Supporting Muslim Students

This book provides school professionals - including teachers, principals, counselors, psychologists, and administrators - with a practical guide for supporting Muslim students in PK-12 schools. It is important that school professionals are culturally responsive and understand students’ backgrounds in planning effective instruction and creating safe schools. However, in the post-9/11 world, negative biases and stereotypes permeate mainstream discourses. Muslim students and their families often find themselves in conflict with school practices, procedures, and policies and do not often find themselves represented in the curriculum. This book provides a practical guide to the important issues that may impact the lives and education of Muslim students. This books give essential information about Islam and Muslim students from authentic perspectives. This text will support teachers and other school professionals in their advocacy for all students to provide equitable and just educational opportunities for all students. Beyond basics such as food and clothing requirement, this text advocates for the implementation of anti-bias pedagogy for diverse learners. Through school-based vignettes and case studies, we situate experiences of Muslim students in lived realities and help school professionals think deeply and critically about who their students are and how to engage their experiences in the curriculum.

The purpose of this guide is to equip teachers, trainers and lecturers with the fundamental knowledge and understanding to provide enhanced affective and cognitive support for their Muslim students - as well as providing all students with an additional reference for seeking clarification on issues of our/their time. Its principal day-to-day functions are as a pocket-sized quick reference guide with information which is accessible and user-friendly.

A Muslim immigrant teen struggles to hold her family together in the wake of 9/11 in this poignant novel from acclaimed author Marina Budhos. You forget. You forget you don’t really exist here, that this isn’t your home. Since emigrating from Bangladesh, fourteen-year-old Nadira and her family have been living in New York City on expired visas, hoping to realize their dream of becoming legal US citizens. But after 9/11, everything changes. Suddenly being Muslim means you are dangerous, a suspected terrorist. When Nadira’s father is arrested and detained at the US-Canada border, Nadira and her older sister, Aisha, are told to carry on as if everything is the same. The teachers at Flushing High don’t ask any questions, but Aisha falls apart. Nothing matters to her anymore—not even college. It’s up to Nadira to be the strong one and bring her family back together again.

As the U.S. Muslim population continues to grow, Islamic schools are springing up across the American landscape. Especially since the events of 9/11, many have become concerned about what kind of teaching is going on behind the walls of these schools, and whether it might serve to foster the seditious purposes of Islamist extremism. The essays collected in this volume look behind those walls and discover both efforts to provide excellent instruction following national educational standards and attempts to inculcate Islamic values and protect students from what are seen as the dangers of secularism and the compromising values of American culture. Also considered here are other dimensions of American Islamic education, including: new forms of institutions for youth and college-age Muslims; home-schooling; the impact of educational media on young children; and the kind of training being offered by Muslim chaplains in universities, hospitals, prisons, and other such settings. Finally the authors look at the ways in which Muslims are rising to the task of educating the American public about Islam in the face of increasing hostility and prejudice. This timely volume is the first dedicated entirely to the neglected topic of Islamic education.

"While 9/11 and its aftermath created a traumatic turning point for most of the writers in this book, it is telling that none of their essays begin with that moment. These young people were living, probing, and shifting their Muslim identities long before 9/11.... I've heard it said that the second generation never asks the first about its story, but nearly all the essays in this book include long, intimate portrayals of Muslim family life, often going back generations. These young Muslims are constantly negotiating the differences between families for whom faith and culture were matters of honor and North America's youth culture, with its emphasis on questioning, exploring, and inventing one’s own destiny."—from the Introduction by Eboo PatelIn Growing Up Muslim, Andrew Garrod and Robert Kilkenny present fourteen personal essays by college students of the Muslim faith who are themselves immigrants or are the children of immigrants to the United States. In their essays, the students grapple with matters of ethnicity, religious prejudice and misunderstanding, and what is termed Islamophobia. The fact of 9/11 and subsequent surveillance and suspicion of Islamic Americans (particularly those hailing from the Middle East and the Asian Subcontinent) have had a profound effect on these students, their families, and their communities of origin.

A MUST READ for any educator of Muslim students. This book puts to text a training program that was designed for public school educators and became very popular in different states. Teachers are told so much about the importance of knowing the home culture of students, and practicing culturally-relevant pedagogy. But rarely do teachers feel that they are actually given an inside view into the home culture of their students and directly how it relates to teaching them and the way they show up in school. This book is a unique journey where Islam, Muslim culture, the history of Muslims in America, and the learning structures in mosques that Muslim children are acculturated to are all taught in a prose that is specifically written for the public school educator with the goal of not only offering new and practical insights, but also ideas and consideration for practice that would take culturally-relevant pedagogy of Muslim students out of the nominal and superficial and into the authentic.