This issue of Thresholds in Education, addressing teaching about Islam in U.S. schools, brings together a diverse set of articles each threaded together by a common desire to respond to the question: what does it mean to be educated about Islam? Though the articles speak to a variety of diverse platforms including textbooks, secondary classrooms, and institutions of higher education, they all call into question the ways in which Islam is currently approached and offer new frameworks for understanding curricula on Islam. After outlining a brief summary and the sequence of articles in this series, the author of this introductory essay asks the reader to consider how each of the articles addresses curricula on Islam through the lens of the curriculum box, including explicit, implicit, and null curriculum (Eisner, 1985).

While much research has considered the way Muslims are represented in the mass media in recent years, there has been little exploration of the way Muslims and Islam are discussed in U.S. public schools. This article considers how Muslims and Islam are represented in educational standards, textbooks, and supplementary resources, with an eye to the need since September 11, 2001, to provide a broad understanding of this religion and group as part of the diversity of public life within U.S. society and across a global community. The author concludes that greater teacher preparation is needed to enable teachers to make good use of outside resources, in order to aid understanding, rather than put forward one sided, if “matter-of-fact,” information such as that typically found in textbooks and supplementary resources today.

See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Yo5aAE1Ggo Stereotypes of Muslim minorities cause them to face discrimination on a daily basis. Islam is a religion of peace, but non-Muslim majority groups have a prejudicial attitude toward Muslims. While there are basic tenets in Islam, Muslims, just like people of other religions, are engaged in intra-faith debates, particularly with respect to men’s beards, women’s veils, and food. Especially after 9/11, Muslims are stereotyped as terrorists to which many institutions pro-actively respond by implementing transformative community education and popular education programs that promote interfaith understanding, conflict transformation, and peace building (Lederach & Mansfield, 2010) in energetic social movements. See http://tripwow.tripadvisor.com/tripwow/ta-00a1-d972-1c16?lb

Islam in the American Classroom Patricia Salahuddin Florida International University, USA Abstract: A growing American-born Muslim population warrants ... this section, I will discuss basic information that will include definitions of Islam, the life of Muhammad, Prophet Muhammad ...

While case studies have documented how teachers can either ameliorate or exacerbate situations of ignorance or hate in the classroom toward Muslim students, the role of educational leaders in U.S. public schools remains negligible. In response, this paper aims to develop the knowledge base of educational leadership as it pertains to the jihad or struggle of Muslim students to deal with Islamophobia and to provide insights for productive leadership which deconstruct stereotypes toward anti-Islamophobia. Because postcolonial theory, as espoused in Edward Said’s work, emphasises creating spaces for subjects to speak for themselves, we highlight an oral history account of a Muslim female immigrant’s experiences as a student and teacher in U.S. public schools, and as an activist educational leader in a U.S. Islamic School. The narrative is broadly applicable – as Islam and Muslims have been painted with a pejorative broad brush due to global sociopolitical incidences.

Coinciding with the rise of Islamophobia in the United States, is a small but growing set of educational scholarship around the curricular impact and response to Islamophobia. The qualitative case study discussed in this manuscript aims to contribute to this conversation by investigating how Muslim girls from minority communities of interpretation (n=6) made sense of and responded to curriculum on Islam in their Social Studies classes. The central finding describes how sample students responded to Islamophobia in the classroom by building bridges across differences. Ultimately, this study aims to learn from the experiences of students, and advocates a curriculum on Islam honoring complexity.