Dr Farah Ahmed, Hughes Hall Governing Body Fellow and Research Fellow at the Faculty of Education, has been awarded a John Templeton Foundation Grant.
The grant is for a two-year project entitled “Reorienting Education in Muslim Contexts towards Awe and Wonder through Dialogue, Science and Art” aiming to translate theoretical work on Islamic educational thought into classroom practice by blending traditional forms of learning with contemporary pedagogies.
The project will support an online international community of educators to carry out classroom inquiries that:
- Centre human personhood and character as the core aim of education.
- Re-infuse Islamic educational practices with dialogue and reflection.
- Re-infuse Islamic educational practices with awe and wonder of the natural and social worlds through integrating Science, Art, Craft, Design and Technology education with spirituality and character building.
Dr Farah Ahmed is Director of the IELC, a learning community of Islamic educators to facilitate exchange between Islamic scholarship, educational research and Islamic educational settings.
This grant will build on Dr Ahmed’s current Leverhulme funded work centred around the Islamic Educator Learning Community (IELC), a domain of Camtree, the Cambridge Teacher Research Exchange, based at Hughes Hall. The new grant will fund research on how these classical Islamic educational theory and practices could be translated into contemporary schooling by engaging an international online community of educators.
IELC is a learning community of Islamic educators (anyone working in or teaching Muslim learners aged from 3-18 years); an online platform to facilitate exchange between Islamic scholarship, educational research and Islamic educational settings. It supports teachers and educators to engage in reflective practice and conduct their own classroom research inquiries, in order to improve learning and provide context specific content.
Camtree – the Cambridge Teacher Research Exchange – is a Hughes Hall Bridge Centre; a global platform for close-to-practice research in education. Its mission is to support, promote and publish ‘close-to-practice’ educational research by educators to improve teaching and lead to better outcomes for learners worldwide.
Dr Ahmed has published widely on Islamic education and is founder and Director of Education and Research at Islamic Shakhsiyah Foundation, where she has worked for seventeen years on research driven curriculum development and teacher education for Muslim teachers.
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