ERIC Number: EJ1123259
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2014
Pages: 15
Abstractor: ERIC
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0882-4843
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
Poststructuralist Approaches to Teaching about Gender, Islam, and Muslim Societies
Khoja-Moolji, Shenila
Feminist Teacher: A Journal of the Practices, Theories, and Scholarship of Feminist Teaching, v24 n3 p169-183 2014
Scholars of curriculum and teaching have undertaken critical analyses of the myriad ways in which curricula--taught, planned, lived, and/or hidden--and pedagogical practices (re)produce social norms and bring into effect particular kinds of subjects. This article presents an engagement with curriculum and pedagogy that foregrounds the poststructuralist concerns of discourse, power, and resistance together with theorizations of the everyday in teaching about gender, islam, and muslim societies. Specifically, the author reflects on her experience of teaching a course entitled Islamic Cultures at a public higher education institution and outline the pedagogical strategies that she employed to disrupt her own as well as her students' desires to come to universal truths about gender, islam, and muslims. These desires for deconstruction, locating modalities of resistance, and working toward social justice, place the authors pedagogies within a feminist paradigm. This article seeks to demonstrate that a poststructuralist and feminist orientation can offer educators theoretical concepts through which to interrogate sedimented understandings about religion and religious practitioners, destabilize linear and progressive narratives of history, and "decenter the unitary heroic subject." It can facilitate imagining the practice of curriculum and pedagogy as a project that is always-in-the-making and never finished or complete.
Descriptors: Postmodernism, Teaching Methods, Gender Issues, Islam, Muslims, Feminism, Curriculum, Discourse Analysis, Power Structure, Resistance (Psychology), Public Education, Higher Education, Educational Strategies, Social Justice, Religion, Theory Practice Relationship
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A