Puebla Learning Community: Leading Practice seminar series

In 2003, I was working at the National College as a research assistant and consultant on Islamic schools. My report, ‘Leading Islamic Schools’, is published online by them. I also co-hosted a ‘leading practice seminar’ on issues surrounding Muslim pupils in state schools during the invasion of Iraq.

Below is an adaptation of the latest leaflet from the NCSL on the ‘leading practice seminar’ series. It is very similar to what Abdullah Trevathan and I are planning for the Puebla Learning Community and we intend to put on a series of residential seminars during 2008-9. Information will also be available at http://theretreat-online.com/ inshallah.

The only difference is that we see leadership in Islamic schools as a collaboration between all of the stakeholders – pupils, teachers, parents and governors. If the following seems interesting, please visit our blog.


Puebla Learning Community: Leading Practice Seminar Series

A series of innovative and creative seminars to address Islamic school issues; 1st residential seminar 16th-23rd August 2008.

Our leading practice seminar series is designed to tackle issues at the forefront of Islamic school practice and policy. The seminars draw on the latest thinking about leadership in Islamic schools and are designed to respond to the needs of school stakeholders in innovative and interactive ways.

The seminars play a key part in our research and policy work by:

· Identifying current and significant themes for enquiry and exploring them with key individuals and groups

· Respecting the knowledge and practice of school stakeholders

· Providing a dynamic forum for dialogue

· Bringing together theory and practice to create new understanding that has relevance in schools and for policy development

· Developing processes to ensure that new understandings are widely available for application

We have a commitment to build from the best of what is known to create new understanding. Seminar programs are structured to give respect to the three fields of knowledge and ensure that we:

· Learn from and with practitioners – their significant practice, their perspectives on current experience or problems, their accumulated understanding and insights from prior experience and their enthusiasm

· Use national and international theory and research to frame, support, structure, illuminate or challenge the knowledge and thinking that school stakeholders bring

· Employ processes that enrich the dialogue between practitioners and researchers and provide opportunities or collaborative work to create new insights and understanding

(with acknowledgements to the NCSL)

This is the email that has most recently been circulated regarding the Family Retreat this summer and the general idea behaind the Puebla Learning Community. Please feel free to make a comment or a contribution.
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Suppose that many Muslims in the UK today are concerned about the education their children or grandchildren are receiving. Suppose that there are many different initiatives beginning to create new curriculums, new styles of school: home-schooling, small schools, Islamic Waldorf and Montessori schools and others. Suppose that organisations are beginning to build an infrastructure of conferences, publications and websites around the theme of education and teacher training in the Muslim community.

Now suppose that the answer lies, not in tinkering with and trying to improve British State education system, or even adopting a system already developed by someone else, but in combining the traditional understanding of Islamic spirituality with the most advanced developments in European philosophy within a practical context of participative action research and learning community development.

Suppose, further, that in adopting this approach, not only can the education of children be made more relevant and successful, but a new and dynamic approach created to establishing the deen of Islam, avoiding the twin pitfalls of ‘fundamentalism’ and ‘innovation’?

All of this is in fact happening now.

Abdullah Trevathan is already well known as the director of the Islamic Retreat, recently the subject of a BBC series. He was, for many years, the Headteacher of Islamia Primary School, the UK’s first, government funded Islamic school. He is currently a senior lecturer in Religious Education at Roehampton University and is preparing his PhD on the work of Ibn al Arabi, al Shaykh al Akbar in comparison with the philosophy of Martin Heidegger.

Ibrahim Lawson has been the Headteacher of 4 different Islamic schools and has conducted research for the National College for School Leadership on leadership in Islamic schools. He is currently preparing a PhD in action research in education.

Together, they are planning the development of an innovative approach to Islamic schooling and teacher training. The first public event will be a week long retreat program this summer for families and educational professionals at which the practical groundwork will be laid inshallah for a new form of participative, Islamic learning community.

If you are interested in finding out more, contact them at enquiries@theretreat-online.com or pueblalc@gmail.com. Visit also their blog at http://pueblalearningcommunity.blogspot.com/

A Family Retreat this summer

The Family Retreat and Islamic Learning Community
Summer 2008

This is to announce a program of events and activities entitled ‘The Family Retreat and Islamic Learning Community’ which is designed primarily for parents and children.

Applications from teachers and other education professionals will also be welcome.

