In this presentation, we provide an overview of The Art of Knowing project.  This pedagogical intervention and research project utilizes non-Western, specifically Indigenous Muslim storywork, as the foundation for an extracurricular science curriculum to engage elementary school children in multiple ways of knowing, and diverse orientations toward knowledge.
 
We first situate the study geographically and temporally within the local community context to understand the school site and the community in which it is located. Next, we explain and demonstrate the application of social critiques of modernity and coloniality to the design of curriculum and pedagogical strategies that forward culturally responsive and revitalizing relationships with, and understanding and production of knowledge and our world.  Finally, we provide a model lesson using the story of Hayy ibn Yaqzan, a classical tale from the MENA & Muslim work that provides a theory of knowledge, as a curricular and pedagogical foundation. 

Arshad I. Ali, is an educator, community worker, and scholar who studies youth culture, race, identity, and politics. He is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies Education and Civic Education at UC Santa Cruz. Dr. Ali’s research examines the construction of racial identities through exploring questions of democracy, liberalism, and modernity in the lives of youth. He has written extensively on issues relating to the cultural geography of Muslim student surveillance, citizenship, governmentality and other issues of coloniality and Muslims in Western spaces.  His current research project explores questions of Muslim ways of knowing and science pedagogy in elementary education. 
 
Ebtissam Oraby, EdD, is a teaching assistant professor at George Washington University, where she teaches Arabic language and literature. She is a scholar of curriculum and pedagogy specializing in multilingual education, and Arab and Muslim cultures. Her research interests lie at the intersection of philosophy, language, religion, and education.  
 
Sam Burmester, is an educator and education scholar who draws on his career as a Language Arts teacher to explore pedagogies of literary, linguistic, and epistemological pluralism. His current work engages questions of institutional construction of linguistic, epistemological, and cultural legibility in educational spaces, particularly surrounding issues of how individuals, their knowledge, and their ways of knowing are represented and if/how they are able to represent themselves and their knowledge. 

Sponsor(s): Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Fowler Museum at UCLA