ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces a learning study on the topic of ‘Islam and being a Muslim’, conducted in a Muslim secondary girls’ school in London. It addresses the research question: “What kind of variation in understanding the object of learning did Muslim students have prior to the introduction of the framework of Critical Religious Education and Variation Theory in religious education classes? How did their understanding of the object of learning change/evolve during the learning study?” There are four sections in this chapter, explaining the steps of the learning study. The first section presents the students’ pre-understandings of ‘Islam and being a Muslim’. The next section introduces lesson plans that include characteristics of Critical Religious Education and Variation Theory such as critical aspects and patterns of variation. Following that, the discussion moves to enumeration of how the lessons were enacted in the classroom according to the framework of Critical Religious Education and Variation Theory. The final section presents the students’ post-understandings. The findings of this study revealed that students gained an informed, differentiated, and integrated understanding of ‘Islam and being a Muslim’ at the end of the study as almost three times as many students reached a higher understanding of the object of learning, when compared to those at the pre-test stage.
