Lessons Learnt in Promoting Arabic as a Further Education and Training Learning Area in a Selected KwaZulu-Natal Muslim School
Keywords:
Arabic, Islamic ethos, Muslim schoolsAbstract
This article reports on a case study of a selected Muslim School in the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal. It explores how the principal, board members, and Arabic teachers navigate the challenges of promoting Arabic as they seek to understand the issues and lessons learnt in developing Arabic as an FET subject. The research question for this article is: What are the lessons learnt in promoting Arabic as an FET learning area? The first author’s PhD study on the rise and decline of Arabic in the Further Education and Training (FET) phase in selected KwaZulu-Natal Muslim schools demonstrated that Muslim parents prefer Muslim schools to promote the Islamic ethos of their children. Paradoxically, the study also highlighted that parents play a significant role in motivating their children to select academic subjects over Arabic, leading to the decline of FET Arabic. The findings of this study are unanimous that the home environment primes Muslim school learners with two essential cultures: social mobility and Islamic cultural heritage. While these two cultures aim to develop learners holistically, learners face a subject choice dilemma when they select academic subjects over Arabic. One of the conclusions of that study was that home culture impacts negatively on the Arabic language, mainly devaluing the integrated status of Muslim schools which are premised on balancing academics and Islamic education.
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Accepted 2024-07-24
Published 2024-09-25