The retreat will take place in the beautiful and isolated centre at Alqueria de Rosales, high in the Sierra Segura mountains of Andalusia, 2 hours drive from the city of Granada and also within easy reach of Almeria, Alicante and Murcia airports.
(See http://www.al-madrasa.com/eng)

· Venue: Alqueria de Rosales, Granada Province, Spain
· Dates: Saturday 16th August – Saturday 23rd August
· Cost*: Adults – 500 euros, children under 13 - 250 euros, including full board and lodging. Large, comfortable tent accommodation is available at a reduced cost.
*prices are flexible: a more detailed cost can be given when we know your accommodation preferences.

Program

· The program will be based on our successful ‘Retreat’ format which was the subject of a television series last year (see http://www.theretreat-online.com/)

· In addition to the sessions of Salah, Dhikr, Qur’an recitation and practical activities and walks normally offered on our retreat program, the theme of the week will be ‘education’. Participants will take part in workshops and activities with a focus on education designed to generate new thinking from shared knowledge and experience. The aim will be to lay the foundations for a new vision in Islamic education for both children and adults. Our hope is that this process will result in a new kind of school or learning community.

· There will be a variety of activities for children of all ages, including Islamic art and craft work, sports and games, including horse riding and swimming, and outings.

· Specialists in Islamic education may also be invited to share their experience and ideas with us.

· The design of the program will be in your hands and according to your interests and needs. For this reason, we would like to hear from you now in order to begin that conversation, even if you are not yet sure that you are able to attend you still have a role to play.

Retreat organisers: Abdullah Trevathan and Ibrahim Lawson

Abdullah and Ibrahim have both been in education for over 25 years. Abdullah is currently Senior Lecturer in Religious Education at Roehampton University; Ibrahim is Head Teacher at Al Risalah Secondary School in London, UK.

Contact us at pueblalc@googlemail.com or enquiries@theretreat-online.com

Visit our blog http://pueblalearningcommunity.blogspot.com/ to join in the conversation.

And please forward this invitation to anyone you think may be interested.

John Dewey on inquiry

I find 'pragmatism' an interesting approach to philosophy (slogan - "no proposition is immune to revision") and I think that inquiry is the basic form of education. His view of education was that it was 'the reconstruction of experience' and this seems to be an fruitful topic for discussion. The excerpt below contains some challenging ideas given the 'check or obstacle to successful human action' currently experienced by Muslims desiring change:

"John Dewey was a leading proponent of the American school of thought known as "pragmatism," a view that rejected the dualistic epistemology and metaphysics of modern philosophy in favor of a naturalistic approach that viewed knowledge as arising from an active adaptation of the human organism to its environment. On this view, inquiry should not be understood as consisting of a mind passively observing the world and drawing from this ideas that if true correspond to reality, but rather as a process which initiates with a check or obstacle to successful human action, proceeds to active manipulation of the environment to test hypotheses, and issues in a re-adaptation of organism to environment that allows once again for human action to proceed. With this view as his starting point, Dewey developed a broad body of work encompassing virtually all of the main areas of philosophical concern in his day. He also wrote extensively on social issues in such popular publications as the New Republic, thereby gaining a reputation as a leading social commentator of his time."

see http://www.iep.utm.edu/d/dewey.htm

Changing the whole

I very often have the impression, and it is one that I find is shared by many colleagues, that we are constantly fighting what can seem like a losing battle. This is not to say that there are not some notable successes, but the overall trend seems to be one of increasing struggle.

This is a very vague statement. The world of education is complex and has many stakeholders at different levels and degrees of participation, so pick any area you think this comment may apply to.

However, I believe it is true to some extent that overall, we are struggling, as we must, to find our way and some problems and difficulties seem to be constant.

Could it be then that we are not addressing the right issues? Could it be that the problems and difficulties we are dealing with continually in the world of Islamic education are in fact not specific to that domain?- do not have their causes exclusively within the world of Islamic education and therefore do not have their solutions within that world?

Suppose that the problems we are constantly having to deal with have their causes in the wider society, the global context. If we are not addressing those issues at source, then we will find ourselves endlessly dealing with the consequences as they arise in specific, localised domains within that overall context.

If I am right, then we have to deal with the whole of society in order to effectively address the issues we find in our part of it; our schools and our communities.

How do we deal with the whole of society? Perhaps there are two basic approaches: top-down and bottom-up.

The top-down approach is to come up with a solution in the form of an end product, a plan of how society should be. We then take that plan out and find ways to impose it on society. This is analogous to an conqueror marching in with his army and imposing control.

The bottom-up approach is to enable small groups of people to ‘grow their own’ solutions. As these grow, they spread and link up, gradually transforming society by re-writing its DNA, cell by cell. Think of it as the ‘viral infection’ approach.

