Session Information
26 SES 04 C, Perspectives on Leadership in Denmark, Australia and Swedish Muslim Schools
Paper Session
Contribution
The phenomena of Muslim independent schools in Sweden is mainly discussed as an issue of social and cultural integration. This discourse have to been understood in the light of the transformation of Swedish school system has underwent. Meanings about the necessary of keeping religious influence and secularised education apart (Englund, 1996) are still strong. The state and municipals is looked up as warrants of this divide. At the same time 6 % of 134 000 pupils in independent schools attend confessionals schools in Sweden. The number of Islamic profiled school are increasing as the immigration from countries where the larger part of the population affirm themselves as Muslims. The Central Bureau of Statistics (2014) in Sweden predict that 20 % of the Swedish population either are immigrants or the children of immigrants in year 2020. A larger part of those immigrants will probably be Muslims with a wish to maintain their faith identity and recognized as Muslims (Thobani, 2011). To understand the context of leadership you need to have knowledge about the discourses about Islam and Muslims.
The aim of this paper is to discuss methodology to do research on educational leadership in Muslim schools. An empirical touchdown from my dissertation (Nilsson, 2015) will serve as a back-drop to do this.
The academic discourse about the outcomes of Muslim profiled schools education is divided (Nilsson, 2015). Either are Muslim Schools comprehended to maintain self-assurance and cultural recognition (Gerle, 1997) or as means of segregating children with different backgrounds from each other (Englund, 2010) and/or to reproduce patriarchy circumscribing democracy (Ali, 2009). The representation of Muslims and Muslim school in mass media and the civil sphere often held the later opinion to be true (Shadid & Koningsveld, 2002). Especially when it comes to the establishment of a new school, prejudice are common among the members of the majority. An increasing Islamophobia in Europe is emerging and parents therefore chose Muslim profiled schools because they think they are safe. However Shah (Shah, 2015, p 140) argues that the interest in Islamic schools is reflecting a desire to make education not just a mean for developing and strengthening their faith identity but also as a vehicle for social mobility".
According to Durkheim, education is about transmitting knowledge and values to the next generation (Durkheim, 1956) and this process can in a social perspective bring about reproduction of social position (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990) but also producing cultural meanings and crossing boarders of culture (Giroux, 2005). But how does cultural boarder crossing happens? My suggestion is to look up on educational leadership as a possible cultural boarder crossing. I understand the boarder crossing as a social performance which aims to re-fuse already de-fused meanings (Alexander, 2006). A social performance can be successful if it re-fuses meaning and change the audiences’' landscapes of meaning (Reed, 2011) and change the way of social life in the direction that the actor intend. This direction has in a normative perspective not be wanted. That's why, from a sociological point of view, I suggest that the social performance also is a question about content in aspects about whose cultural meanings getting re-fused or remains de-fused. The different content of the de-fusion/re-fusion is therefore understood as different modes of incorporation: assimilation, hyphenation and multicultural incorporation (Alexander, 2006). Integration in this perspective is about on-going internal social and cultural processes.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Alexander, J. (2006). The civil sphere. New York: Oxford University Press. Ali, A. H. (2009). Därför måste demokratin försvara sig mot islamismen. Banks, J. A. (1999). An Introduction to Multicultural Education: MA: Allyn and Bacon. Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J.-C. (1990). Reproduction in education, society and culture (2. ed.). London: Sage. Durkheim, É. (1956). Education and sociology. New York: Free Press. Englund, T. (1996). Utbildningspolitiskt systemskifte? Stockholm: HLS. Englund, T. (2010). The general school system as a universal or a particular institution and its role in the formation of social capital. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 1(53), 17 - 33. Gerle, E. (1997). Muslimska friskolor i Sverige. Pedagogisk Forskning i Sverige, 2 (3), 182-204. Giroux, H. A. (2005). Border crossings : cultural workers and the politics of education (2. ed.). New York: Routledge. Gustafsson, K. (2004). Muslimsk skola, svenska villkor: konflikt, identitet & förhandling. Umeå: Boréa. McLaren, P. (1994). ‘White terror and oppositional agency: towards a critical multiculturalism’. In D. T. Goldberg (Ed.), Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader. (pp. 45–74.). Cambridge: MA: Blackwell. Nilsson, H. (2015). Kultur och utbildning – en tolkning av två grundskolors mångkulturella kontexter. Växjö. Reed, I. A. (2011). Interpretation and Social Knowledge. On the use of theory in the human sciences. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press. Shadid, W., & Koningsveld, P. S. v. (2002). The Negative Image of Islam and Muslims in the West: Causes and Solutions. In W. Shadid & P. S. v. Koningsveld (Eds.), Religious Freedom and the Neutrality of the State: The Position of Islam in the European Union. (pp. 174-196). Leuven: Peeters. Shah, S. (2015). Education, Leadership and Islam: Theories, discourses and practices from an Islamic perspective. . London: Routledge. Sleeter, C. (2015). Ethnicity and the Curriculum. In D. Wyse, L. Hayward, & J. Pandya (Eds.), The Sage handbook of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment SAGE Publications Ltd. Thobani, S. (2011). Pedagogic discourses and imagined communities: knowing Islam and being Muslim. Discourse: Studies In The Cultural Politics Of Education, 32(4), 531-545.
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