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’.