Bottom-up change

Obviously, bottom-up change has to be led by a person or persons at the bottom. This is a paradox for change managers who hold senior positions in the formal hierarchy. The initiative for bottom-up change cannot come from them, authentically or even logically.

But you cannot just say to the pupils: what do you want to learn? You can’t say to ordinary people: what do you want for your community?. They need to be educated before they can answer such a question.

Someone once coined the phrase ‘inside-out’ to describe a process that was neither top-down nor bottom-up. I suppose it has something to do with realising values.

Supposing that as a change manager you want people to change because they want to themselves, as a part of their process of realising their values. Supposing you have experienced the power of authentic values realisation when conducted effectively and want that to be the driving engine of your organisation or colleagues.

They need first the thinking skills necessary to be able to implement an effective process of values realisation (the first one being the skill of recognising the need for change where it exists and accepting responsibility for your part in that).

The education that children and adults need is one that empowers them to take on the management of their own affair, design their own curriculum, develop and realise their own values.

Values realisation is one way of understanding the process of Action Research.

IBERR Forum

The IBERR forum took place in Leicester last weekend. Inshallah, some of you reading this were there, or some of you who were there are reading this.

I came away thinking that we should pay attention to the idea that educational change could be led by the students. More on this later.

My Inquiry - by Ibrahim

In what follows, I shall be questioning my own educational practice as a teacher for the last 30 years. My goal is to develop that practice through the process of sharing it with you, if you choose to read what follows. If you stop reading before the end, that sharing, that participation, that potential collaboration, will be only partially realised.

My goal is inextricably bound up with the form this piece of writing is taking, for I hope to achieve something new and this cannot be done, or so I have come to believe, without new methods and even a new methodology or philosophy of action. For this reason, I would make this request: please enter into what I am doing below in a spirit of inquiry.

This is a lot to ask and I would like to thank you in advance for your patience.

It is customary at this point to write a brief guide for the reader explaining in one or two paragraphs what they can expect to find in the main body of the text. For methodological reasons which I explain below, I choose not to do this. However, I do perhaps need to say something here about my general orientation and assumptions.

After what is probably tens of thousands of hours spent in teaching and learning contexts from kindergarten to post-graduate seminar room, I am as convinced as I could be that the approach which is generally taken to education, especially in terms of schooling children from 5 to 18 years, is seriously flawed. I believe this is because we make certain fundamental assumptions which we are unaware of and which need to be challenged. These assumptions are to do with the nature of knowledge: what it is, how it can be acquired and how it can be used.

‘Knowledge’ is a complex matter and there are several questions I would initially choose to identify:


- What is knowledge? What is it that I am doing when I know something?
- Knowledge is usually assumed to be based on truth. What is truth? What do I know when I know something is true?
- Knowledge is often assumed to be based on a process of verification which is justifiable. How do we justify knowledge?
- Are there are different kinds of knowledge?
- If so, are there different ways of acquiring knowledge?
- What is the relationship of teaching to the acquisition of knowledge(s)?
- Are there different types of teaching?
- What is learning? And what is the point of learning?
- What do I want to learn, and why?


What is your first reaction to these questions?

I imagine some readers may find them fairly pointless, boring, or at least of little practical importance. Ivory tower stuff. Too intellectual.

Others may feel challenged, but in a negative way: I don’t want to have to think about these things, it’s too complicated, I don’t know where to start. There’s no point.

Perhaps you feel that these are trivial questions? The sort of thing a youth or young adult may agonise over before they finally grow up and realise that life is about getting on with it and getting things done rather than playing intellectual games.

Perhaps there are other reactions – I would be interested to find out. However, the point I would like to propose is that these reactions may reveal an attitude which is rather complacent. It is often as if we know already the answers to life’s important questions and we need only concern ourselves with practical, first order issues of implementation. However, when things are not turning out as we expect or hope, surely that is the time to ask whether we might be taking something for granted, that we should really be turning around and having a fresh look at second order issues (behind the scenes so to speak)..

There is a very good example of this in the history of attempts to deal with the educational under-attainment and under-achievement of children of Afro-Caribbean origin in the UK. The ‘problem’ was first identified in the early 70’s when reliable data on pupil attainment began to be collated with specific reference to racial origin. Significant under-attainment was found among Black pupils. In the 30 years that followed, huge amounts of money were spent addressing this issue; you could say that a whole industry developed to deal with Black underachievement.

On Saturday 10 May 2003, nearly 2,500 delegates participated in the second conference on the underachievement of black pupils in London schools. The conclusion of the conference was effectively that nothing had changed in 30 years and that more needed to be done. The proposals for action make it clear that many participants believe that when something isn’t working, the answer is to do more of it.

