslim minority and majority societies will also be explored.

You can see a list of broad interrelated themes and questions that can be prioritised for in-depth exploration here

1st Summer School Reflections

2nd Summer School Reflections

3rd Summer School Reflections