Evaluation of a Proposed Integration Model: Integrating Islamic Perspective into the Global Perspectives Subject in a School in Qatar, "The Next Generation School”

Abstract

In an earlier article, titled, "A Proposed Model of Integration of Islamic Perspective into school curriculum” the authors had proposed an integration model to integrate Islamic Perspective into school curriculums. One of the biggest hurdles as outlined by Baba et and Abdallah et al is that teachers do not have pre-integrated textbooks for teaching modern subjects like English, Mathematics and Science (S. B. Baba 2015)(Abdallah 2011). The purpose of the proposed model was to integrate Islamic Perspective in to standard textbooks for an efficient integrated curriculum. In this paper, the authors have qualitatively evaluated the proposed model. The researcher integrated Islamic Perspective into two topics from the Global Perspectives subject (social studies subject) from Grade 8 in a school in Qatar, "The Next Generation School”. For this purpose, two classroom observations and document analysis of current textbook and supplementary notes was conducted. Additionally, six students from Grade 8, two Global Perspectives teachers, two Islamic studies teachers, and one principal were interviewed before implementing the teaching of the integrated topics. The same set of students were then interviewed after the implementation of the integrated topics in the classroom with the addition of one more student making it a total of seven students. One Global Perspectives teacher was interviewed as well. Six classroom observations were conducted. The results show that that prior to the integration model, students and Global Perspectives teachers were either unaware that an Islamic Perspective existed for Global Perspectives Subject topics or minimally integrated Islamic Perspective into the Global Perspectives Subject. Findings reveal that after the implementation of the proposed integration model, students were able to understand that Global Perspectives Subject could have an Islamic Perspective and communicate what that Islamic Perspective could be. Towards the end of the article, recommendations for the proposed integration model have been offered to further improve the model.