Negotiating selves, crafting lives: Culture, identity, and belonging in an islamic school

This study draws upon phenomenological, anthropological, post/colonial, and globalization theories to describe and explain the ways in which four individuals experienced their identities as teachers in an Islamic school. It examines how their identities as educators took shape, based on their educational experiences as learners and teachers, over the course of their life histories. Particularly, it focuses on the ways in which their journeys interacted with an Islamic school. The school was a site which drew upon their backgrounds as well as shaped their identities. It was a dual curriculum institution where Islamic and American subject matter existed side by side, yet mixed together in classroom activities. Their role as teachers in this organizational arrangement supported the socialization of students into their identities as Muslims and as Americans. Three questions guide this study: (1) broadly, how does culture and experience shape teacher identity in the era of globalization? (2) In particular, how did the educational experiences of four teachers shape their teaching identities, including the experiences they had in the context of an Islamic school? And (3) how did their identities shape the culture of the school? To explore these questions, I chose to investigate the four teachers' educational life histories, to understand the experiences they viewed as important in their development as professionals. I understood each educator's trajectory as a journey, the important particulars of which they related to me in conversation. I coupled the narratives of their experiences with observations of their teaching, to understand how the school had shaped them, and how they shaped it as a cultural world. Over the course of my two and half years of fieldwork, I employed ethnographic research methods. Namely, I conducted participant-observation in classrooms and interviewed teachers to understand these dynamics. These methods were matched with archival research, which helped me to situate the school, and the local Muslim community it was part of, in a social and historical context. Lastly, informal discussions with students and staff greatly supported my understanding the day-to-day running of the school, as well as the way it represented the desires for local Muslims. My analysis shows that the production of identities among the four teachers centered on the ways in which their experiences over the course of their educational life histories interacted with Islam and US culture, both global and local forces. These interactions shaped their journeys as teachers in a Muslim-American context. As such, each teacher crafted and negotiated an identity based upon their relationships with Islamic religious culture, American secular culture, and the dynamics of the school. The ways in which their experiences with Islamic and American cultures played out in the school produced feelings for the educators based upon belonging and not fully belonging, and were negotiated in varying degrees to support their professional work. Indeed, the school was a site where Islamic and American cultures were woven together, producing a school that shaped, and was shaped by, the teachers. As such, the past, the present, and the future were all elements in play: the life histories of teachers, their activities during my fieldwork, and how they contributed to the school's culture, socializing students into the future, centering on their faith and American culture. These constituted the elements that shaped their identities and the culture of the Islamic school.