Laying Foundations for Islamic Teacher Education

Increasingly, educators committed to the vision of Islamic schooling are expressing sentiments of moral dissonance. On the one hand, they choose Islamic schools because they aspire to affect hearts, nurture whole human beings, and grow spiritually while impacting their learners’ sense of higher purpose. On the other hand, they are up against an era of globalised educational reform, characterised by neoliberal-engendered market forces and neoliberal policy logic that promote performativity and efficiency. This narrows what counts as learning, technicises the art of teaching, and assumes all learning that counts is visible and measurable. The teacher education and ongoing professional learning that educators working in Islamic schools have access to remains bifurcated. It is unable to address how an educator committed to tarbiya as “soul-making” ought to navigate aspirations with realities. This paper serves as the introduction to a special issue (SI) dedicated to conceptualising why Islamically grounded teacher education is needed and what it may entail. This SI will also offer empirical studies related to existing Islamic teacher education and professional learning programmes that capture essential reflections for a burgeoning subfield of Islamic Education Studies. In this introduction specifically, the co-editors and a co-author colleague make three big moves to lay the foundations for Islamic teacher education, including (1) establishing urgency for why Islamic teacher education is needed, (2) conceptualising what makes teacher education “Islamic”, and (3) providing an example of one Islamic teacher education programme’s attempt to advance a coherent professional learning journey for Islamic school educators. Together, these three moves serve as an attempt to redress bifurcation and advance a contextually relevant in-road to teacher education that is rooted in an Islamic paradigm and worldview while conversant with contemporary debates in education.