Staying on the 'straight path': a critical ethnography of Islamic schooling in Ontario
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study provides a critical ethnographic examination of 4 full-time Islamic schools in order to examine the social, pedagogical and ideological functions of these alternative, religiously-based educational institutions in Canada. This research is based on the following three objectives: (1) identifying the role and function of Islamic schooling in a diasporic context, (2) understanding the role of Islamic education in the development of Islamic identity, (3) examining the Islamization of knowledge and pedagogy in Islamic schools. The discursive socialization and educational practices of Islamic schools also serve to structure gender roles in the Muslim community. The socialization of Muslim girls in particular is implicated by the contested notion of gender identity in Islam. Muslim girls must negotiate various orientations and articulations of identity that both challenge and affirm traditional notions about Islamic womanhood, as well as facing situations of "gendered Islamophobia" outside of schools. For religiously oriented families, Islamic schools provide a more seamless transition between the values, beliefs and practices of the home and school environment. They also provide a space free from racism and religious discrimination that many students encounter within public schools. This study also examines the epistemological foundations for Islamically-centred education and the pedagogical strategies, including methods of discipline and socialization. These aspects of knowledge, pedagogy and practice are examined in order to better understand how they are informed by the religious and spiritual traditions of Islam. Operating as a spiritually-based alternative to the public education system, independent Islamic schools take on multiple sociological roles. For example, these schools attempt to create a "safe" environment that protects students from the "de-Islamizing" forces in public schools and society at large. Some parents choose Islamic schools for children who have become engaged in un-Islamic behaviours such as alcohol or drug use, gang activities or sexual promiscuity. In these circumstances the schools function as spaces for the re-socialization and rehabilitation of wayward youth. Islamic schools therefore also operate as sites for the social reproduction of Islamic identity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".