Online Educator Professional Development
From 2020-2024, I held a Leverhulme Early Career fellowship designed to take my PhD work into broader contexts. Alongside theoretical work through the Cambridge Dialogues: Rethinking K-12 Islamic Education project, I also researched the potential of educational dialogue and dialogic halaqah to transform education in Islamic contexts.
By Islamic contexts, I mean any educational setting which is teaching Muslims, teaching Islam and ideally teaching from and for an Islamic worldview. From an Islamic worldview means using Islamic educational theory to understand education and educational practice. I have written more about this here. My work on shakhsiyah Islamiyah is my contribution to what it means to teach for an Islamic worldview. For this project, I designed, taught and researched three six-week online courses for educator professional learning.
Fundamentals of Educational Dialogue
The first was a generic course, designed in partnership with Meaghan Brugha as a MOOC on the Fundamentals of Educational Dialogue and built on previous work with CEDiR and Camtree colleagues. This first cohort brought together participants from across the globe and led to an international community of researchers and educators collaborating on educational dialogue, with whom I have been involved in several open access publications. This course will be moved onto the Camtree learning platform.
Islamic Educator Learning Community (IELC)
Two related six-week courses were designed to research how dialogic halaqah might be used to transform practice in Islamic contexts. Course 1A: Dialogue in Islamic Classrooms: Using Halaqah to Develop Shakhsiyah and Course 1B: Implementing, Investigating and Evaluating Dialogue in Halaqah.
Publications
Brugha, M. E. Arif, I. Peters, S. Ahmed, F. Piccini, C. Bermudez, G. M. A. Goodland, J. Raghavendra, D. and Weeden, K. (2024). Educators’ Perceptions and Experiences of Online Teacher Professional Development. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, X(X): X, pp. 1–15. DOI: https:// doi.org/10.5334/jime.902
Brugha, M. & Ahmed, F. (2024). Teacher professional development in educational dialogue: lessons from a massive open online course [version 1; peer review: 2 approved with reservations]. Routledge Open Res 2023, 2:15 https://doi.org/10.12688/routledgeopenres.17681.1
Ahmed F. (Under Review) Supporting Educators to introduce Dialogic Halaqah into their Classrooms: conceptual change through online professional development.
Conferences and Events (* by invitation)
*10 October 2024 MOOCs and Dialogue: a great pairing Digital Education Futures Initiative Online Roundtable. DEFI, Hughes Hall College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.
*30 January 2024 IELC: building an online professional learning community. Gulf EdTech Fellows Panel Discussion, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.
19 June 2023 Ahmed, F. Dialogue in Islamic educational contexts: Theory, practice, research methodology and teacher professional development CEDiR Review 2023, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
*7 December 2023 Designing and facilitating effective online and blended TPD. Digital Education Futures Initiative Webinar. DEFI, Hughes Hall College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.
*26 January 2023 Global approaches to educational equity and inclusion. Digital Education Futures Initiative in-person seminar. Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.
26 June 2022 Brugha, M. & Ahmed, F. Teacher Professional Development in Educational Dialogue: Lessons from a mechanical MOOC. CEDiR Review 2022 – Dialogue, Professional Learning and Impact, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge
26 June 2022 Ahmed, F. & Al Qassim, A. Building a dialogic online educator-researcher community.
CEDiR Review 2022 – Dialogue, Professional Learning and Impact, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge
7 July 2021 Ahmed, F. Rethinking Close to Practice Research as Researcher-Teacher dialogic exchange.
CEDiR Review 2021 – Dialogue in Different Contexts, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge (online)
Impact
The courses on dialogic halaqah gave me a basis to build the Islamic Educator Learning Community online platform and are now run by Islamic Shakhsiyah Foundation. The courses have reached over 250+ educators to date across over 20+ countries.
IELC is a domain of Camtree and is working towards educator research reports being added to the Camtree library in a special collection on Islamic educational contexts.
IELC is partnering with ISLA and other organisations to run an annual online research symposium for educators and researchers.
IELC holds online webinars, workshops and conferences including on Islam, Science and Education.
Find out more here.
Related work continues through the Awe and Wonder project.