Whether anyone asked the obvious question: have we been wrongly assuming anything?- is not clear.

What I want to ask you is: do you see any parallels between the issue of black underachievement and Muslim underachievement?

By Muslim underachievement I do not mean failure to attain reasonable results in SAT’s, GCSE’s and A Levels, although there is a national issue here. I am thinking more of the issue that Islamic schools face of a more general type of underachievement in terms of enabling our students to become successful Muslims and human beings.

I have always thought that the true test of an educational system is not the number of passes in examinations but rather the kind of society that its graduates go on to produce after 10, 20 or more years.

By this measure, how would we rate the British education system, for example? How would we even begin to systematically evaluate (there are plenty of anecdotes) the education British Muslims have been receiving over the last 30 years?

These, then, are some of the issues which concern me and which I believe need urgently to be addressed. Moreover, I believe that our inquiry needs to be far-reaching and penetrating in the sense that we are probably not even aware at present of what the most urgent questions are, let alone how to answer them. This means that we will probably have to re-think, to ‘problematise’, some of our basic assumptions about what we are doing and how.

Finally, I am reminded, as I frequently am, of a story about Mullah Nasruddin. A neighbour found him one day searching high and low his garden. He watched the Mullah for a while as he looked under stones and in between the bushes and flowers. He finally asked the Mullah what he was doing. “I am looking for my house keys,” Nasruddin replied, “Come and give me a hand.”

They searched for some time and had finally left no stone unturned, as the saying goes. “Well, I don’t know,” said the neighbour, “They don’t seem to be anywhere. Where exactly did you lose them?” “Inside the house,” replied Nasruddin. “Then whatever are you doing looking for them out here?” the astonished neighbour demanded. “Well, there’s more light out here and it’s easier to find things,” was the reply.



Section 1: Problematising Assumptions

I will begin with three quotations:

We are an ummah (a nation) ummiyyah (unlettered): we do not write nor do we calculate.
The Prophet Muhammad, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam.

For the crystalline purity of logic was, of course, not a result of investigation: it was a requirement. The conflict becomes intolerable; the requirement is now in danger of becoming empty. We have got onto the slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!
(Wittgenstein; Philosophical Investigations - 107)

'Reader-response theory' recognizes the reader as an active agent who imparts "real existence" to the work and completes its meaning through interpretation.
(Wikipedia)

To continue, this inquiry has no specific beginning, middle or end. It has no single, unambiguous focus. Its boundaries and participants are not clearly defined. Its meaning is incomplete.

If this does not appeal to you, stop reading now.



If you are still with me, I will have achieved a small part of what I have set myself to do in this introduction: to involve you, the reader, in making a conscious choice as to your relationship with this text.

Explaining my use of citations, in reverse order as it turns out, I believe that it is possible that reading is far more complex than merely ‘decoding’ marks on a page into spoken sounds. This is important in all readings, but perhaps especially in the very sophisticated and advanced reading appropriate to an academic paper such as this might have been.

Reading, and even more so, writing, an academic paper is something not many people do. For a very small minority, it is a way of life; for a minority of that minority, it is a living.

As such, this specific act of reading is a quite peculiar phenomenon. It has to be asked: what is the meaning, or phenomenology, of this event?

To answer this question, we have to look at the context within which the reading of an academic paper occurs. That context is the British education system, which is of course an important part of the world’s education system.

In analysing this small part of the system, we come to some interesting and significant conclusions about the whole, and consequently, since everything is linked up, other parts of the system too, such as the Islamic schools movement. This approach is a preliminary to what is sometimes called ‘systemic inquiry’ which in turn is a form of action research.

An academic paper is the product of a highly specialised system, of which it also forms a constituent part. It is written by an expert in some topic, or someone aspiring to be, or at least imitate, an expert. It is validated by other experts with a view to incorporating it into the body of accepted expertise and concomitantly validating the membership of the author in this specialised community. As such, it is an act of power, and the power relations surrounding and constituting the academic community, which includes the education system, for the most part, cannot be ignored as incidental to the construction of knowledge as it currently occurs.

One major feature of this community, or discourse, as some would say, is that just as there are experts who have power by virtue of their ‘knowledge’, so there are the rest of us who have no power, by virtue of our ignorance.

