The pedagogy of the mosque Portrayal, practice, and role in the integration of Turkish-Dutch children

This dissertation presents an exploratory research on mosque education followed by school-aged Dutch-Turkish children in the Netherlands. It is based on extensive fieldwork that includes classroom observations at the mosques (N=9), roundtable discussions with imams and mosque teachers (N=2), an expert meeting with representatives of all official Islamic communities in the Netherlands, and semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders, imams, mosque teachers, mosque students and their parents (N=104). The dissertation starts with situating the topic of mosque education within the public and political debates about it as portrayed in the Dutch press between 2010 and 2016 (Chapter2), and continues by investigating actual practice: the organization, curriculum content, learning goals, language policies and pedagogies implemented in the mosque classrooms in the largest Turkish Islamic organizations in the Netherlands (Chapter 3 and Chapter 4). As imams are major actors in teaching mosque classes and training other mosque teachers, it pays special attention to the reasons of failure of the Dutch initiatives for training imams in the Netherlands (Chapter 5). The relevance of the provided education to the lives of Muslim children growing up in the Netherlands is one of the central questions addressed by this dissertation. It compares and contrasts the definitions of integration of the relevant actors: parents, imams, mosque teachers and major stakeholders, and their differing perspectives on the role played by mosque education in the integration of the Turkish-Dutch youth (Chapter 6). Implications of the findings and recommendations for policy and practice are discussed (Chapter 7).