The effect of this is that we ordinary members of the public are expected to turn to the experts in knowledge production whenever we need to know something. When we do so, we find ourselves reading, or sometimes listening, to an ‘expert’ who is telling us what we need to know. This experience is usually strangely disempowering, making us feel weak and helpless in front of the superior knowledge of the expert knower who has done the work of knowing for us. Even at the best of times, when we try to absorb and implement this knowledge in our own life and practice, we find it hard to effect significant change and often that the original problem continues to resist our efforts to correct it

This analysis of the ‘feel’ of traditional methods of knowledge transmission, or ‘teaching’, applies to all such contexts, not just to the upper echelons of academia. Laurence Stenhouse, one of the earlier pioneers of educational action research, coined the term the ‘proletariat of the intellect’ to describe the disempowered masses who have effectively no control of the means of knowledge production and are expected to be the consumers of second-hand knowledge (reduced now to mere information), often these days mass-produced by the knowledge industry.

This, in addition to the issue of the unequal distribution of power, is another feature of the education system as we know it: it is highly industrialised, and this contributes to the disempowering effect as we perceive ourselves as individuals to be tiny cogs in a huge machine over which we have no possible control and which is incapable of recognising, let alone valuing, our individual existence.

Thus we can see that, even before we add in all of the technological apparatuses now so widespread, education has become ‘technologised’.

One common reaction to this is ‘resistance’ in the ‘learner’; i.e. hostility towards being treated as an object of instruction or an empty vessel waiting to be filled with information masquerading as knowledge which we neither asked for nor particularly want.

Let me turn to a practical example. A situation that I am confronted with constantly is the behaviour of the students in my school at the time of the dhuhr salah, the midday prayer ‘in congregation’.

I will take this as an inquiry, to be pursued step by step in what follows. However, the main point I will be looking for is to what extent this case study illustrates the critique I have preliminarily made above of the education system and where there may be some clues as to what can be done to discover the nature, causes and solutions to, what might be called, ‘pupil underachievement’.

A Vision - by Abdullah

In order to initiate a discussion on learning and education generally and for my own personal clarification I set out my vision of education below:

Perhaps somewhat negatively, I will start out with what I see as not desirable, based on my own experience of education within mainstream and Islamic schools.

Institutionalization – by this I mean the whole structuring of teaching and learning within a narrowly confined syllabus, schemes of work tied to such syllabi based on a rigid timetable with very clear role demarcations; (hierarchy of staff, pupils, teachers, auxiliary staff, etc) uniforms, corporate identities and the seeming necessity of purpose built buildings beyond the need for shelter, etc.

My experience of institutionalized collective education is that it doesn’t work very well. Without cynicism, schools may be more positively regarded when perceived as day care centres where young people are supervised allowing parents to engage in the material production process, (stemming from a valid Marxist critique but which communist countries offered nothing but arguably worse alternatives). Another perfectly viable argument, frequently used by home schoolers, is that the majority of parents knowingly or unknowingly allow the responsibility for the education of their children to usurped by Government control. This doesn’t mean that some learning doesn’t takes place in such institutions but it does so at a cost to the individual and to my mind that is a price to dear to pay. Then again many would say the learning is minimal and mediocritised. From my own day-to-day experience the educational system tends to generally foment resentment and defiance on the part of both staff and students.

My thinking on institutions would generally follow along the critique of Foucault, namely that by their very nature institutions end up to be self serving and thereby end up at odds with the original intentions in setting up the organization. In this case educational institutions eventually obliterate the basic human act of passing on, imparting or the sharing of experience and knowledge. An aspect of the Ofsted inspection criteria of successful schools provides an example of this. Successful schools are seen to have good student attendance whereas low attendance signifies bad teaching and management resulting a lack of motivation on the part of children and parents. In the school where I was Headteacher of there were high instances of families taking leave during term time to visit the home country. Personally, I could think of nothing more educational than an urban child experiencing another world as in a rural setting with attendant agriculture and animal husbandry, a rooting sense of family relations truncated by migration and a different language based environment. Despite that the school was criticized as a result, (though the school was judged overall as ‘good’- Why do I hasten to add that?). The point is there was an inability to see that education could take place outside of the classroom or school. The initial impulse of setting up schools; i.e. that children are educated had been eclipsed by the needs of the institution to maintain the criteria of the inspection system.

Foucault further posits the idea of institutions as serving to contain and sustain the status quo and its values, (he sees institutions modelled on prisons). In addition, the discourse of such institutions, educational or otherwise is unable to conceive of anything beyond the social context they are embedded in. I would like to suggest that sacred traditions; Islam in particular, are based on a different paradigm which runs counter to that discourse. The development of institutionalized education systems within those communities, particularly those based on sceptical western rationality has resulted in confusion and a schizophrenic discourse within these traditions.

Supremacy of rationality and the scientific paradigm – more on this later

Separation of mind and body - more on this later